Dear friends,
It seems to me that our predilection to always want greater and greater control is starting to hold us back. Our desire to control our environment led to the development of heating and cooling. The desire to have our physical needs met led to plumbing. Our desire to control has been a font of good for us in the past.
Now that we have achieved so much with our scientific curiosity and engineering innovation we have began to display hubris. We now seek to eliminate all risk. To do so is impossible but moreover it is a Faustian bargain. One that gives less and less even as it asks greater and greater sacrifices.
As government regulates more and more of our personal behavior, to protect us from ourselves, we will become resentful sheep. We will fall asleep as the wasp grubs eats us from the inside. Lulled into a false sense of protection we will continue to cede our rights and responsibilities, to government, for the imagined artifact of safety.
Take seat belt laws. They were enacted ostensibly to protect people from collisions and the negative results of them. Seat belts were regulated into cars, then, we were regulated to wear them. That is the dominant paradigm for government intervention into protecting us… government determines the means. However, studies have proven… the use of helmets in cars would dramatically reduce the most debilitating and mortal danger of collisions. Even more then seat belts. So, if protecting the people were the driving force, helmet laws would have been enacted.
They weren’t seat belts were. Helmets were not doable… politically . Seat belts were. The faction that was weak was crushed by the faction that was strong. Aristotle’s definition of Democracy “the strong tyrannize the weak“. The government decided the technology that is to be our primary defense in a collision by means of the most politically expedient way.
How about legislating outcome? Instead of legislating details legislate outcomes. Using our original example, car accident survivability and injury prevention, what would have happened if government had legislated that in a head on collision, by some date certain, at some speed given, one hundred percent of people would walk away unharmed else the car would be resolved unsafe and banned. Letting market forces determine the means. It’s better to let government determine the ends… not the means. Maybe if government ceded some control over us and we ceded some control to God… we would all be better for it.
