Government Has Made America Inept
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2014/05/government_has_made_america_inept.html#commentsMay 14th, 2014 at 10:00 am by David Farrar
Philip K. Howard writes:
In February 2011, during a winter storm, a tree fell into a creek in Franklin Township, New Jersey, and caused flooding. The town was about to send a tractor in to pull the tree out when someone, probably the town lawyer, helpfully pointed out that it was a “class C-1 creek” and required formal approvals before any natural condition was altered. The flooding continued while town officials spent 12 days and $12,000 to get a permit to do what was obvious: pull the tree out of the creek.Government’s ineptitude is not news. But something else has happened in the last few decades. Government is making America inept. Other countries don’t have difficulty pulling a tree out of a creek. Other countries also have modern infrastructure, and schools that generally succeed, and better health care at little more than half the cost.Reforms, often embodied in hundreds of pages of new regulations, are tried constantly. But they only seem to make the problems worse. Political debate is so predictable that it’s barely worth listening to, offering ideology without practicality—as if our only choice, as comedian Jon Stewart put it, is that “government must go away completely—or we must be run by an incompetent bureaucracy.”The missing element in American government could hardly be more basic: No official has authority to make a decision. Law has crowded out the ability to be practical or fair. Mindless rigidity has descended upon the land, from the schoolhouse to the White House to, sometimes, your house. Nothing much works, because no one is free to make things work.Automatic law causes public failure. A system of detailed dictates is supposed to make government work better. Instead it causes failure.The simplest tasks often turn into bureaucratic ordeals. A teacher in Chicago who called the custodian to report a broken water fountain was chewed out because he didn’t follow “broken water fountain reporting procedures.” On the first day of school he was required to read to his students a list of disciplinary rules, including this one, just to start things off on the right foot: “You may be expelled for homicide.”
It would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so sad.
Budgets are out of control because government executives lack flexibility to shave here and there to make ends meet. Soon after his election, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo thought he had found an easy way to save $50 million when he learned that a large juvenile detention center was empty, with no prospects of use anytime soon. There it was, sitting upstate, with several dozen employees—doing nothing but costing taxpayers millions of dollars. But no one had the authority to close it down, not even the governor. There’s a New York law that prohibits closing down any facility with union employees without at least one year’s notice.
I look forward to Labour adopting this as policy!
Even matters of life and death are sometimes asked to yield to the rigid imperatives of a clear rule. In 2012, Florida lifeguard Tomas Lopez was fired for leaving his designated zone on the beach to rescue a drowning man just over the line. “On radio I heard Tommy saying ‘I’m going for a rescue but it’s out of our zone,’” said another lifeguard, who added that the “manager told him not to go and to call 911.” Lopez said he couldn’t just sit back, and was prepared to get fired, adding, “It wasn’t too much of an upset, because I had my morals intact.” After publicity about the incident, Lopez was offered his job back. He declined.
These are extreme examples, but they show why it is important to rely more on values and judgement than strict rules.
Let this be our motto: Just tell me the rules. In 2013, an elderly woman collapsed at an assisted living facility in Bakersfield, California, and a nurse called 911. The operator asked the nurse to try to revive the woman with CPR, but the nurse refused, saying it was against policy at that facility. “I understand if your boss is telling you, you can’t do it, but … as a human being … is there anybody that’s willing to help this lady and not let her die?” “Not at this time,” the nurse replied. During the seven-minute, sixteen-second call, the dispatcher continued to plead with the nurse: “Is there a gardener? Any staff, anyone who doesn’t work for you? Anywhere? Can we flag someone down in the street to help this lady? Can we flag a stranger down? I bet a stranger would help her.” By the time the ambulance arrived, the woman had died. The executive director of the facility defended the nurse on the basis that she had followed the rules: “In the event of a health emergency … our practice is to immediately call emergency medical personnel for assistance … That is the protocol we followed.”
Very sad.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/04/government-has-made-america-inept.htmla number of interesting comments after the break
Ryan Sproull (6,795 comments) says:
Just to play devil’s advocate here, what are the scenarios that this bureaucracy prevents that might otherwise occur?
For example, sure, $12,000 is spent fucking around about something we say is obvious: pull the tree out of the creek.
Let’s imagine a situation where there’s a tree stump in the way of something. Someone says, “The solution is obvious – chain it up to the tractor and rip it out. No need for expensive consent bureaucracy!” And it gets pulled out, but turns out the roots run down and around some gas lines, and the tractor rips up the gas lines along with the stump.
Obviously I’ve invented that scenario. I’m just saying that it’s very easy to point at the most ridiculous or worst consequences of something when its greatest successes are in the events that don’t occur.
Obviously I’ve invented that scenario. I’m just saying that it’s very easy to point at the most ridiculous or worst consequences of something when its greatest successes are in the events that don’t occur.
Nasim Taleb hypothesizes a similar scenario in The Black Swan. A US politician passes a law imposing stricter security regulations on domestic airlines, the law comes into effect on Sept 10 2001 and prevents the 9/11 attacks, the airlines are outraged by the pointless regulatory cost that’s been imposed on them by the government with no visible gain and fund the politicians’ opponent who defeats him in the next election.
gump (1,275 comments) says:
May 14th, 2014 at 10:38 am
FJR2010
manapp99
gump (1,275 comments) says:
May 14th, 2014 at 10:38 am
The problem isn’t just that there are rules, the problem is that people have been conditioned to follow them blindly.
It’s the same mentality that allowed the Holocaust to occur in an other otherwise civilised country.
I think it’s a mistake to simply talk about government here. If you look at those examples what you’re actually seeing is a culture where people have been told not to think for themselves, especially if it involves breaking rules set by the state, no matter how stupid or immoral. That feeds in from a whole range of factors that make up our society; education, parenting, media messages – culture.
The real question is whether the numbers of people like the lifeguard are being overwhelmed by the numbers of people like the nurse. Here in NZ I don’t think we’re at the tipping point towards mindless rule-following – yet. But elsewhere in the West, including the US …..?
Howard strikes me as the same kind of button pusher that John Stoessel is. Find an outrageous government excess or ineptitude, extrapolate it to the whole and make money selling a book to anti-government rubes. The corollary is that some banks tanked the economy by selling too many bad loans, therefore all banks are evil. Banks are killing the country.
Sure, there are too many inane government regulations, but the balance is you have ones that aren't. And the list of regulations you benefit from every day is far greater than the list of of silly ones. Would you like to go back to leaded gasoline, for instance? Would it be okay for companies to resume dumping PCB in rivers? Should we stop inspecting meat? Want to resume advertising cigarettes and booze to kids? Eliminate seat belts from cars?
It's a question of balance. I don't know whether we've gotten it right or not, but I'm pretty sure headline writers who say government has made American inept are full of s*&t.
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