I found this in the comments section of a TPM post; an otherwise forgettable rhetorical drive-by of an entirely deserving target. The thread was mostly partisan, and mostly well-aimed jibes at a target that more than deserves to be mocked, because she's an insult to the intelligence and principles of anyone who actually should be engaged in the process.
Now, this assumption was inherent in the post and the reaction; it is of course the underpinning of the Resistance ... I mean, the rather incoherent gasp of horror that is the US Progressive movement. But I've never really seen the resistance to the tea-tards put so well. It's not enough to mock and resist; one really should know why, or one's disdain can and perhaps should be dismissed as mere partisan sniping.
The GOP loves to fight, loves to win, but frankly, finds governing a pain in the ass. They don't think it should or even can be done properly, since government is the problem, not the solution. Why people vote for individuals who despise the process they're fighting hard to become a part of is so far beyond me as to make me, in my own view, practically a foreigner in my own country.
I don't want an arsonist managing my lumberyard.
I don't want government-haters running my government.
Seems simple to me. I believe in our government, and the founding fathers who risked and sacrificed everything they had to establish it. I'm tired of idiots telling me the People shouldn't rely on the government. We the People established the government. It's ours. We made it. and we made it to help solve problems. To rely on institutions set up to help us is not a shame. Tearing down those institutions is.
I love America and I love my American Rights. I love our open arms and our promise of hope to the wretched refuse of the world -- you know, our grandparents and great-grandparents, and their parents, and theirs, etc.
The first rule of budgeting is to look at your costs and priorities. It's as true for governments as it is for people. You look at the various things you spend time and money on and you decide if they actually bring the benefit you once thought.
This is one very dramatic example.
Watch the whole thing, and then realize the overwhelming truth. A positive budget shift of more than 2 billion dollars more or less immediately upon stopping the drug war. In California. Alone. 2 BILLION dollars.
I don't have to be an advocate of recreational drug use or medical marijuana to make that argument. I just have to point out that flushing two billion bucks down the crapper in return for no good outcome, much less anything like the intended outcomes (other than getting politicians elected) is really very stupid.
Let's look at a few other things going on in society. Currently, the majority of incomes are static or going down. This is due mostly to pressure from right wing groups (social and fiscal) who see the solution to everything to be cutting taxes and defunding "entitlement programs" like social services, medicare, etc.
On occasion, I do wonder if they ever think about consequences - at all. For some number of persons denied affordable health care for a loved one or a shot at a decent job will certainly cook methamphetamine to cover expenses. They will certainly consider stealing a BMW to pay the rent. That is to say, you increase the statistical motivation for crime while at the same time decreasing the ability of government to statistically decrease and prevent crime. Well-educated people, for instance, tend to have more lawful options, so are less likely to resort to violent crime. At the worst, they are less likely to blow their apartment building up because they couldn't read instructions for cooking a drug.
Let us also remember that every usage of government comes at the price of something else it could be doing. This is a point Judge Grey makes above; that drug wars come at the price of investigating and prosecuting other crimes which, obviously, should take priority - basic things like murder, rape and robbery.
But it's also less obvious that many things government does are best done because they have diffuse, widespread benefits. Things like public health and welfare; universal, affordable heath care, vaccinations, sewage treatment, even direct welfare programs. These have many diffuse benefits that are obvious only in their absence; allowing ourselves to be ideologically blinded to the macro benefits because the "wrong people" will benefit on the micro level is breathtakingly stupid. Karl Smith illustrates this point.
If we want to build a model of what the government spends money on we would be best to start this way: ask people what social obligations do they believe “society” has. Look around for the cheapest – though not necessarily most efficient – programs that could credibly – though not necessarily effectively– address those obligations. Sum the cost of those programs. That will be government spending.
Contrary to Jonah Goldberg and others who see Canada and the United States as examples of two clashing ideologies, they are actually examples of two different ethic distributions. The United States is not Canada because there is ethnic strife between Southern Blacks and Southern Whites. That strife reduces the sense of moral obligation on the part of the white majority and so reduces government spending.
I want to be very clear that I don’t say this to paint those against social spending as racists. From where I sit I am betting that most of the intellectuals lined up against expanding the welfare state are naively unaware that their support rests upon racial strife. Otherwise they would realize that as America integrates they are doomed. They are fighting as if they believe they have a chance of winning. Given the strong secular trend in racial harmony, they do not.
