Relative Benefit, Relative Harm

Dear Friends,

It seems to me that government should explicitly take into account the relative benefit of a given action. Passing a law for example.

Take a man who is starving. He comes across putrid meat. Is the relative benefit of eating the meat such that he will be less starved after or will he be so sick that the harm from eating the meat will outweigh the benefit? Maybe sufficient cooking will render the meat safe. Perhaps not… [from Mohist doctrine]

The decision is important and as much information as possible must be gathered before it can be made. The human being will use intuition in this instance. Smell the meat and intuit if cooking it sufficiently will make it safe. A misstep in the decision making process and he could die…

Government makes decisions with as great a moment. But government never really weighs the benefit and harm. They only look at the projected benefit. But as we saw with our analogy, there is potential harm. To ignore the harm is to ensure catastrophe.

But that is the job of the party not in power… to point out the potential harm from pending legislation…. Some will argue. And they wouldn’t be far from wrong. But, politics makes strange bedfellows, is an apt saying. When the interests of politicians align…

So if we cannot rely on the opposition party to point out the potential harm in pending legislation what about the media? The media’s role is exactly to do this very thing. But unfortunately the media has become “unbiased“. They have replaced their true faces with a veneer of fairness. While it is not in human nature to be unbiased… they claim to be. An impossibility. Therefore… Foregoing their responsibility even as they pretend to uphold it.

The last two paragraphs have been minor causes of a full examination of the potential harm from not thoroughly examining pending legislation. They work as a unit, sometimes, and separately other times. This loosely coupled mechanism is like a capacitor in an electrical circuit.

A capacitor is like a tank. It can be empty or full. So if you put an empty tank in a fuel line as fuel flows to it’s destination it must fill the tank before it can move on. After the tank is full the flow of fuel can go on. If the flow is reversed the tank has a reserve of fuel before air is sucked in. It buffers the flow of fuel in our analogy. A capacitor does exactly this in an electrical circuit. And by doing so it acts as a buffer to electrical current. In the case of the opposition/media mechanism it acts to buffer the true cost/benefit examination from being done.

Without a relative benefit analysis being done… another example of normalizing deviancy, government necessarily lowers the lot of Man. Every time poorly thought out legislation takes effect the harm often outweighs the benefit. So government’s reaction is to pass more poorly thought out legislation that may, or probably does not, help.

Like a gambler. He wins the first few hands and is up. He continues and over time he looses all his money. Even though the house has a very slim margin of advantage.

Because people react emotionally. In gambling, the stock market and in politics… Meat anyone?