Councilor Benton Doesn’t Get It

Too many elected officials seem to get into politics simply to tell the rest of us what to do. One of the most prominent examples of this tendency is Albuquerque City Councilor Isaac Benton. Benton, in an op-ed published in the Albuquerque Journal, argued in favor of the City’s new green building codes and ripped the national industry group that is currently suing to prohibit the City from implementing the code.
While the industry group is suing on the basis of federal preemption of local law, the idea that governments rather than individual actors in the marketplace should determine how homes are built and what utilities they should use is ridiculous. After all, as we have seen recently with the rush to more fuel efficient cars, consumers will naturally purchase appliances that provide the greatest efficiency for the money.
Hopefully, Benton and those pushing costly green building codes on Albuquerque will suffer a legal setback in this case, but the probability of the nanny-statists and those who would control our every decision giving up is small.