I point this out also to show why the major Republican strategy for limiting government was doomed from the start and why I am also not particularly worried about Americas fiscal future per se.
Now, it's becoming increasingly clear - to me at least - that people tend to discount the price they are willing to see other people pay to create the sort of society they would prefer to live in. I'd like you to try and look at this objectively - of course, I would be expecting rather a lot of you to do that. But try to look at the following and say, hm, supposing this actually was a sane idea that could arguably accomplish something positive, how much would it cost, and would it actually make more sense than, say, taking a third of that money and opening drug rehab beds, while blowing the rest on - oh, I dunno, something silly, like flood control?
If only Dick Morris would tell us how he really feels about libertarians.
During a radio interview with Peter Schiff, a former economic adviser to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, Dick Morris thought he’d be talking about his new book, and seemed annoyed when he found himself discussing trends within the Republican Party.
Schiff, who said he noticed that nearly a third of the people he met at CPAC came from the “Ron Paul/Gary Johnson wing” of the GOP, with the rest in the more traditional conservative camp of Mitt Romney, asked Morris how he thought this would play out in the presidential race.
“I strongly oppose Ron Paul,” Morris said. “I think he’s horrific. He wants us to end the War on Drugs. He wants us to end the War on Terror.”
“Do you think we’re winning the war on drugs?” Schiff interjected.
“No, because we’re not fighting it,” Morris replied.
“We’re not fighting it?” Schiff asked. “We don’t have enough laws against drugs?”
“No,” Morris replied. “We should drug test every high school student. We should drug test everybody that gets a student loan. Anybody that’s using drugs should not get a government student loan.”
Schiff argued that there was something vaguely socialist about the government giving out student loans in the first place, but Morris disagreed, and became increasingly annoyed.
“Peter, I’d like to talk about my book, which is ‘Revolt: How to Defeat Obama and Repeal his Socialist Programs,” Morris complained. “You know what, Peter? You talk to yourself for the next 15 minutes. That seems to be what you want to do.”
And with that, he hung up.
Morris’s feelings about Ron Paul are not a secret, as he called him “crazy” in a column in 2007. But the drug testing for all high school students is new, as far as I can tell. Morris did not respond to a request for comment.
UPDATE: Morris emails to clarify: "Yes, I support drug testing for all high school students with those who fail getting rehab. I support drug testing for all recipients of student loans and those that fail should be tested again and, if they fail, the loan should be terminated."
Let me get this straight here. Socialism is bad, because it presumes that some central planner, some "bureaucrat" has inappropriate power over you, and of course, the obvious objection and argument, that such immense, overreaching structures with their arbitrary rules and institutional mentalities are woefully inefficient at doing anything cheaply or well... but collecting pee in cups along with SAT tests is somehow an exception to that rule? Derisive laughter is the only possible response!
Government is best done when it's focused on what people actually do need and how they actually will behave. It makes a terrible nanny. It does well when it does what it absent-mindedly can to make resources, information and spaces available so that people can most effectively help themselves. Oh, and the best reason for it to do that is because people will help themselves and those who they approve of, regardless of what any particular government might think of that proposition, or who they feel has the "God-Given right" to determine the fate of the majority of people.
Everyone's abuzz and atwitter about the WaPo's investigative report, Top Secret America.
It certainly inspired Glenn Greenwald, and your really must read every single substantive word. It is an on-point piece about the National Security State and a howl of frustration toward the endless flood of trivial drek that we must all wade through to find anything, anything at all of actual importance.
Ironically, it's exactly the same problem that the "Intelligence" community has... a flood of information that overwhelms one's intelligence.
If you read and write about politics full-time and are thus forced to subject yourself to the political media -- as I am -- what's most striking aren't the outrages and corruptions, but the overwhelming, suffocating, numbing stream of stupidity and triviality that floods the brain. One has to battle the temptation to just turn away and ignore it all. Every day, day after day, is consumed by some totally irrelevant though distracting melodrama: what Sarah Palin wrote on her Facebook page, some "outrageous" snippet of a comment made by John Boehner or Harry Reid, some "crazy," attention-attracting statement from some fringe idiot-figure or TV blowhard that is exploited for superficial partisan gain or distraction value (hey, look over there: I think Michelle Bachmann just said something outrageous!!!!).
