Why Americans don’t trust government
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
But it doesn't really address why we never repeal anything, and it's in large part because we keep doing too much at too high a level of government. A thousand years ago a population the size of New York City would have been a nation, but now it's a city inside of a county inside of a state inside of a union. And the union is inside of a set of international treaties.
It's too many layers of bureaucracy. People keep advocating laws at the highest level where they can get them passed, which both makes them harder to fix because they're further removed from the affected people and more likely to cause trouble because any flaws are amplified by the larger affected population.
The flaw seems to be that people think federal legislation is less complex than local legislation, under the theory that uniformity reduces complexity. But in practice what happens is that you end up with 10,000 pages of federal regulations instead of each city having their own 20 pages, and then not being able to fix anything because San Francisco and Houston can't agree which rule one should impose on the other when the sensible choice is to let each do what they want.
Which, first of all, you already do, the county/state/federal laws apply on top of those.
But you're also assuming that uniform national laws will be less complicated than dealing with different local laws, which doesn't seem to bear out in practice. California is going to care about earthquakes and Massachusetts is going to care about ice storms but not really the other way. If you do business in both California and Massachusetts then you have to care about both earthquakes and ice storms regardless, and if the relevant legislation is at the federal level then it will cover both. Which means local laws aren't more complicated for companies who do business in both places, they're less complicated for companies who don't, because then if you only do business in Massachusetts you don't have to deal with earthquake regulations.
Sure they do. You're insuring against earthquakes in California and ice storms in Massachusetts. North Dakota has a much different banking environment than New York City. Trucks pulling three trailers make sense in big empty western states with wide open spaces but no sense in high traffic urban environments with tight corners.
Doesn't change your point, though.
A lot of problems could be solved all at once by restricting the interstate commerce clause to only commerce that directly occurs between states. That and the fallout from Roosevelt's "court-packing plan" mean that the federal government is currently far too powerful.
These last two wouldn't really solve the problem you mention directly, but it would limit the impact of any particular legislation to just the states demanding it, and reduces the number of representatives needed to change it in the future.
You would end up having The Omnibus Reauthorization Act of [This Year] every year because many of the old laws are sensible or necessary but nobody actually wants to comb through them all and separate the wheat from the chaff.
What might be interesting is to set the bar for passing laws higher than the bar for repealing them, the higher you go in government. So cities and counties would keep a simple majority while state governments would need 55% of the legislature to pass a law but only 45% to repeal it and at the federal level it might be 65% and 35%.
That wouldn't solve the entire problem but it would help. A lot.
Or, pass a constitutional amendment capping the allowed size of the US Code at 150 megabytes(and allow Congress to cap the aggregate size of all individual federal agencies' implementations of that law at, say, 10 terabytes):
So if you want to add a kilobyte, you have to remove another kilobyte somewhere else.
With the current 2 party system, this will only make gridlock even worse, since the opposition will always be able to undo the ruling party's bills. This is filibustering on a whole new level.
That's the idea. The only way you get anything passed at the national level is if most everybody agrees it should be passed at the national level. If you don't have the votes for that then you do it in your own state or not at all.
Maybe the assumptions underlying the Theory of the Firm [1] are changing, making internal transaction costs approach or even exceed external transaction costs.
If so, we should see large organizations disband into smaller, more efficient, more accountable components.
Try to hold your congresscritter responsible. You can't. They blame gridlock for anything that doesn't get done, and stake their position on the right side of popular wedge issues to get reelected. This frees them up to be beholden not to the citizens, but to the party and the donors.
It's only at the very top and the very bottom that we even give a fuck at what our representatives are doing. That's why state governments are often the most corrupt. They're doing god-knows what down there in the state capitol, and chances are you don't even know their names.
1. Many of the regulatory systems which are supposed to protect the populace have been captured or have their effectiveness impaired by special interests, ie. the revolving door between the SEC and Wall Street, the FDA and Big Pharma, and DOE and Big Oil
2. Even when our institutions are not captured there is a perverse logic supporting institutional missions that lead to abuse of power. The Tuskegee experiment makes perfect sense you've got to have a control group in order to better understand the pathology so you can better protect the populace.
3. Poor execution or formation of government policies that would in any other profession be cause for malpractice or being disbarred or worse are routinely foisted upon the populace.
4. Corruption
5. Increasingly your rights and legal protections are seen by institutions as being granted by those institutions instead of being protected by those institutions. Your rights are correctly perceived by the institutions as hindrances to their institutional missions.
Better legal policies wouldn't even crack the top 5 reason for me to trust government. We are way beyond wonky tweaks to our legal system. All of the above essentially boils down to accountability. If policy makers and lawmakers could be held legally accountable for policy mistakes, possibly even financially responsible for the mayhem they cause I for one would feel a much closer allegiance to our government.
The wrong doing in the 2008 recession plus the illegal surveillance state combined to shatter trust in government. Evidence is seen in the Bernie Sanders voters and non-establishment republican voters in 2016.
But yeah, in Ithaca there was a little bridge by the police station that took 9 months to fix. It makes me wonder if the GWB and Tappan Zee bridge were built by aliens, as some have alleged the Egyptian pyramids were. (No, just by Moses... Robert Moses)
It's interesting that the article talks about bridges. The replacement for the Tappan Zee bridge demonstrates, in a microcosm, one big problem with today's government. From wiki[1]:
The bridge was built on a very tight budget
of $81 million (1950 dollars), or $796 million
in 2014 dollars.
Where the fuck does all the money go? Fix that problem and Americans will start trusting government again.
