Learning The Hard Way

Monday, March 30, 2026

I became a regular, as opposed to occasional, listener of The Hugh Hewitt Show on 9-11.  The host speaks with embarrassment of the job he did that day, but I searched all of media as events unfolded and he was the only one that 1) was willing to say what he did not know and 2) reacted with humanity first.  And so I was sold.  Lots has happened since then that we don’t need to go into, but I tell that story to emphasize just how many times I have listened to a Hugh Hewitt interview – it’s a lot.  Never has an interview he has conducted captured me as much as his of Eli Lake this Friday past.

It’s a long interview and somewhere in the middle the host coaxes Lake into reciting his resumé.  It is at about 16:10 and the following three or so minutes that we learn that covering the E.P.A. played a significant role in Lake’s change of mind from a liberal college student to the standout conservative commentator he is today.  He confesses to going into his work covering that agency as a classic liberal, thinking industry was “the bad guy” and comes out of it as a opponent of the vast Administrative State.

I think that Lake ought to turn his quite prodigious writing skill into a book of that story and all that floated around it.  The host, who also worked with the Administrative State was immediately animated, as was I.  Please remember I spent my working career consulting with industry on how to deal with the various agencies.  One of the specifics Lake got into was noting that some companies embraced regulation as a means of locking out competition.  This fact was the basis of my company and so his observation resonated loudly.

“Overhead” is a concept that most people that do not own a business do not understand.  Google A.I. defines it:

Overhead refers to the indirect, ongoing costs of running a business that are not directly tied to producing goods or services, such as rent, utilities, insurance, and administrative salaries.

What regulation does is add overhead – driving up the cost of doing business.  There are direct costs associated with regulation – the piece of equipment that has to be installed and staffed to meet regulation, but it is the overhead – the applications, reporting, etc. where things really get ugly.  I recounted one such situation back in 2016.  A very large company can absorb the added overhead burden of a specific regulation much more easily than a small one.  This is what creates the competitive imbalance Lake observed.  It does more than stifle competition, it destroys innovation as the new idea can never raise enough capital to get its feet off the ground.

My business was dedicated to helping the small company compete in such an environment – and for years it worked.  But California has now raised the regulatory stakes so high that for many businesses, even large ones, operation is impossible, let alone competitive operation.  That’s why companies are leaving California at such a breakneck pace.

Lake got a close up look at how the sausage was made and was repulsed – as would almost every American if they could get such a look.  That’s why a book by Lake on the subject would be a work of major importance.  The narrative of “regulated community bad”/”regulators heroes” is deeply embedded in the American psyche.  But the days of flaming rivers are far behind us – and even then the companies involved in that incident were not acting out of malice or bad intent, but ignorance.  Ignorance of exactly what their discharge was doing and ignorance of all the other guys on the river discharging into it.

That a national security guy like Eli Lake was so moved by a short, more-or-less-training stint covering E.P.A. should tell every American just how bad things actually are in the regulatory state.  We need that story in full.