Now compare that to this excerpt:
NSA whistle blower Adrienne Kinne, when exposing NSA eavesdropping abuses, warned of what ABC News described as "the waste of time spent listening to innocent Americans, instead of looking for the terrorist needle in the haystack." As Kinne put it:
By casting the net so wide and continuing to collect on Americans and aid organizations, it's almost like they're making the haystack bigger and it's harder to find that piece of information that might actually be useful to somebody. You're actually hurting our ability to effectively protect our national security.
Glenn goes on and I'm certain I could find others saying much the same. Indeed, it would take very little effort to pick up instructive examples of waste and duplication of effort. I learned to pad the bibliography in grade school. But in fact, it would add very, very little to what I'm going to say next, which is, sadly, mostly based on things I've known for quite a long time, and you probably know too.
Now, this is actually what an intelligence and policy analyst does. Ideally, they do it a long, long time ahead of the curve, so that infrastructure, government and regulation - all slow moving entities - are able to respond and adapt.
This entire, completely mad situation occurred because national panic created a situation that could be exploited by political and economic opportunists; people who put their own agendas far ahead of any rational view of National Security. So the US is now far less secure than it was, with less reliable intelligence than it had before, with a bizarre degree of available force deployed in the wrong places, addressing the wrong threats, generally in the worst possible way. Consequently, it's ability to wield power usefully and effectively in order to secure it's own national and economic interests is much diminished, to the extent that it explains why there has been no serious attempt to follow up on 9/11.
"Never distract an enemy who's in the process of destroying themselves."
The whole point to "national security" is making the nation secure; that means every single citizen and indeed, even the unwelcome visitors and the rats in the walls must be secure; it must be a perceived and genuine reality.
They must know they are secured against predictable threats and hazards, and that their governments are both willing, able and capable of responding to emergencies effectively, so when things like Katrina or the oil spill in the gulf happen the competent response to a visible emergency will reassure them that they are in good hands in regard to situations that must be kept under a cloak of secrecy.
One way to demonstrate competence is to deal with the obvious in an intelligent and proportional way. If you are serious about a policy, if it's not merely an exercise in diverting funds to cronies, then there are certain things that must be done, things that will displease some constituencies while pleasing others, but which proceed logically from the proposition.
If you want a good football team, you don't dump a quarter of the budget into the glee squad. You don't spend time playing tennis to "develop a rounded athleticism." Most of all, you do not choose the squad based on which player's parents whine the loudest. Once the process is corrupted, the only predictable outcome is that you won't have a football team that can put the ball in the end-zone. Putting it in the end-zone is the point to the exercise, and between corruption, distraction and pandering - that's the national security situation in a nutshell.
A team that doesn't know what game they are playing, how to work together, or where the other team is.
One of the first things that should have happened in the weeks following 9/11 would have been to secure the petroleum infrastructure, since large piles of things that can leak or go bang with effects that dwarf any pitiful little WMD that might be cobbled together in a garage are a problem.
Security, regulation and oversight for critical infrastructure should have been an immediate and obvious priority. Hasn't been done. Hell, the routine maintenance of critical infrastructure has not been done.
When procedures and inspections are so sloppy as to permit a well to just blow up all by itself, it would be amazingly trivial to sabotage a pipeline, pumping station or tank farm. Considering the industry track record on safety and cover-ups, I'd venture a guess that the sabotage, if ever detected, might never be reported.
The same for securing the ports; ensuring that it's impossible to casually transit a few shipping containers filled with God Knows What routed to Who Knows Where. Hasn't been done.
And consider the substitution of National Security Theatre for anything that might actually promote National Security, such as the TSA and the "no fly list." Meanwhile, air cargo remains largely unscreened and the baggage handling system is easily penetrated. People concerned about the potential for cheap, high-impact terrorism have been screaming about this for decades. Decades. Since the time it was fashionable to hijack planes and fly them to Cuba.
Fixing infrastructure and communications mis-matches are not sexy. Precautionary regulations that cost Boeing and Exxon money are third-rail double-plus un-sexy. It's a quick ticket to being taken down in a primary by some useful idiot who will rant on about god, guns, gays and "American Exceptionalism."
