BonzaiDuck
Lifer
- Jun 30, 2004
- 15,880
- 1,550
- 126
If you want to understand our politics, you need to understand the concentrated industries in the economy which have various aspects of monopoly power. And you want to understand those industries with sufficient lobbying power to overwhelm the public interest with their corporate self-interest.
Regulations designed to protect the health and living standard of the largest number of people are good or necessary. Regulations designed to protect this or that industry at the expense of reasonable competition are bad. Unfortunately, I suspect that the political dimension of industrial influence opposes good regulations simply to keep excess profits high and discourage potential competitors.
Just as a footnote, because it occurred to me recently and I had no place to articulate it. Sarah Palin at one time demonized the idea of "incrementalism" in our political and governmental decisions. Without putting it in words, she was implying that the T-Party movement was a "revolutionary" insurgency with a patent and fixed ideology bent on upending everything at once. That is, Utopianism imposes costs of rapid and mistaken change on the public, according to some dimwit's idea of "how the world should be" as opposed to how it is.
It shows what a dimwit pinhead she is, because the Founders' intention was incrementalist.
I'm fine for taking a scalpel to regulations and agencies while avoiding situations that make government employees mentally ill. I'm against wholesale elimination of a regulatory and government regime because somebody got it into their heads that it would be better to recede to a time of three-corner hats, no matter whom it hurts, no matter what it costs.
It took more than a hundred years to put in place the various cabinet agencies. If you give someone the power to destroy them in 4 years, and they are actually intent on that sort of destruction, I'd be proud to put a cap in your brain.
Regulations designed to protect the health and living standard of the largest number of people are good or necessary. Regulations designed to protect this or that industry at the expense of reasonable competition are bad. Unfortunately, I suspect that the political dimension of industrial influence opposes good regulations simply to keep excess profits high and discourage potential competitors.
Just as a footnote, because it occurred to me recently and I had no place to articulate it. Sarah Palin at one time demonized the idea of "incrementalism" in our political and governmental decisions. Without putting it in words, she was implying that the T-Party movement was a "revolutionary" insurgency with a patent and fixed ideology bent on upending everything at once. That is, Utopianism imposes costs of rapid and mistaken change on the public, according to some dimwit's idea of "how the world should be" as opposed to how it is.
It shows what a dimwit pinhead she is, because the Founders' intention was incrementalist.
I'm fine for taking a scalpel to regulations and agencies while avoiding situations that make government employees mentally ill. I'm against wholesale elimination of a regulatory and government regime because somebody got it into their heads that it would be better to recede to a time of three-corner hats, no matter whom it hurts, no matter what it costs.
It took more than a hundred years to put in place the various cabinet agencies. If you give someone the power to destroy them in 4 years, and they are actually intent on that sort of destruction, I'd be proud to put a cap in your brain.