Great Teens, Dumb Politicos
Bensblurb # 536 April 5, 2010
Great Teens?? YES !
Denzel Washington’s fine movie performance in The Great Debaters as a coach for black kids in the 1930s was my only frame of reference as I agreed to help judge a homeschoolers’ debate contest this past weekend at Stafford’s Mount Ararat Baptist Church.
In a contest involving short extemporaneous speeches, I sat there in awe at the knowledge of the seven youthful competitors. Each one had to choose among only three, previously undisclosed, current topics and then was given 30 minutes to prepare a 5-minute speech about it. In their prep time (barred from using a laptop or Google), they could reference only their own prepared indexes on likely news topics of the past month. You would never have known from their subsequent erudition that they had been restricted at all. (In contrast, Obama was taking questions in Charlotte recently when a woman said she was paying too much in taxes; his answer took 17 minutes.)
It’s said there are several hundred homeschooled students here in Stafford Co., Va. Nationally they constitute roughly 4 percent of the student population through high school.
From what I saw, there’s still hope.
Ignorant Rage
Long ago, friends and I finagled to get a few words into a farm-law change that enabled us to print and distribute my ag agencies’ reports and leaflets independent of the mighty Government Printing Office’s Superintendent of Documents--which later got awfully mad at me until they realized those few words were law and hard to scrub. So we continued merrily down our independent way.
So it made me laugh when I read the following account of something similar on a much larger scale.
As Glenn Reynolds, in Instapundit, put it:
“...[R]ecent events suggest that it's not just the economy that regulators don't understand well enough -- it's also their own regulations.
This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation...Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them....So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.
They were also bad publicity...and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman...who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves...
Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But... Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation - well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.
In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created...Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb...But it's just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn't make much difference.
The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes 226 volumes.
No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer... We're governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can't help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system...helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don't know what they're doing.”
--Ben Blankenship
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Great Teens?? YES !
Denzel Washington’s fine movie performance in The Great Debaters as a coach for black kids in the 1930s was my only frame of reference as I agreed to help judge a homeschoolers’ debate contest this past weekend at Stafford’s Mount Ararat Baptist Church.
In a contest involving short extemporaneous speeches, I sat there in awe at the knowledge of the seven youthful competitors. Each one had to choose among only three, previously undisclosed, current topics and then was given 30 minutes to prepare a 5-minute speech about it. In their prep time (barred from using a laptop or Google), they could reference only their own prepared indexes on likely news topics of the past month. You would never have known from their subsequent erudition that they had been restricted at all. (In contrast, Obama was taking questions in Charlotte recently when a woman said she was paying too much in taxes; his answer took 17 minutes.)
It’s said there are several hundred homeschooled students here in Stafford Co., Va. Nationally they constitute roughly 4 percent of the student population through high school.
From what I saw, there’s still hope.
Ignorant Rage
Long ago, friends and I finagled to get a few words into a farm-law change that enabled us to print and distribute my ag agencies’ reports and leaflets independent of the mighty Government Printing Office’s Superintendent of Documents--which later got awfully mad at me until they realized those few words were law and hard to scrub. So we continued merrily down our independent way.
So it made me laugh when I read the following account of something similar on a much larger scale.
As Glenn Reynolds, in Instapundit, put it:
“...[R]ecent events suggest that it's not just the economy that regulators don't understand well enough -- it's also their own regulations.
This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation...Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them....So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.
They were also bad publicity...and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman...who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves...
Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But... Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation - well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.
In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created...Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb...But it's just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn't make much difference.
The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes 226 volumes.
No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer... We're governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can't help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system...helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don't know what they're doing.”
--Ben Blankenship
#############
posted by Ben Blankenship at
6:43 AM
