More Government Mandates

In the name of supposedly making everyone better off. Of course.

And for “the climate.” Also that, of course.

But government mandates are necessarily “one size fits all.” They have to be built on assumptions that every person and every situation is the same, and thus suitable for that single-size government mandate.

A county in Washington state is proposing that all sellers of single-family houses, duplexes, and townhouses be required to get a “Home Energy Score” (HES) before listing the house for sale. The proposal comes under the category of “climate change.” The theory is that this information will encourage home buyers to choose the more energy-efficient home among competing listings. And will encourage home sellers to invest in improvements that would increase the home’s energy score.

But government requirements like this assume all sellers and buyers are interested in the same thing - here, the energy efficiency information the government mandates.

The county says the cost of the survey to get the score is $150 - 350.

But my wife pointed out that while the cost of this particular energy score survey may be small, it is on top of a whole list of mandatory inspections, fees, and disclosures. Some of us old people have watched the stack of paperwork associated with a house sale grow from a few dozen sheets forty years ago to a stack an inch thick or more. $300 here, $300 there, and $300 for some other “good” thing accumulate into high costs and undo complexity.

At the moment, the county proposal is only to mandate getting the score, not to require a minimum score before the house can be sold.

But here again, my often-skeptical wife noted that it would be mighty tempting for the government to step from mandating the survey that generates the score to mandating the house meet a minimum score before it can be sold. This would likely require the seller to spend money to improve the energy efficiency before the seller could sell the house.

Then she brought up the process of selling her parents’ house in 2021 after they died. A “Home Energy Score” would have been pointless to that transaction. The house had not been updated since it was built in 1986, and Mrs. Tabby’s parents had been the only owners. We lived 2,000 miles away, not in a position to manage a major house renovation project. So she sold the house “as is.” The listing made clear the state of the house, so any prospective buyer would know that they’d probably want to put a lot of work into bringing it up to date.

Any energy score on the house as it was would be irrelevant to the buyer, as the buyer was likely to replace windows, install new HVAC systems, install a new kitchen (probably with a major room layout revision), and make several other changes that would materially change the energy efficiency of the house. Since we thought the buyer should decide which improvements were most important to him, my wife wasn’t going to spend money on energy efficiency. So a $300 survey would be of no value to either buyer or seller. Just wasted money. Some houses are sold with the expectation that the house will be demolished. An energy efficiency score on a house that is to be demolished is also pointless.

For the record, the family that bought (and still owns) the house was far more interested in the rare opportunity to live in that area on almost an acre of land (including covered parking for their fishing boat) than in any other details. All of the competing offers for the house made clear that they expected to put significant work into the house.

Having said all the above, when we bought our current home in 2018, energy efficiency was of interest to us. The cost of air conditioning is a big deal in North Texas. The builder advertised the house's energy efficiency, presuming (correctly in our case) that energy efficiency mattered to buyers of this category of newly constructed houses. It didn’t take a government mandate.

Information is of different value to different people in different circumstances. The market can often figure out what is of value to whom.

Yet government keeps mandating that we value what it says we should value, assuming one standard matters the same to everyone, and ignoring the wide range of interests, circumstances, experiences, and preferences humans have that affect what we value.

And those mandates tend to pile up and accumulate, increasing costs and complexity, often unnecessarily.

[Not all government mandates are pointless. But government's tendency to mandate seems to exceed the level of mandates that is necessary.]