Meanwhile, various levels of law enforcement are making it increasingly clear that if you have a bad situation, the quickest way to make it worse is to ask a cop for help. So, aside from all the inherent wrong that presents, you can fairly much forget getting any ground-level intelligence out of the very communities that any terrorist would first think to hide within. "The revolutionary swims within a sea of peasants" - Chairman Mao.
He owed everything to the astonishingly corrupt "legitimate" government.
So the way to avoid that outcome is to govern honestly and have as few ignorant, sullen resentful peasants as humanly possible. That's a lot easier and far less expensive than running a counter-insurgency.
When it becomes clear to ordinary people that they will be treated as aliens, subversives and criminals by agents of the state, that the worst might happen to them regardless of their innocence, what incentive is there for them to not be smuggling blow, spying for foreign powers or trafficking in illegal weapons and people?
There would have been no Robin Hood without the Sheriff of Nottingham. Now, here's the obvious thing. From the viewpoint of people who fondly believe that they are in charge, the Sheriff is "one of them." He's one of the good guys. But in actual fact, he's the guy who's escalating the situation. It's hard to find Robin, but you know where this guy lives. Dealing with him sends a message and just incidentally, makes a whole bunch of really bad situations never happen in the first place.
That is the goal of national security. Making sure that most bad situations never happen.
Looking at the concentration of effort going into "narcoterrorism" at the WaPo site, it's clear there is dramatic concern about the overlap between drug trafficking and it's ability to generate funds and camouflage for terrorism. Or at least, concern within each intelligence community that they aren't getting their share of drug dollars.
And yet the most obvious response would be to literally legislate the problem away.
Legalize drugs, regulate them in a sane manner, tax them cautiously, so as to avoid significant grey and black market activity and an enormous amount of human capital and a giant pile of wasted money will be released for other uses.
It would take a relatively small amount of that money to deal intelligently and humanely with the actual consequences of individual drug use - which, I might add, are largely un-addressed due to there being no money and a lack of warm bodies. And suddenly, without the influx of "drug offenders" into private enterprise prisons, those prisons could retask themselves and their staffs towards something actually useful - say, perhaps rehab and treatment for drug use, chronic PTSD and vets affected or disabled by traumatic brain injuries.
In other words, you want to get as close to the root of a problem as possible, and that leads me to refer once again to petroleum infrastructure. Clearly it's vulnerable. Hell, it's falling apart and blowing up at random! Phasing it out in favour of renewables, and distributing fuel and energy production as widely and evenly as possible would be a Very Good Thing.
Consider how much havoc could be caused by simply triggering an overload of the power grid on a hot summer day at rush hour on the Eastern Seaboard. The best way to avoid this is to ensure that power is generated diffusely so that there are many fewer obvious, high-value targets.
But the most important thing to understand about National Security is this - you always, always, always want to get at least two bangs for your buck. Worse, any dollar that is directly spent on guns and spies is pretty much wasted, because those are fall-backs; ways to address the worst case. So you really do not want to invest more than you actually need, and you really want to spend even those dollars in ways that develop capabilities that can be used for more mundane things.
It's like building a city wall, in olden days. It is a HUGE investment. It's required, of course, and it must be maintained, and manned. If you don't have it, you will be exploited or attacked. But the point to the effort is to secure everything else, and if it becomes half of everything, and makes everything else that much harder... it's not actually doing it's job. Indeed, if it actually gets in the way of those it's intended to keep secure, they will subvert it as a matter of course.
Government should foster, encourage and regulate toward the end of seeing the nation secure itself, organically, in the ordinary course of affairs. That is to say, you regulate and legislate so that things that tend to make the nation more secure against external threats, and promote domestic tranquility and prosperity happen as a happy and natural side effect of what people are ordinarily doing.
This generally means securing lines of communication, encouraging inter-dependencies between classes and regions, fostering trust, building relationships and generally being responsive and useful. In other words, when you call, they should come - and they should have better things to do than show up for no good reason.
When it starts to look to large portions of your population that they have a greater natural alliance and a greater reason to owe loyalty to foreign governments, drug lords, street gangs and of course, personal networks and families - that signifies national irrelevance - and at that point, you don't really have a "state" to "secure."
