So I got into a discussion recently with some friends on the new Common Core standards, and an interesting question came up about regulations. I'm of two minds regarding regulations...
On the one hand, I am vehemently opposed to opposition to regulation for its own sake, in that having an anti government filter for everything is just stupid. It is one thing to want small government, it is another thing to automatically be anti government about everything, always saying that government is the wrong solution or to say that government is always evil. This way lays madness and compulsive lying to get what you want. Lots of people rag on and on about the lady who sued McDonalds because her coffee was too hot. Well guess what folks, that lady had a legitimate reason to sue, and it was primarily because the psychopaths at that restaurant kept their coffee so hot and so far above industry standard that the woman actually got third degree burns on her legs because of their insanity.
On the other hand, while individual regulations might be well intentioned, those that make and enforce the rules rarely consider the ripple effects that they will cause. One example of this is included in the book Outliers, which explains about the curious fact that Hockey Players in Canada in the major leagues were almost all born in January, Febuary and March. This was due to the tiered system of minor leagues and an arbitrary cut off date which put five year olds with much greater size and skill playing against kids of a much younger age. This affected 75% of all players for the rest of their lives because someone thought it would be convenient to put an age cut off 'here.' Another example of this was when I was getting my Scrum Master Certification and I mentioned my recently awful experience with the USPS IVR and how it clearly hadn't been tested with actual users...only to have one of my fellow students mentioned that they'd tried that with some pentagon software, and due to some insane White House directive, they initially couldn't and were only able to do so due to a desire of a third party to conduct research.
When a bureaucracy has to skirt its own rules just to be able to interact with its own end users, there is clearly something wrong with the world. A former friend of mine (well I'm still his friend but he decided to become my ex friend when I took umbrage with the fact that maybe the NRA was awful and liars because they were AOK with mass murdered children being a cause for some soul reflection beyond saying 'EVEN MORE GUNS' without any thought whatsoever....) had a really good point in that he explained that it is the nature of an institution to try and do what it was designed to do...which is to say that a government regulatory agency is going to try and well...regulate. It isn't just going to suddenly decide, 'you know what guys...we've got enough rules now'....it just doesn't happen.
Now, regulatory agencies have their own problems in that they can either be utterly coopted by the people they're regulating, or potentially be so archaic that they don't understand modern technology, or they could just become so overwhelmed that they become essentially lazy and non functional. There are a lot of solutions to this...reform works from time to time...but let's look at some.
1) The CIA in the 1960's was the perfect definition of the Deep State, causing some of the most notorious abuses in the history of government. In the 1970's some of their abuses were paired back, but by the time 9/11 rolled around, they were given cart blanche ability to do whatever was 'necessary to protect us' showing that the constitution and the bill of rights were utterly inadequate to protect us from their abuses as well as the rest of the Classified Community. Now these rogue agencies don't even answer to Congress any more. A commission is not enough to hold a rogue government agency in check.
2) The IRS was brought up in witch hunts by the 'special' conservative revolution class in the 1990's...most of this, like so many things conservatives do, was idiotic and stupid, but there were some very legitimate complaints against government power. So congress passed some laws to reform it. And what happened? The agency that took down Al Capone when no one else could has become so weakened that it barely has enough to do any audits at all any more. And people wonder why there is a wealth gap in this country. Even now, Oligarchy efforts to demonize the IRS are being carried out by their mass army of conservative collaborators.
3) The Department of Homeland Security coordinated a federal strike against peaceful protesters...and no one has been held accountable.
4) The Department of Justice has failed to go after bankers...and no one has been held accountable.
So simple reform isn't enough to do it. Would eliminating the entire agency like what South Korea is doing to their coast guard work? Not really, because there is still a need for regulation and so when an agency is dissolved, a new one must take its place, but because of the way most governments currently hire...guess who is the most likely group of people to be hired when you go looking for employees for the agency? Yup, you guessed it, the old employees of the one that was just dissolved. That's exactly what happened with the hyper corrupt agency that regulated oil drilling right after the Deepwater Horizon incident.
