I don’t like our political system. Its popular description as “the best system we’ve yet devised” seems like a cop out. It reminds me of a supremely bad manager I once had whose favorite phrase was “it is what it is”. As an acknowledgement that a situation is beyond one’s control I can’t fault it; however, she used it synonymously with “I’m too lazy to bother fixing the problem”. It seems that way with the US political system, too. One big reason is that there is no accountability for failure, especially in regards to our political and bureaucratic classes. And through them, businesses that are still around that shouldn’t be.
Here in the US, the Constitution was supposed to act as a bulwark against the mission creep of politicians but it has proven useless at doing so, as we are increasingly under more rules and regulations brought to us “for our own good” by unelected bureaucrats and their paid “experts”. The scare quotes around the word “experts” is to illustrate the fact that experts can be bought, incompetent, unethical, or otherwise compromised in judgement, and as such those judgements are invalid as they do not meet the standard of expert as being “a person who has a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area” if they ignore what the facts tell them in order to push an agenda. A single scumbag like Harry Anslinger can cause immense damage by testifying according to his opinions rather than telling the truth (and he did, just look at the War on Drugs); incompetence at the FDA, who doesn’t even test pharmaceuticals for safety themselves (they just review studies that have been submitted to them) can lead to thousands of injuries and deaths because they’ve approved something dangerous. Side note: how many times have you seen some new miracle drug on the market only for a “Have you or a loved one taken or been exposed to…” commercial to come out two years later? They were all approved by the FDA, right? And they’re supposed to be the drug safety “experts”, right? Meanwhile, the FDA thinks it’s vital to expand their mandate into yet more products to keep us safe…
The list is long. Burning leaded gasoline was supposed to be safe. For a while there, nicotine was medicinal. Hey, anyone know if eggs are good or bad this week? Experts are wrong all the time, whether they admit it or not. But no number of bad guesses or policy failures will ever convince them that they’ve done something wrong, rather it’s always because they didn’t have enough money, staff, time, training, etc.. They never stop making a problem worse because they never suffer for bad decisions. If the finances, careers, reputations, certifications, futures, and freedom of decision-makers were on the line, do you think they’d be more careful? Maybe there would be fully informed consent and a complete explanation of known side effects before we’d agree to taking a drug or before using a potentially hazardous product. It may even spawn an era of truly personalized medicine where innovators would tailor care to a specific individual, who knows? The possibilities are endless. Make way for competition! Freed from barrier to entry regulations and Intellectual Property laws, almost anyone with desire and talent can enter any field they want. And being accountable, producers and manufacturers will be safe and profitable or they’ll go out of business or become donation-based services. Among many others, I’m lookin at you airlines, banks, car companies, drug companies, police forces, polluters of any kind, and all other recipients of government subsidies, from farms to corporations, and all the bureaucracies in between.
You can, of course, make the argument that the rich will just weasel out of responsibility by using expensive lawyers and tying up the legal system, but that’s exactly what happens now so how would we be worse off, exactly? If you want to make that generalization about a group of people, make it about politicians. They can propose any insane bullshit they want, cause immeasurable loss of life, then get continually re-elected and retire comfortably with the gratitude and idolization of a good portion of the population, after first having been on the boards of all the companies they passed regulations for while they were in office. And as long as they keep saying that they do it because they care about [insert group here] hardly anyone will ever call them on it unless they are in the opposite party, and who listens to those assholes anyway? Zero accountability. In business, we are supposed to be able to withdraw our support from evil corporations by not doing business with them. If the government takes our money and gives it to them to continue operating, then an essential market function has been broken.
And don’t give me the “vote the bad guys out” speech, I’ve heard it a million times. Voting does no good because the laws are written by lobbyists and staffers and bureaucrats no one voted for. Regulations that arise from those laws are written by bureaucrats, more people that no one voted for. And they are enforced by guys with guns, from federal agents on down to local police, still more people no one voted for. And none of those people are accountable to us. At all.
