A few days ago, a friend made the usual denigrating comment about how incompetent “government” is and I made the same response I’ve been uttering for more than 40 years, “Since ‘government’ is us, that’s why ‘you always get the government you deserve.’” As usual, he blew me off without much thought (that reply almost always gets the same response) and we went on to fluffier subjects. It’s true though. Nobody gets to bitch about their government without deserving a substantial portion of the blame. I don’t care what kind of government you have, if you’re a citizen of that neighborhood, city, county, state, or nation, your government is a reflection of who you are, how much you care about your country and neighbors, and how much attention you pay to the direction all of those things are taking.
In the United States, if you have voted for any Republican Presidential candidate in the past 60 years, you’ve voted to dumb-down government at every level and you’ve mostly succeeded in that goal. From Reagan on, every Republican candidate almost without exception has argued that “government is the problem” and they have “worked” (abusing that term viciously) to break as many functional aspects of government as possible. The latest iteration of that model, President TacoTrump, is very likely to succeed in breaking everything at the federal level while Republicans at the state and local level are doing their best to equal that damage as far down the governmental pyramid as possible.
[If you are wearing your Big Kid Pants and are up to reading an actual book (or two) about who works (or worked) in the US federal government and what they do to keep the rest of us safe, healthy, and able to vote and have some influence on our destiny, I strongly recommend Michael Lewis’ The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy and Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service. Those books will not only inform you about what we’re giving up in this current disastrous moment in our history, but you’ll also have to suck up your disappointment in your own pointless life in comparison. Because, outside of medical professionals, public defenders, a rapidly vanishing percentage of “law enforcement” authorities, and firemen who don’t hose protestors, pretty much nobody else in society does anything as important as critical government services.]
Thirty years ago, I worked for a Colorado medical device manufacturer that had taken so many device design and manufacturing shortcuts that the $500M/year company was in the process of dissolving itself into a scrap pile of marginal patents for competitors to pick over. That process would take about 3 years, but early on FDA engineering inspectors prowled the company hallways like temporary employees. While some of the company employees were busy trying to shuffle and hide the various infractions and incompetency and corruption from the FDA inspectors, I regularly heard many of our engineers say, “thank god for the FDA” because they knew the outcomes of the problems the regulators were uncovering. In the early 90s, the US had a pretty robust FDA and most of the rest-of-the-world were far behind us in patient safety and medical device and drug regulation. Thanks to Republican voters bending over and taking it in the rear to benefit corporate executives, we’re trailing-edge today and our national failure during the COVID pandemic is a prime example of that outcome.
But as citizens and voters, this is the government we elected and the outcome we, apparently, wanted.
I have worked in semi-regulated to seriously-regulated industries for most of my career. I have yet to meet the classically described “lazy government employee” in my capacity as a design and manufacturing engineer, a field clinical engineer, a reliability assurance engineer, or even as a college instructor. And I worked with at least a few dozen of those government employees in every capacity of my career. I have, however, had plenty of experience with greedy, incompetent, vicious, useless, and flat-out evil corporate executives in EVERY job I’ve had. In fact, I have yet to experience a single CEO, COO, CFO, CIO, CTO, corporate president, vice-president, or even a director who demise wouldn’t have improved every aspect of the businesses they mismanaged. And I’ve suffered a few dozen of those useless zombies, too.
The difference between government and corporations is that individuals can change government. Corporations are, by design, idiotic and corrupt and they only thing that can keep them from gleefully destroying life on this planet is government regulation. The difference between incompetent government and a functioning, sustainable society is the citizens and their quality, moral values, and participation. Nothing points out the power of active, sentient citizens like the “3 ½% Rule”: “If you want to overthrow a dictator, resist an authoritarian regime, or create a movement that can change the national status quo, you don’t need half the country to join, you only need 3.5 percent of the population . . .” My favorite explanation of this newly discovered statistical fact is from my favorite podcast, “You Are Not So Smart #313.” If we can’t assemble 3 ½% of the population to fix the disaster we’re spirally into, we deserve every moment of misery that we’re going to experience.
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