So, maybe you all should get to work on that. Me, I'd deal with the unemployment crisis. Can't really think of a bigger threat to national security than a large number of hungry, desperate, well-armed peoplewho can find out where you live by poking a few buttons on their smartphones. But that's just me. Carry on as you will.
I happen to believe that government should be as small as possible, and structured to do as little as possible. Unlike many Libertarians, it is not because I believe that private enterprise can do things better by definition. There are some things that must be done privately and some areas where you could go either way.
The place where I depart with ideology is here: a government is a means by which a group of people can be well employed doing something worth doing. It has precisely the same basic rationale as a business - but it exists to account for those circumstances where common interests preclude any particular private interest.
Oh, and as an ideal principle, and as a way of testing the value of any particular government enterprise, it should produce the desired net positive outcome at a lower net cost than private enterprise could - if private enterprise could produce any acceptable outcome at all.
This is admittedly a complex idea and it's difficult to reduce to even simple mathematical expressions. You see, while a government should be profitable in terms of "adding value" to the area for which it is responsible, it does it in ways that are inherently and necessarily diffuse.
Take, for example, the building and maintenance of roads and bridges. It's almost impossible to justify a road that goes anywhere you want or need development to occur, without some government involvement or guarantee. Toll roads - a popular Libertarian idea - tend to dissuade people from using them, which in many cases has the effect of making the entire effort pointless - or at least blunting it's point.
And if roads are problematic, public transit is far more difficult to persuade as being directly profitable. They have to be evaluated as being a means to offset other, greater costs, while generating secondary economic effects.
For example, you really do not want people taking their cars into downtown cores. Those cars impose tremendous infrastructure costs, from parking (and enforcement) to pollution to congestion. At some point, people will simply go elsewhere, rather than put up with the "hassle tax."
This can be directly addressed by public transit.
Now, here's the problem with diffuse solutions to socal problems. No diffuse solution can ever be perfect, it cannot possibly solve every possible combination of issues one might raise as an objection to doing it in the first place, etc.
But again, here's where we get back to the entire point of having a government.
You need a mechanism in existence that serves to deal with things that cannot be solved without resolving various conflicts of interest.
Or in other words, a government is called into being by the existence of a "free market," and the absolute necessity for a "commons" in which that market may exist.
That which is literal and obvious in a village becomes difficult to discern when dealing with a congested urban area or, indeed, a nation.
But it becomes obvious again when we see what happens when government is taken over by those who do have a particular ideological vision that absolutely precludes an impartial, pragmatic and informed decision making process; who believe that government is an inherent evil, or who use that simplistic talking point to conceal a more basic lust for unchecked power and a complete lack of qualification for having it.
Governments exist to achieve certain things. In order to do that, they need talented, ethical, responsible people and ethical, responsible, fair and relentless critics. The goal is NOT to have one philosophy of government "win out" over another - the idea is to achieve a workable, useful, satisfactory consensus with a minimax outcome. I suspect that it's possible to mathematically prove that such a minimax outcome is absurdly unlikely if partiasan politics becomes completely divorced from the inescapable view that the objective matters in practical human terms.
Govenrment is not hockey. Hockey is hocky. At the end of the day, it is the game that counts, how well it is played and whether it's fun to watch. Government, on the other hand, must be judged by outcomes; when the process gets in the way, or even precludes dealing with real and serious problems, it's useless. I would suggest this is the fault of the participants - those who are elected, those who are appointed, and those who prefer to let it be somebody else's job.
One way or another - if you have ever complained about the result of government, well one of those roles has obviously not been filled. So, what are you doing that's more important?
“I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed'' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents "interests,'' I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.” -Barry Goldwater
In my mind, there is a natural balance between political parties and the wings thereof, and it's very important to illustrate how that balance should with good examples. I yield the floor to Rep. Ted Poe who brings all that is good and fine about being a Conservative thinker to bear on a "solution" to our energy crisis that may well be worse than the problem it will supposedly solve.
The natural role of the Republican is to take the negative, to ask the hard questions, to demand that all the numerical ducks are in a row and both the obvious and hidden costs are documented.
It's not simply to oppose all ideas that are (variously) Democratic, Liberal or just Overenthusiastic. It could be stated that, traditionally the first question should be first (as Rep. Poe points out) - "Is it Constitutional?"
