I always find it interesting that people often differentiate
between, segregate, “humans” and “nature” as if humans are not a part of
nature.
Similarly, people often differentiate and segregate “humans” and
“government” as if humans were not a part of government, as if in fact the
government was not made of humans. The ills and promise of governments are
all very human. Governments are organized humans.
Governments are not a lost cause; the Constitution of the USA shows that to
be the case. It is possible to create a “governmental technology” that
protects humans from themselves.
Jeff
···
On Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 9:12 AM Starchild sfdreamer@earthlink.net wrote:
Beyond the most odious and morally repellent things that governments do –
genocide, democide, torture, war, police murder, prison slavery, systemic
corruption, etc. – there is a whole level of routine outrages that normally
fly under the radar or get taken for granted. The book “The Permission
Society: How the Ruling Class Turns Our Freedoms into Privileges and What
We Can Do About It
http://www.encounterbooks.com/books/the-permission-society-how-the-ruling-class-turns-our-freedoms-into-privileges-and-what-we-can-do-about-it/”,
by Timothy Sandefur, does a good job shining a light on some of this layer
and how it operates.An excerpt:
*"A politician runs for office on a platform promising, say, to stop
pollution. Once in office, he writes a bill that forbids anyone from
emitting pollutants without a permit—and also establishes a new
bureaucratic agency charged with determining what qualifies as a
“pollutant” and how one goes about getting a permit. **Once the bill is passed, the politician can tell his constituents that he
has taken bold action to solve the problem and move on to the next issue.
While voters are applauding his achievement, the new agency begins writing
regulations, often with little public attention. These regulations are
intricately complex, are backed up by severe penalties, and sometimes have
nasty unintended consequences. **The unelected officials employed by the agency have every incentive to
interpret their mandate as broadly as possible because, after all, they act
‘in the public interest.’ Within a few years, the agency has implemented
thousands of petty and complicated rules, which are in effect a code of
laws that no elected official ever approved and which neither they nor the
voters can realistically control. *If the agency ever takes a step that causes a controversy in the
media—for instance, declaring a July 4 fireworks display to be illegal
“pollution”—the politician who wrote the law can shake his head, claim that
was not his intention, and chide bureaucrats for going too far—again
winning the applause of voters. But since nothing short of a new law is
likely to rein the bureaucracy in, he can probably do nothing meaningful
about it, even if he wants to."I suspect this is erroneous only in suggesting that politicians do much of
the actual law-writing themselves.More insights at https://wng.org/roundups/the-out-of-control-bureaucratic-branch-of-government-1617230148
https://wng.org/roundups/the-out-of-control-bureaucratic-branch-of-government-1617230148Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))