Why Government Does Not Function

http://www.tpnn.com/2014/03/23/why-government-does-not-function/

Do you have the feeling that we no longer have government from the federal to the local level that is able to function because of vast volumes of laws and regulations that have made it impossible to do anything from build a bridge to run a nursing home? If so, you’re right. The nation is falling behind others who do a better job by permitting elected and appointed officials to actually make decisions. We are living in a nation where lawsuits follow every decision to accomplish anything.

This is the message of Philip K. Howard in a book that everyone concerned for the future of America should read; “The Rule of Nobody: Saving America from Dead Laws and Broken Government” ($23.95, W.W. Norton).

It explains why we can elect a Representative or Senator, send him or her to Washington, D.C. and still see no progress. Instead, we get the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—that began as a 2,700-page law that has already metastasized into regulations that, stacked up, stand seven feet tall! And more on the way. It has destroyed the healthcare insurance industry and is destroying the U.S. healthcare system.

“The missing element in American government could hardly be more basic. No official has authority to make a decision. Law has crowded out the ability to be practical or fair,” says Howard. “It’s a progressive disease. As law grows to fill the vacuum, the wheels of government go slower every year.”

Howard points to a variety of problems that our nation is encountering. “America’s electrical grid is out of date—transformers, on average, are about forty years old, and not digitized.” As vital and essential as the grid is to all life in America, “there’s no active plan to rebuild America’s electrical grid. The main reason is that government cannot make the decisions needed to approve it.”

Citing proposals that would allow the Bayonne Bridge to permit the new generation of large container ships clearance that would enable the Port of Newark to remain competitive, it took three years for environmental reviews to clear the project, but as Howard notes, “the average length of environmental review for highway projects, according to a study by the Regional Plan Association, is over eight years.” Eight years!

“Government on legal autopilot,” says Howard, “doesn’t have a chance of achieving solvency. In 2010, 70 percent of federal tax revenue was consumed by three entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—that don’t even come up for annual congressional authorization.”

Americans are in general agreement that Big Government is a big problem, but did you know that more than twenty million people work for federal, state and local government—or one in seven workers in America. Their salaries and benefits total more than $1.5 trillion of taxpayer funding each year or about ten percent of the Gross Domestic Product. Cities in America are declaring bankruptcy because they cannot afford the retirement and other benefits that their employees receive. State budgets are comparably weighed down.

We read about the often incomprehensible results and costs of the legal system affecting all levels of government. “Up and down the chain of social responsibility, responsible people do not feel free to make sensible decisions,” says Howard. “Everything is too complicated: rules in the workplace, rights in the classroom, and machinations in government. We’re bogged down in bureaucracy, pushed around by lawsuits, and unable to steer out of economic and cultural storms.”

“The point of regulation, we seem to have forgotten, is to make sure things work in a crowded society.”

What is forgotten or never learned is that there are elements of risk in everything we do. Trying to legislate risk out of our lives only leaves us with millions of rules that make it impossible to function intelligently in business, in schools, in hospitals and nursing homes, and everywhere else. It eliminates swings and seesaws from playgrounds out of fear of lawsuits.

“America is losing its soul,” says Howard. “Instead of creating legal structures that support our values, Americans are abandoning our values in deference to the bureaucratic structures.” Too often, decisions made by elected officials or reflected referendums voted upon by the public have been taken over by the court system in which judges now feel free to decide these matters. The response was a growing objection to “judicial activism.” Now even the judges are distrusted.

Howard’s book explains why America is in trouble and offers recommendations to put it on the right path again. If it is ignored, the America into which I was born more than seven decades ago will not be around or livable for the next generation or two of Americans.

 

Less talk, more doing, preferably by a benevolent dictator..

Committees are where progress and innovation go to die...

 

sit down when you read this one....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/03/22/sinkhole-of-bureaucracy/?hpid=z1

 

Good god, that article just makes a person want to go insane.

 

It makes me want to start hanging high ranking bureaucrats, at least 38 of them at a time.

http://www.unitednativeamerica.com/hanging.html

 

#@&^. Tune in to the Netflix series House of Cards. Probably more real than not. . . and you'll not only want to STFA from going into politics, you will also not want to be friends with anyone who does.

Once in some government class in college, we did a month long "legislative simulation" where we ran a mock US Senate, complete with press, lobbyists, parties, committees, you name it. Lobbyists could "encourage" legislation with points that counted towards a senator's final grade. We (the majority party) never gave a moment's thought to whether the bills were any good. It was all about politics, who had the money and what people at home wanted. We'd backstab one guy or group at a moment's notice. And that was just college kids at a small school working towards (more or less) meaningless grades. JFC, I can't imagine how bad it really is in the halls of power.

 

Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America, v.2, Chapter VI
"What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear"

I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar
pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his
children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside
them but he does not see them. . . .

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over
their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. . . . It seeks only to keep men fixed irrevocably in childhood. . . .
It provides for the citizens' security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs,
directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of
thinking and the pain of living?

Thus after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over
society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking uniform rules through which the most
original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them,
bends them, and directs them. . . . it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders,
compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to nothing more than a herd of timid and
industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

 

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal notes what has occurred since the 1990s when some three dozen gray wolves were captured in Canada and transferred to the wilderness of Idaho. According to federal biologists, this was necessary to restore the ecological balance in a region teeming with elk and other creatures on the gray wolf food chain.

The article noted that more than 650 wolves roam the state today according to the Idaho Department of Fish and Game which has been hearing a lot of complaints that the wolves “are wreaking havoc on Idaho’s prized elk and livestock, and prompted the governor’s office to embark on an effort to wipe out three-quarters or more of the population.”

So the federal biologists bring in the wolves and a few years later the governor’s office says kill them. Why? Because the elk population has fallen about 15% since the wolves arrived, along with 2,589 sheep, 610 cows, and 72 dogs.

Take a moment on contemplate how arrogant and unconscionably stupid it is to take gray wolves from Canada and put them in Idaho in the name of “ecological balance.” The only balance achieved was a significant imbalance in the elk population and witless destruction of sheep and cows which represent a livelihood to ranchers and dinner to the rest of us...

http://www.tpnn.com/2014/03/24/the-green-scam-of-endangered-species/

 

My neighbor keeps telling me to check out the house of cards series. Sounds like I'll have to do that!

 

Last week, MRCTV's Dan Joseph went to American University to give the student body a little general knowledge quiz.

When asked if they could name a SINGLE U.S. senator, the students blanked. Also, very few knew that each state has two senators. The guesses were all over the map, with some crediting each state with twelve, thirteen, and five senators.

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Obviously, in addition to voter ID, the completion of a civics test should be a requirement prior to voting.