Mr Decker.
You are implying that we only have OSHA laws and EPA laws because of the political left? Really?
Unions benefit NOBODY who is not in them. They drive up prices for goods. That's all they do for the rest of us.
I'm not implying that the social left was the impetus for OSHA and the EPA. I'm flat-out saying it. It was the worker unions that petitioned Johnson to get the ball rolling on addressing unsafe working conditions (the rightwing considered any regulation of safety burdensome).
We all know how Big Business loves government regulation.
And for the EPA, well, let's let the EPA tell us the inspiration for its creation:
The official birthday of EPA is December 2, 1970. Like any other birth, EPA's needed progenitors, and a family tree stretching back for years. Surely no factor was more pivotal in the birth of EPA than decades of rampant and highly visible pollution. But pollution alone does not an agency make. Ideas are needed--better yet a whole world view--and many environmental ideas first crystallized in 1962.
That year saw the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, first in serial form in the New Yorker and then as a Houghton Mifflin best seller. This exhaustively researched, carefully reasoned, and beautifully written attack on the indiscriminate use of pesticides was not exactly light reading. Yet it attracted immediate attention and wound up causing a revolution in public opinion.
...
The disillusioning effect of the Vietnam war enhanced the popularity of Silent Spring. When people heard of the defoilation tactics used in the jungles of Indochina, they became more receptive to the "environmental" ideas advanced by Carson and her countless imitators. The cognoscenti even began using a more arcane term--"ecology"--in reference to a science of the environment, then still in its infancy.
http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/epa/15c.htmYes, all those republican big business magnates joined the Peace Movement and spread the ecological word.
You hate unions. B/c they drive up the price of goods? You're right. Let's go back to the days of subsistence wages and 7 day work weeks. Quality of life? That's for Socialists.