https://mises.org/wire/turns-out-elites-administrative-state-better-democracy
The ruling did no such thing. Instead, the court said that federal regulatory agencies are not free to create and enforce rules outside of their statutory authority. The EPA had simply declared itself the official power plant CO2 emissions regulator under the Obama administration despite the fact that Democrats had a supermajority in the US Senate and a huge majority in the House and theoretically could have passed a law giving new regulatory powers to the EPA. That Congress did not do so is instructive.
In other words, this was an extralegal power grab but one approved by elites because, well, elites know more than everyone else. The NYT editorial continued:
The “administrative state,” of course, is anything but democratic; it is autocratic to the core. For all of their professed love for democracy, progressives have long demanded rule by experts, or at least rule by “experts” that meet progressive approval. As I pointed out last year, when actual scientists studied the effects of so-called acid rain and concluded that it was not causing lake and river acidification, progressives in the media, as well as EPA administrators, immediately tried to destroy the careers of scientists failing to echo the party line. Not surprisingly, one of the loudest antiscience voices in the acid rain affair was the New York Times.
Furthermore, for all the “experts know best” rhetoric in the NYT editorial, there is no proof that the administrative state governs as effectively as democracy, which elites pretend to love. The “experts” at the Federal Reserve believed they could substitute trillions of printed dollars for actual production of goods without creating monetary chaos. In western forests, the “experts” at the US Forest Service have had fire suppression policies in place for more than a century, and the result has been that what were once mere forest fires have become destructive conflagrations that burn so hot that they often destroy the scorched soil’s ability to generate postfire growth.
The ”experts” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed policies that precipitated massive job losses, caused unnecessary premature death from ailments other than covid-19, and still failed to promote adequate information about the virus and its origins. Education “experts” have created one educational crisis after another, and so on. Rule by experts—the administrative state—has caused destruction whenever it is invoked, yet the editors at the “newspaper of record” have failed to notice.
Instead, they proclaim eternal fealty to what only can be called a failed experiment in governance, not to mention that it is antidemocratic. Yet, the NYT editors cannot keep from claiming loyalty to both forms of governance, even when they contradict one another:
There is much to dissect in those words, but suffice it to say that to assume that EPA decision makers have the kind of knowledge and expertise implied in that editorial is to foolishly demonstrate faith in something that inevitably fails. Far from being near-omniscient sages of science, the bureaucrats making life-altering decisions at the EPA are people who bear no costs if they impose unnecessary burdens on the lives of ordinary people but who also find that the more draconian their edicts, the greater the praise from environmental interest groups and, of course, the New York Times. What possibly could go wrong?
Of course the elites prefer the administrative state over real democracy. It helps perpetuate big government.