Taking Lousy Government for Granted
25th June 2012
David Henderson blows the whistle.
There are two ways to take lousy government for granted: (1) to understand clearly how lousy, petty, vicious, self-serving, and narcissistic most government is, and (2) to understand implicitly how lousy, petty, vicious, self-serving, and narcissistic most government is but get so used to it that you hardly notice. I’m in category (1). There are a lot of people in category (2) whom I’m trying to get to category (1).
Case in point: The Supreme Court decision about Obamacare.
The decision is likely to come out next week. Yet we’ve been told that the actual decision was made months ago and it’s probably the case that all the opinions were written weeks ago. So why can’t they tell us? Why make us wait?
Imagine that Apple found a bug in its iPad and came up with a fix. How would you feel if you had just bought an iPad and found out that Apple was going to wait 2 months before releasing the fix? My guess is that you would be angry. Yet I don’t see people getting angry at the Supreme Court. Why? Check out reason (2) above. We are so used to government officials being narcissistic and self-serving that we just accept that they take their sweet time telling us. The fact that waiting until the end of June instead of finding out in, say, mid-May, will cause the misallocation of billions of dollars? No biggie.
This is why, when doctors do clinical trials, if it quickly becomes obvious that the medicine being examined works to fix what’s wrong with people, they cancel the trial and give it to every sick person involved; they don’t wait to finish the trial. Doctors figure that their job is to help sick people, not carry through with some procedural Kabuki dance. Lawyers — not so much.
June 25th, 2012 at 10:46
Why do conservative writers go to such lengths to portray themselves as whiney-assed children unwilling to wait to open their Christmas presents?
The essence of this article is, “But I want it NOW!!” So much for decorum and manners.