Any truly worthwhile idea can be achieved in a Constitutional way, if the focus is on ends, rather than a means by which that end will be achieved. Indeed, since those means are usually tied to various special interests that are either economically or idiologically biased it's fairly usual for the means to achieve the exact opposite of the sincerely intended end.
The War On Poverty. The War on Crime, The War On Drugs. And of course, the latest and greatest: The War on Terror. In each case, the means preclude the end.
The ultimate Republican question in the face of such outcomes is "And how is that workin' out for ya?"
In a positive sense, the various progressive, liberal, populist and activist movements are the ones that bring things before us and say, often with great moral force, that Something Must Be Done.
But the devil is in the details, therefore, any real solution has as few details as possible and is as an elegant solution as can be found, or it will tend to produce unintended consequences that cost us more stress, wealth and liberty than which provoked us into Doing Something. This is where Conservatism really shines, with the ruthless application of Occam's Razor. Indeed, for an excellent illustration of the principle at hand, I refer everyone to the Robert A. Heinlein tale in Time Enough for Love, The Man who was Too Lazy to Fail.
Heinlein, I am morally certain, will one day be considered one of the greatest conservative philosophers of this age. But that personal belief aside, Sir, I am sure that Barry Goldwater would have approved greatly of this speech.
I have a couple little nits to pick with Rep Poe's conclusions regarding his ideas of what resources we should be developing but let us gloss over that in the spirit of celebration and to the end of not missing the more important point.
Then, of course, there's the related question that Congress must seriously address for the sake of it's own credibility: Was he actually elected? Or is that just the apparent result produced by the Sierra Systems voting machines we are blessed with? You see, it is not enough for the wife of Caesar to be chaste; she must be seen to be chaste! Otherwise, all that tedious honor and propriety is for naught, and - as the current crop of republican functionaries and fools doth prove - the ruling principles are "Make hay while the sun shines" and "One may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb."
Rep Poe; I do you the courtesy of pointing out that one does not direct such observations toward the obvious rule - but to presumable exceptions. In the light of this, I do not think anyone could reasonably criticize you for being unelectable save for an electronic Deus Ex Machina.
However, noting that you have a fine sense of the absurd, and in recognition of all the corn now rotting on the banks of the Ohio River, corn that was most inappropriately destined to be a poor source of ethanol instead of an excellent source of food - may I suggest that there is an opportunity to speak to that here and now?
Rotting corn, husks, stalks and agricultural waste can be fermented. A floating crop is easy to corral - ask any cranberry farmer. All you need are two boats and a rope.
Then you need a fermenter. That is to say, a large tank, filled with enough water to start, and either the natural yeasts, or some more aggressive yeasts developed by the brewing industry. For that matter, sir, I'm sure Texas A&M has a few good mycologists who could whomp up a practical publication with pointers to online sources pretty much in their sleep.
It makes enormous sense from the perspectives of both agricultural and energy policy to make farms as self-sufficient in energy as is possible. A diffuse energy supply is a secure energy supply. Further, the more diffuse it is, the less energy it takes to get the energy you have to where it is needed. That's actually better than conservation.
It also serves as a buffer against commodity fluctuations. And it is a solution that depends upon an obvious profit center and simple procedures, rather than burdensome regulations.
You see, Sir, when you pointed out the regulations regarding Chinese compact fluorescent bulbs, you did not point out the most obvious criticism. Rather than seeing that it was an inherently bad idea to mandate or even encourage this technology, Congress in complicity offloaded the the responsibility consequences onto the American people by means of a set of regulations that will never be complied with in any widespread way. As it did with DDT, 2,4,D and of course that Superfund Favorite; PCB. I mention things that we really should have been more suspicious about, but I suppose I should also point to Asbestos as having given us a century or two of unintended consequences due to unappreciated risks. Indeed, I wonder to what extent the fall in lung cancer may be attributed to a sharp drop in environmental asbestos, rather than the liberal presumption that anti-smoking campaigns are due the credit.
(Not that we object to the outcome, of course.)
But I think I speak for many when I say that Americans are really really tired of having the responsibility for the consequences of government and indeed a far greater than reasonable compliance duty offloaded upon us without any compensatory medical or retirement benefits comparable to your own.