So what solutions actually work? Well one that is working pretty good so far is to set up competing agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection agency initially chaired and advocated by Elizabeth Warren...you KNOW it is working because of how much it is making the bankers squirm, but the problem is, all societies have conservative administrations sooner or later, and the next is likely to eviscerate it and fill it with conservative psychopaths. It might be effective for NOW, but give it a couple of Romneys, Bushes, Reagans or McCains and they'll likely suck more than anyone else and be bogged down in nonsense or, like most Oligarchy agencies, stop answering to the common folk at large.
So what will actually WORK?
My solution starts with the Brundlestaag, which has the potential to shift the arbiter of a government solution from federal to local, local to federal or either to NOT GOVERNMENT every fifty years. This solution might seem extreme, but it kept the Roman Empire alive for another THOUSAND YEARS when they shifted their capital to Byzantium.
There are other solutions as well, such as I think allowing election or at least popular rejection of pretty much everyone currently confirmed by the US Senate. Special care will have to be taken to prevent conservatives from destroying government or killing everyone, but there are ways to achieve this.
But back to my solution of 'not government.' How does that work? What happens if people put, say, Health Care, in not local and not government but still want something better for their society than the psychotically stupid 'Get Well or Die Quickly' American health care system pre ACA?
I look at that coolest of nations, Switzerland. No country is perfect, but as a direct democracy (or closer to it than most countries) they have prevented some pretty stupid things and pretty awful corruption by allowing a popular vote. The way the Swiss handle their health care is to allow for a wide variety of not for profit institutions to act as insurance agencies but since they are not for profit, their stake holders are their policy holders rather than Oligarchy Stock Holders.
And it works pretty well. The government only has to set some minimum standards about how they can't basically be conservative lie factories that don't really provide insurance. Now, a lot of libertarians have provided this exact same solution and I think its a good idea. The problem is, that you cannot allow people who hate civilization or any form of regulation (and even if you know that one rational libertarian who isn't against all regulation, you know the rest are really pretty much anarchists organized enough to try to destroy everything but the military and contract law) to actually implement government or be in charge of anything.
But its actually a GOOD idea. The Red Cross, long before FEMA, did fantastic things in disaster relief for the better part of a century. Sure they weren't perfect, but they did a really great job and, not being part of the government, were able to a lot because they didn't have to fill forms out in triplicate, use government procurement rules etc.
In the Scrum class I attended, at one point the instructor asked, "Why does government have to hold itself to those standards? Who set them? Government." Usually congress, because some legislator has to make a name for himself. Government doesn't work, not because government is part of the problem, but because some of the basic assumptions we make about it: 'blind' procurement, meritocracy based testing, supreme documentation etc, are all based on reforms that took place in the 19th century that helped out a lot but were put into place before current technology. We need to rethink how we do regulation and government at a fundamental level, but before we do that, I want to swap out the order I take things because Article III talks about the courts and Article II talks about the executive.
All problems with our regulatory system come down to how we administer our courts and our laws, which needs to be fixed (at a constitutional level) before we do anything else.
But I want to mention one more idea in this area, which is basically the constitution saying 'the legislature can't do this'...which it has routinely ignored. Telling government and congress what it can't do piecemeal has often been ignored, in large part because the constitution is simply too hard to change and too inflexible to adjust to the times. Conservatives love it...but let's look at who is defending it. You know...conservatives...the same group who think that having their Oligarchy Masters tell them what to watch and what to think is a swell thing.
But one good idea, executed horribly, that the conservatives had was the idea of competing institutions for government. That is to say, that one way you could make a regulatory agency behave was to threaten to replace them with something else if they suck. But you can't make it another government agency. Where conservatives (as usual) got it wrong was their magical Market Fairy thinking that assumed a business could do it better. What does a business do? It makes money for the people who own it (usually the Oligarchy). It isn't going to work for the greater good of society. In theory, a B corp could do that, but probably never in the American Oligarchy Capital society.
However, threatening to replace it with a NON PROFIT granted monopoly power or even better, several non profits could work wonders. Note....this also only works if you can keep religion out of it, because while not all religions are about money, telling the ones that are in it for the money vs the ones that are in it for the good of Man is essentially impossible.
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