Forest, meet trees. Trees, this is forest.
May 24, 2010
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Posted by Michael S. Langston
One of the more frustrating things I find when engaging others in political discussions, is that some people seemingly have either an unwillingness or inability to contemplate how too much of a good thing can still be bad.
I say frustrating, because it’s intuitive to understand this. As Paracelsus was quoted saying centuries ago:
“Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.”
But even without that thought, it seems as if examples are around us daily. The easiest one to spot is the current tax code. Looking at individual deductions, it’s easy to see why most exist. Deductions for raising children or owning a home or small business tax cuts for those hiring or charitable deductions…..etc, etc, etc – They all seem innocuous by themselves. Even if you disagree with some specifics, the arguments seem valid.
Yet you transition from this basic idea of rewarding people for certain actions through the tax code, to today and you end up with (here):
…the current tax code is 60K pages of government sponsored corruption where the normal citizen or even the IRS agent has little idea exactly what all 60K pages means together, but special interests, nonprofits, businesses, and others all work to make the code a little better for themselves. (Freedomworks – Top Ten Reasons to Scrape the Code here)….
The criminal & regulatory codes are no better. Their infinite complexity and shear volume, promotes the same corrupt, rent seeking behavior (ever wonder why health care reform is 1600 pages?).
This complexity inherent in all these laws and regulations creates not only rent seeking behavior, but also makes it easier for those in power who wish to abuse others through the system to be able to do so. You see, once the system has become so complex, then even the average citizen runs the very real risk of unintentionally being on the other side of the law. When enough people are on the other side of the law, then you get selective enforcement.
But when you’re a Senator and there are potential political points to score…. the trees are just too pretty to worry about that whole forest thingy, so you add more to it by introducing legislation to ban a specific crib because of 32 infant deaths since 2000.
Even on the merits, this law isn’t needed as the 32 deaths weren’t all by the same failure in the drop-down crib (via government’s own report) and no one has yet made any claim that the design itself is the reason for the deaths:
…CPSC has also received reports of 20 other drop side incidents, 12 of which involved the drop side detaching in a corner of the crib. In two of these incidents, a child became entrapped. One child suffered bruising from the entrapment. There are five reports of children falling out of the cribs due to drop side detachment. One child suffered a broken arm as a result of the fall.
In addition, CPSC has received 8 reports of mattress support detachment in these cribs. Due to the space created by the detachment, three children became entrapped between the crib frame and the sagging mattress and four children crawled out of the crib. There was one report of cuts and bruises….
What they found was this was actually the products from one single manufacturer which is now out of business. The report goes further to note:
…Due to the fact that Generation 2 went out of business in 2005, CPSC has limited information about the cribs. Although CPSC does not know the total number of units distributed or the years of production, it is believed that there were more than 500,000 of these cribs sold to consumers…..
Which means, that even out of the number of products sold by this one company, the government doesn’t have any real information on such things as failure rates. 32 out of 500K is a small failure rate (assuming all failures can be attributed to product failure versus other causes like improper installation). Combine that with the knowledge that these numbers are guesses and only include one single company, our Senator should think of herself as being on shaky ground.
The calculus for any potential opponents however is obvious: lots of potential downside when being labeled as pro-infant death and very little upside as few people seem to care.
So for now, while the trees might know the forest exists and vice versa, until voters are able and willing to contemplate the difference, we will simply continue to lose sight of one in favor of the other.
Categories: Critical Thinking, Legislation, Politics, Quotations, Regulation/Deregulation
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Tags: Critical Thinking, Legislation, Politics, Regulation, Taxes
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