And speaking to you and your colleagues, Sir, the very point of a representative democracy is to put the people who do not suck at governance at work so that we can go about doing the things we do not suck at.
It's not so much that the taxation levels we cope with are burdensome, it's rather that instead of using that money and mandate to make us more secure, comfortable and productive, it seems to always bring us an extra boil on the ass, like this one you so ably point toward.
I think we have a right to expect good governance, intelligent governance; a governance that does as little as possible, as lightly as possilbe, in order to do that little as professionally as possible and with all regard and courtesy towards those it interacts with.
In this, you beautifully illuminate an example of the complete opposite, Congress has signed off on environmental mercury poisoning as an acceptable price for having appeared to achieve something. It's also the price of allowing "industry experts" to blow sunshine up your butts instead of asking for the expertise of constituents. There is certainly no state caucus that does not have at least one well-staffed state university with all sorts of expertise there for you to presume upon, at little or no cost to the taxpayer, direct or indirect.
Such an institution will tell you there are many ways to produce light - and there is one technology that is USA made, or can easily be, is more efficient, produces better light and has even lower costs in terms of energy and supply chain issues.
Light Emitting Diodes. Congress could create a demand simply by becoming an early adopter of LED lighting and participating in getting it down to a price that is acceptable to those of us doomed to live in trailers by years of the sorts of policies you so pointedly ridicule.
But a regulatory mandate for LED's would be just as foolish, other than as a research and development project. Good regulations set targets for overall system efficiency without restricting how those efficiencies should be achieved. And then, they set positive rewards for beating those standards.
I do not believe that I've said one thing here that is not an inherently conservative thing. Indeed, the entire thing may be summed up with Franklin's observation that "a penny saved is a penny earned."
It's very foolish to mandate a technology that will inevitably turn every single landfill into a Superfund site, EPA regulations be damned.
Regulations that are not read and are easily evaded are worse than useless, if policy assumes general compliance. How much non-compliance can we afford? Would it not make far more sense, if a risk exists worthy of such regulations, to demand that lighting devices be both non-toxic and easily recyclable, either at the curb or the landfill?
Mercury vapor is not the only gas that fluoresces - assuming RF pollution and the madding subliminal flicker are issues you find acceptable on my behalf. I do not, by the way.
Here the EPA - and I'm criticizing the same thing from a different angle - has committed the greatest sin any government can. It has issued a law in full knowledge that it cannot and will not be fully complied with. And who is to blame? Well, clearly from the perspective of the EPA and Congress - those unaware of regulations they did not read, probably due to the fact that they did not realize there was anything to read.
It is certainly not reasonable to assume that congress would mandate a more hazardous technology with greater long-term costs and risks. I cannot imagine that any genuine conservative would think that a still largely conservative government would.
Actually, it's such a violation of plain common sense and obvious due diligence that I cannot imagine any reasonably competent government of any political philosophy doing such a silly thing.
You may reasonably ask, Sir, what do you expect of one state representative?
I respond, Sir; read every bill, and if you cannot, forward every bill to a selection of constituents with expertise you trust. PRESUME, Sir. Demand a little of us. Expect more of us, in a mindful way, rather than inflicting upon us the consequences of not reality-checking the Washington Wisdom.
But first of all - continue to do exactly what you just did. This is the first step, the most important step, to notice such things and call attention to them. And I point out to you sir, as you may have noticed based on this little viral video, that the voice of Representative speaking on the floor of the House is no longer just a fart in a high wind.
One routine speech, one small, pro-forma speech had a significant impact, because your voice got out, was heard and thought upon.
That, Sir, is real power, and it transcends the threat of armed force (c.f. Patriot Act) by several orders of magnitude. There is a reason the Second Amendment does not come first.
In conclusion, Sir, do not take this as being in any way anything other than the best sort of critique. Having seen what you set out to do, and having seen that it is done well I, - and I hope I speak for a broad selection of persons of all political stripes and all walks of life - wish to encourage you to do it more and suggest that you seek out help with any heavy lifting involved.
Oh, and one final note:
ATTENTION, DEAN HELLER:
This, Sir, is what a REPUBLICAN does. This is HOW a Republican should act. Observe, study and learn, for there will be a quiz.
