Dear Children:
We have too many professional political operatives. There are too many people whose livelihood depends on advocacy. Here’s a shiny new dime for the person who can name any issue for which there are no advocates in Washington. A quarter goes for anyone who can name any advocate that does not have a sworn professional enemy. A crisp new dollar bill goes to anyone who can justify this scrum of professional advocates and opponents as a zeitgeist rather than in the particular.
Advocates thrive on extremes. We believe in tough, unyielding advocates who will fight ‘til the last nickel to support them has been exhausted
Everyone likes his own advocate and despises each advocate’s evil twin. It’s just human nature. We want to know that someone is watching out for our money or our sensibilities or our prejudices or our diseases or our religious and moral scruples. Just so, we like to know if some group is jonesing for what is rightfully ours, their grasping hands will be slapped.
The problem is that they’re making a mess. Our laws are overly long and complex because of it. Our regulations are a crazy quilt of insufferable and minor distinctions. Our courts are clogged with ever-finer particularities made on ever-less important matters.
We write the most mind-numbing descriptions of the word fresh. We have ten or so kinds of embezzlement. If you’ve ever made an attempt to parse the school lunch nutritional standards you have yet to test your capacity for torture. Toilet seats conform to a standard. There’s an outfit that proscribes dirty words. Picture a committee meeting with hundreds of chairs all clamoring for attention. You get the idea.
And yet, no matter how silly or timid, it’s always a result of good intentions informed and confused by our advocates.
Let’s say we have a rash of robberies where the robber threatened her victim with a whisk. Is that armed robbery? Is the whisk covered under the statute? Is a woman wielding a whisk during a robbery suffering from some delusion as yet unbeknownst to medical science? How long and how heavy is the whisk? Should we have Armed Robbery with a Whisk in both the first and second degree? What if the victim had a smaller or larger whisk?
The answer is that armed robbery was committed. The important part was “rash” of robberies. Some politician, no doubt egged on by WANGS (Whisks Are Not Good Society), vows to put a stop to it. So we get a new sort of crime over which legislators must meanly debate; about which regulations must be written and after which the courts must rule endlessly.
We go through all this effort to achieve … what? We certainly don’t get a lessening of robberies.
People in authority no longer have authority. No one seems to be in charge so no one need take responsibility. We have traded the idea that we elect people to represent us for a system of rulemaking among all the other people who claim to represent us. All those definitions of fresh do not come from the legislature. They come from bureaucrats who are left to deal with the WANGS of this world and who have their own rules to follow. They have an impossible job. The legislature kicks the ball to the bureaucrat’s court where the other representatives of the people snarl and bully their way to this present predicament.
No wonder people are frustrated. We have a system that doesn’t trust politicians, doesn’t trust regulators and doesn’t trust courts. We put our trust in WANGS who are constantly being thwarted by politicians, regulators and courts as well as the anti-WANGS lobby.
Come to think of it: Can we really trust WANGS?
I’m just sayin’,
Poppy
www.poppylbs.blogspot.com
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