Our Blundering, Intrusive Government Rears Its Ugly Head
15th January 2023
Our government seeks more and more control.
Our government is not competent.
These two statements are both true, and together amount to a nightmare for institutional credibility. A government that seeks more control must at the very least demonstrate credibility in implementing its goals; a government that is incompetent can only regain legitimacy by limiting its authority. And yet we have a government that presents the worst of both worlds: incapacity to perform its most basic functions, combined with an ever-expanding encroachment into daily life.
Thus, this week, the Federal Aviation Administration was forced to ground virtually all flights in the United States after an outage in the so-called Notice to Air Missions systems, designed to warn pilots of weather problems, runway issues or other obstacles. The NOTAM system relies on a reportedly outmoded computer system that has not been updated for years. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who is most famous for taking a two-month paternity leave and then bragging about it repeatedly on national television, helpfully commented, “There was a systems issue overnight that led to a ground stop because of the way safety information was moving through the system.” He then reported this problem to President Joe Biden, who helpfully commented that Buttigieg ought to “restore the system quickly and safely, and to determine causes.”
Job well done, gentlemen.
All of which makes the constant proglodyte effort to get more and more of what goes on in daily life under the control of government totally inexplicable. It’s as if they live on a different planet entirely.