Actual spending is over $7 billion and counting for the new Eastern Span alone, and it is fraught with defects.
My middle school history course was taught to a backdrop of Beatles music. One of my High School history courses was taught in terms of Monty Python movies, which it turns out have a fair bit of historical accuracy to them.
A common refrain was "Why do we do things this way? OLD DEAD WHITE MEN."
When I went to college, I learned who funded the American Revolution. I took a philosophy class that taught us how to deconstruct sentences into logical statements. For practice we used political speeches, which amusingly enough, when diagramed out would often times turn out to be equivalent to null.
For me, the answer is, I don't trust the government because my government provided education deliberately taught me better.
This is also why I get upset when I see people insist that schools are "just indoctrination centers for our youth". Heh. Maybe all my schooling experiences from middle school on up were just serious outliers?
All that said, I do think people's relationship with the government in regards to infrastructure investment is a bit... different. Growing up with a father who worked Union Labor, I learned that the men and women who build this country up have a lot of pride and love for their job. I also learned that everything is far more complicated than I could possibly imagine, with far too many moving parts.
Working in software I know the overhead cost of communications between different teams, within the same company and across company lines. With the number of suppliers and vendors that come together for any given public works project, I am actually impressed that work gets done at all. To a large extent, I think a huge source of problems is organizational efficiency.
Yet the public demands a certain level of accountability and transparency for our public works projects. We want open and honest bidding, and that means dealing with all the overhead of having 20 different vendors win different contracts for different parts of a project. There is an inherent inefficiency there that would not exist if we could just trust "one person" or "one company" to completely execute on a project.
Over time I grew to find the mindset counterproductive. Free thinking is good to a point. But it's institutions, not individuals, that get us to the moon. It's bad when the pendulum swings too far in the other direction and we give up on our institutions.
I agree with this, but I think it is often the case that institutions deserve to be given up on. I don't think we've figured out how to make them resilient against the internal politics of the institution becoming the primary activity of the institution.
At what cost to our liberty? In the absence of something eery (e.g. communists seeking world domination) this becomes harder and harder to justify. If something can't be achieved voluntarily, maybe it just shouldn't be done.
Do you know what the biggest meta-lesson throughout my education was? The single thing that was hammered home in every single class? Following directions. I think that says a lot.
The learning experience was highly regimented and structured. Show up on time, do your work the way we tell you, get an A.
The actual content of any given class was a bit more varied but none of the classes had much flexibility. When they set out to teach or engage creativity, it was always in narrow, controlled ways: assignments and projects with specific, detailed instructions. The creative aspect was confined to how you fulfilled those instructions—the moral equivalent of coloring within the lines.
I think I had a grand total of two truly open-ended assignments in all of high school: one in a CS class and one in a physics class. I built a single thing for both (with permission, of course), and it was easily the best thing I ever did in high school. But that was definitely the exception, not the rule; every other "project" was just a bigger homework assignment.
Maybe I'm being too harsh but, looking back, the experience absolutely did not nurture independence—quite the opposite.
Ironically, a lot of my assignments were free form, and I hated it! I had to sit through so many poorly done video presentations other groups of students did that I eagerly wished for teachers to teach us how to make a proper presentation and make students stick to the format! There are some basic rules to structuring a presentation that I don't think ever got taught, heh.
But those were the monthly assignments. On a larger and more fun scale, both my Middle School and High School had free form graduation projects. My Middle School project was on the history of video games, my HS project was on LED lighting. A minimum report size was dictated, but we also had to come up with a presentation on our own, with no real guidelines given other than a minimum time we had to present for.
A lot of my English reports were open ended. Sure I was given a general topic to write about, but that is sort of the point of a classroom, to provide general structure for students to learn within.
I remember one middle school project were we had to design a life form. That was pretty much it for instructions, just go off and design a new life form and be prepared to present it to the class. I ended up with a scale model, a description of locomotion, vision systems, and a general outline of culture.
Another project was to write a children's storybook.
Then there was the student produced school news channel. We were given instruction on how to operate equipment, but everything else was left up to the students.
Biology class, open ended report with presentation, mine was on the quality of life enhancements that genetic engineering of humans would bring about.
Elementary school, second grade, students wrote and directed a play, we did Stone Soup, we ended up performing it at the Senior Center as well as in front of the school.
Countless classes writing poetry. Either structure or theme was dictated, rarely both.
My social studies class had multiple debate sessions throughout the year. I remember one of them, Rome vs. Greece. My team was arguing Rome, my counterpoint to their claim of philosophers was "You cannot claim the great philosophers that you killed! In Rome, even the lowliest of gladiators could rise up to be a powerful and respected man. You kill your wise men." Not logically sound, but appeals to emotion work.
I'll admit, my parents worked hard to get me into the best public schools that they could, but at all times these were just public schools! Thankfully I graduated before No Child Left Behind made testing all the rage, from what I gather, things have been going steadily downhill in regards to how much flexibility teachers have in their job.
Hmmm. The cliche of dismissing Western culture as one created by "old dead white men" isn't independent, only lazy thinking to me, and it deserves criticism by itself.
The fact that you yourself refer to it as a "refrain" is quite telling on my opinion...
Can you elaborate? It's not clear to me why he would not have written this rant if he had a helicopter. Are you trying to tie his frustration with the bridge to his commute times?
Yes, for starters. He even says so in the article. I also doubt Larry Summers and the people who distrust government can relate to each other. So I conclude maybe there might not be larger lessons to be learned from talking a long time to rebuild an old bridge over the Charles in an area with insane traffic and no possibility of building a temporary bridge, due to the layout of the roads in the area.