l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 By James Stepanek
Say you're in an argument on some issue of a proposed government service
with a friend of a more leftist persuasion, and you are making no progress.
I would suggest trying a question on your interlocutor which may well make
him think and even re-examine his position. Just ask: "Do you really think
politicians and bureaucrats are smarter than you?"
Now it is certainly likely that the other person will view this as off the
wall and think you are digressing. However, you are not by any means.
It is a fundamental fact that once you have asked for government to provide
a service for you, you have relinquished control of that particular part of
your life. Yes, you can vote on these things, but that is far removed from
where the rubber actually meets the road. While your elected
representatives do vote on the laws (I won't even bother to claim they write
them; their staff does that), they rarely enough bother to read all the
text. On top of that, the laws are written in broad generalities which have
to be further expanded upon by the bureaucracies which are tasked with
implementing and enforcing them.
A good example of how this works is the Patient Protection and Affordable
Care Act (ObamaCare). The statutes in question amount to 425,116 words.
Now that this is being translated into actual practice, we are looking at 2,
163,744 words. That is roughly a fivefold increase from law to
implementation. Given how unlikely it would appear that your legislator
read all 961 pages of the statute, do you think he or she perused all 4,500+
pages of the implementation? It really does accent the quote from Nancy
Pelosi: "Well, we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in
it." It's a safe bet that she was in the same state of ignorance.
It should be reasonably clear that even if you did vote for someone to get a
particular piece of legislation passed, did you really know what you were
getting? It's obvious enough that the legislator you voted for didn't, so
how could you? You have acted on blind faith, ceding the outcome to the
politician, his staff, and ultimately the bureaucrats who really create the
regulations.
So what ultimately have you done? You've reduced the health care choices you
get to make. Every time a law is written, something is proscribed.
Someone else has set down a limitation of what options remain legal. Heck,
ObamaCare doesn't allow you even to opt out of the health insurance market.
Either you play the game, or a fine is levied against you for not
participating. This particular "innovation" in congressional power is being
decided by the Supreme Court. Possibly they will arrest this overreach of
power, and we'll get off easy. If they do let it pass muster, you might
still have some choices, but they will be limited and subject to approval by
those bureaucrats and politicians. Obviously, the set of choices has been
diminished.
Now what are the implications of this? Do you think that the people who do
know that law understand your specific circumstances? Do those bureaucrats
know the situation of your health, finances, and lifestyle? No; they cannot
. There is too much information on too many people for there to be any
chance that this the case will be otherwise. Without an unreasonable level
of intrusiveness into the life of every citizen, such information is simply
not possible to collect. Even if it were available, it would not be
possible to write laws or regulations tailored to so many individual
circumstances at once. It becomes quite clear that at best, a general
solution is possible, but that route will leave many people unsatisfied with
the outcome. This is an inevitable outcome of a centralized decision.
There is simply no getting around it. Reality cannot work in any other way.
Is ObamaCare the only example of this? Of course not. The level of
intrusion into your life is vast in scope and extends down to all level of
minutiae. There is very little that the regulatory apparatus doesn't have a
say in. Do you want to save a few hundred dollars on your car and not have
an airbag? Tough -- they decided you need one. Do you want to drink
unpasteurized milk? Tough -- they decided it's not healthy. Do you want to
work for less than minimum wage to get a start? Tough -- your labor is not
yours to price. You want to provide for your own retirement, as you think
Social Security is going to be broke? Tough -- they decided you're not
competent to plan for your retirement. I could go on.
It's important to understand why people end up farming out these choices.
They think they are getting something good for it. Politicians are very
happy to proffer that impression, as it will get their constituents on the
hook. Be it "free" health care, a "living" wage, or any other "service"
provided by regulations, people are convinced that these have benefits.
Granted, every regulation benefits some, but that "some" can be a very small
group who use that regulation to club competitors or gain a subsidy at the
expense of the general coffers. Even those regulations which have a general
benefit have costs and restrict your freedom. It's very important to
understand that everything has costs, and that regulations very often have
hidden ones. Politicians generally specialize in the hidden sort.
There's a reason why we have the aphorism "beggars can't be choosers." If
you task the government with providing you with a service, you are
attempting to shift some form of cost away from yourself. This cost could
be as simple as paying for the service, being charitable, or going to the
trouble of doing the investigation required to make a good choice. The
consequence of this is that you lose the ability to choose. Who will choose
? It will be that politician or that bureaucrat.
Oh, and if you do happen to think they actually are smarter than you, well,
you might want to consider whom they are more responsive to -- is it you, a
faceless voter, or a big donor? Put in that perspective, doesn't making
your own choice sound a lot better? |
|
