No, this post isn’t about the movie by the same name. This post is about the surprisingly astute commentary by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. For my more sensitive readers, please forgive the name of the video and periodic colorful language (Jon’s writers, not my idea). At about the three-minute mark, Stewart begins addressing the response from Washington to the BP spill in the Gulf.
Here’s the video:
I’m not really a fan, but I have been thinking lately about how complicated things are, and discussed it in my last post. Complexity of itself isn’t the problem at all, however. The problem is that our government in Washington is operating a little like the circus performer who spins plates on poles. Spinning a couple of plates isn’t such a challenge. But as more and more plates are added, the performer trying to keep track of all of those spinning plates just can’t keep up. Before long, plates start hitting the ground.
As I’ve noted before, we have a responsibility problem, just like the fellow spinning the plates. People and units of government have allowed too much consolidation in distant spheres of government. A Republic simply can’t do as much as ours is trying to do. It can try, but it will fail, and sometimes fail spectacularly.
There’s a solution to the mess in the Gulf, but it’s not complicated in a big-picture sense. The engineering, the physics, perhaps those things are complicated. The answer may be that, indeed, the government in Washington is the proper place for the oversight of deep-water drilling and all the risks that accompany that business. It’s entirely possible that the communities most affected by drilling activities (both positive and negative) should instead be the ones with oversight responsibility, perhaps even jointly in some sort of cooperative consortium. Surely, as the benefits (in the form of economic activity) and the risks (in the form of consequences of errors) inure to these communities, their interest must be greater than that of any bureaucracy in Washington.
After all, the current paradigm is failing time and again. Consider the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose mission is to “protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” Consider the offices of the Securities and Exchange Commission while you’re at it:
The gleaming headquarters of the SEC
Pretty impressive, but it hasn’t stopped markets from being volatile, stopped fraud, or helped a business in need of capital to make a payroll. The 11 district offices, the staff of 3,500 (all at a cost of roughly $1 billion per year) and the cooperation of other federal departments and agencies – none of these things has made it any easier to protect investors, or maintain fair, orderly and efficient markets. At some point, don’t we have to ask? Isn’t this the elephant in the room that no one has mentioned until now? Which is to say: if an organization can’t do its job, why does it exist at all? When is it fair to make a decision to close the shop based upon an extraordinarily bad return on investment?
