The EPA: the regime's weapon of choice for imposing tyranny and decline

In the name of saving the little children's lungs, this monstrosity of an agency usurps Congress's law-making authority in ever-costlier ways:

While millions of Americans were getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving, the  Environmental Protection Agency unveiled stricter standards for ozone, or smog, levels — a rule that has been criticized as possibly the costliest the agency has ever promulgated.

“Yet again we’re seeing the Obama administration release an incredibly expensive regulation on the eve of a major national holiday,” said Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. “The administration is clearly hoping to release this at a time when the vast majority of Americans are focused elsewhere, and that alone should tell us something about it.”

The EPA’s proposed standard lowers the acceptable amount of ozone in the air from 75 parts per billion to a range of 65-70 parts per billion. The agency says this new standard is based on more than 1,000 scientific studies published since 2008, and will prevent from 320,000 to 960,000 asthma attacks per year, along with “preventing more than 750 to 4,300 premature deaths; 1,400 to 4,300 asthma-related emergency room visits; and 65,000 to 180,000 missed workdays.”

You have to concoct scary numbers like that to convince the cattle-masses that it's worst the cost:

“This new ozone regulation threatens to be the most expensive ever imposed on industry in America and could jeopardize recent progress in manufacturing by placing massive new costs on manufacturers and closing off counties and states to new business by blocking projects at the permitting stage,” Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, said in a statement.

“What’s worse is that this is just the latest in a long line of environmental regulations that have come off of EPA’s regulatory conveyor belt in recent months. Many of these rules are being imposed with little concern or attention to their costs for families and businesses,” Murkowski said. “With regard to ozone, in particular, the projected health benefits are heavily speculative at best, notwithstanding their high costs to achieve.” 

And there's some data out there to mitigate the scary stats the agency is waving in our faces:

critics say the science behind the health effects of ozone is far from settled. EPA documents obtained by the blog JunkScience.com through a Freedom of Information Act request show that in 2007, the EPA exposed asthmatic people to high levels of ozone. The EPA claimed in the 2007 study that no human subject has ever suffered from any observed “adverse event” during an experiment.
“Did any of the exercising asthmatic human guinea pigs experience any adverse health effect whatsoever from these high exposures to ozone?” JunkScience.com asks. “No.”
“EPA has failed to disclose that its own careful controlled clinical experiments of exercising asthmatics exposed to exceedingly high levels of ozone experienced no adverse health effects whatsoever,” the blog continues. “And now EPA wants to impose what will be the single most costly regulation of all time on the American economy.”
More recent human studies conducted by the EPA in 2010 and 2011 exposed people to high levels of particulate matter, diesel exhaust and ozone. No subject died during the tests, but one test subject developed a persistent cough after being exposed to high levels of ozone for 15 minutes in April 2011.

Ozone levels have plummeted 33 percent since 1980, according to EPA data. 

But this is how jackbooted totalitarians deal with being defeated electorally in a representative democracy.

Here's the key question in all of this:  What's required to move post-American society to the point at which howls of "extremism" in response to calls for dismantling the EPA are marginalized, ridiculed and ignored?  Can we be there early next year?