George Rebane
RR readers are familiar with the Rebane Doctrine maxim – ‘If something has gone wrong in society, government is guilty until proven innocent’. The verity of this has been demonstrated countless times in any and every country, especially in America. As our government has become the bloated leviathan that it is, the examples of major harm done by and through government tentacles (i.e. its bureaus, agencies, departments, commissions, …) to its citizens have literally grown without bound. A recent and timely compilation that includes current events and government activities is presented by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and WSJ Deputy Editorial Page Director Daniel Henninger, whose thesis is that “the list of fatal mistakes by federal agencies in recent years is staggering.”
After some toe-curling examples, Mr Henninger asks – “Why do these public-agency mistakes continue to happen? The reasons are complex, so an appeal to Occam’s Razor is in order. The simple answer is that the federal government has become too big to succeed. Its vastness ensures mistakes, and its public-safety responsibilities ensure that some of those mistakes will be fatal.” (more here)
And the growth is fueled by our citizens’ carefully taught myopia about big government as the source of all of society’s blessings. The only ones celebrating the federal bloat are our calcified collectivist elites and their reliably history-challenged constituents. Today when anything goes wrong that passeth understanding, our carefully taught and hard-wired response is to face Washington and demand, “Do something!’
Going through Henninger’s list of federal travesties should convince any reasonable person of the ongoing dangers to fundamental public safety that government presents. In these pages, we understand that it’s difficult/impossible to centrally control a complex system whose behavior you don’t understand (i.e. whose transfer function that joins inputs and outputs is unknown and unknowable). Henninger concludes his commentary with –
It’s pertinent to ask, though, whether the federal government’s inexorable bloat has made it a clear and present danger to the American people. That’s a question for public safety. It’s also a question for our politics.
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