Sure, sometimes it really does make sense to do your own research. There’s times when you really do need to take personal responsibility for the way things are going. But there’s limits. We live in a highly technical world, in which hundreds of esoteric, potentially lethal factors impinge on your life every day.
You can’t “do your own research” to figure out whether all that stuff is safe and sound. Sure, you might be able to figure out whether a contractor’s assurances about a new steel joist for your ceiling are credible, but after you do that, are you also going to independently audit the software in your car’s antilock brakes?
How about the nutritional claims on your food and the sanitary conditions in the industrial kitchen it came out of? If those turn out to be inadequate, are you going to be able to validate the medical advice you get in the ER when you show up at 3AM with cholera? While you’re trying to figure out the #HIPAAWaiver they stuck in your hand on the way in?
40 years ago, Ronald Reagan declared war on “the administrative state,” and “government bureaucrats” have been the favored bogeyman of the American right ever since. Even if Steve Bannon hasn’t managed to get you to froth about the “Deep State,” there’s a good chance that you’ve griped about red tape from time to time.
Not without reason, mind you. The fact that the government
can make good rules doesn’t mean it
will. When we redid our kitchen this year, the city inspector added a bunch of arbitrary electrical outlets to the contractor’s plans in places where neither we, nor any future owner, will every need them.
But the answer to bad regulation isn’t
no regulation. During the same kitchen reno, our contractor discovered that at some earlier time, someone had installed our kitchen windows without the accompanying vapor-barriers. In the decades since, the entire structure of our kitchen walls had rotted out. Not only was the entire front of our house one good earthquake away from collapsing – there were two half rotted verticals supporting the whole thing – but replacing the rotted walls added more than $10k to the project.
In other words, the problem isn’t
too much regulation, it’s
the wrong regulation. I want our city inspectors to make sure that contractors install vapor barriers, but to not demand superfluous electrical outlets.
Which raises the question: where do regulations come from? How do we get them right?
ALT