Howard, a New York lawyer and founder of a group called Common Good, starts off with anecdotes showing how law prevents problems from being sensibly solved.
A bridge blocking New York’s harbor from the newest supertankers can’t be elevated without 47 permits from 19 government agencies and environmental groups will bring lawsuits at multiple stages.
A lifeguard is fired for saving a man outside his zone of the beach. A community soup kitchen was shut down because it served potluck meals and had no kitchen to be inspected. Day care centers have to offer two sets of blocks with at least 10 blocks a set (who counts them each day?).
You get the idea. You’ve almost certainly encountered this sort of thing in your daily life. “Legal rigidity trumps everything,” Howard writes. “Law has crowded out the ability to be practical or fair.”
You want to make government work better? Make it smaller, reduce the scope of its responsibilities, and eliminate as many agencies/bureaucrats/regulations as possible. And while we’re at it, consider prosecuting some of those environmental groups under RICO statutes. Many of them are in the shake-down racket.
When viewed as ‘central control’, it’s fundamentally NP-Hard. Which happens to highlight a reason for federalism’s usefulness.
1) A 10% growth in both ‘thing to be done’ and ‘people to do it’ somehow -always- ends up with insufficient ‘people to do it.’
2) It has the wonderful ‘computational explosion’ property.
It’s the difference between setting out guidelines, and trying for complete control of the field. One is possible. The other has no upper boundary in complexity.
When trying to make laws, it’s almost always impossible to craft a law that covers all reasonable circumstances – especially if it’s a far reaching law. The further the law reaches down into society and/or the economy, the less the law will cover all reasonable circumstances.
Abominations like Obama-cide are doomed because it attempts to manage and control 1/6th of the economy.
So then what doe the stalwarts in Washington do when they realize that, during the first go-around, they were unable to think of all the consequences?
Why they make MORE laws. To try and cover the unthought-of consequences.
And again since the system is to frightfully complex that means they are unlikely to think of the consequences of the second law(s) – which can not only bring new unwanted consequences but even mess up the original law.
So you have a thorough mess.
Classic case:
Government Audits Reveal Vast ObamaCare Failures
Accountability: Two new audits reveal failures in ObamaCare on a scale even we didn’t think possible, with unresolved discrepancies, rules violations and technology problems that expose taxpayers to massive overpayments.
In the first of a series of ObamaCare audits, the Health and Human Services inspector general found 2.9 million “inconsistencies” in applications submitted to the federal HealthCare.gov exchange in the first five months of open enrollment.
In other words, the Social Security numbers, income, family size, citizenship or other information applicants provided didn’t match existing government data. Some 1.3 million of the problems involved citizenship, and an additional million involved income, the IG said.
Worse, the IG found HHS was unable to resolve 2.6 million of these discrepancies because the ObamaCare “eligibility system was not fully operational.” This means the government “cannot ensure that an applicant meets each of the eligibility requirements for enrollment” or that they’re getting the right tax subsidies.
How huge are these numbers? Consider that only 6 million had filled out applications by the end of February and just 2.6 million had enrolled. And of the 300,000 problems the HHS was capable of resolving, it had managed to do so for only 10,000.
Meanwhile, the 11 state-run exchanges had a total of 422,772 problems — equal to 34% of the applications they’d received. These states didn’t say how many of these had been resolved.
If that wasn’t bad enough, a separate IG report found the federal exchange and two state exchanges didn’t have adequate internal controls to make sure they were protecting taxpayers from fraud and abuse.
Looking at just 45 randomly selected applications, the analysis found cases where income data were wrong, Social Security numbers hadn’t been checked, citizenship or legal status hadn’t been verified and information was entered incorrectly.
The IG said that, as a result, the exchanges had limited ability “to prevent the use of inaccurate or fraudulent information.”
Oh, and the government apparently hasn’t been properly reconciling its enrollment numbers with insurance companies to account for dropouts and cancellations — casting more doubt on enrollment numbers.
If ObamaCare were a private company, you can bet its executives would be facing criminal charges. Instead, Obama and the press are cheering ObamaCare as a great success.
Man dominates man to his injury. No human form of government will ever change this, although some are better than others it doesn’t mean we should settle for smaller tyranny. We are going to see more extreme examples because subtlety isn’t working. Soon it will be undeniable.
Obama isn’t the last of his line. Nor are others around the world. How many have gotten away with assassinating opponents? The IRS scandal is almost as bad and politics is proving impotent in dealing with it (although I retain some hope.)
How bad does it have to get before people understand it will never work in any form?
Howard, a New York lawyer and founder of a group called Common Good, starts off with anecdotes showing how law prevents problems from being sensibly solved.
A bridge blocking New York’s harbor from the newest supertankers can’t be elevated without 47 permits from 19 government agencies and environmental groups will bring lawsuits at multiple stages.
A lifeguard is fired for saving a man outside his zone of the beach. A community soup kitchen was shut down because it served potluck meals and had no kitchen to be inspected. Day care centers have to offer two sets of blocks with at least 10 blocks a set (who counts them each day?).
You get the idea. You’ve almost certainly encountered this sort of thing in your daily life. “Legal rigidity trumps everything,” Howard writes. “Law has crowded out the ability to be practical or fair.”
You want to make government work better? Make it smaller, reduce the scope of its responsibilities, and eliminate as many agencies/bureaucrats/regulations as possible. And while we’re at it, consider prosecuting some of those environmental groups under RICO statutes. Many of them are in the shake-down racket.
When viewed as ‘central control’, it’s fundamentally NP-Hard. Which happens to highlight a reason for federalism’s usefulness.
1) A 10% growth in both ‘thing to be done’ and ‘people to do it’ somehow -always- ends up with insufficient ‘people to do it.’
2) It has the wonderful ‘computational explosion’ property.
It’s the difference between setting out guidelines, and trying for complete control of the field. One is possible. The other has no upper boundary in complexity.
When trying to make laws, it’s almost always impossible to craft a law that covers all reasonable circumstances – especially if it’s a far reaching law. The further the law reaches down into society and/or the economy, the less the law will cover all reasonable circumstances.
Abominations like Obama-cide are doomed because it attempts to manage and control 1/6th of the economy.
So then what doe the stalwarts in Washington do when they realize that, during the first go-around, they were unable to think of all the consequences?
Why they make MORE laws. To try and cover the unthought-of consequences.
And again since the system is to frightfully complex that means they are unlikely to think of the consequences of the second law(s) – which can not only bring new unwanted consequences but even mess up the original law.
So you have a thorough mess.
Classic case:
Government Audits Reveal Vast ObamaCare Failures
Accountability: Two new audits reveal failures in ObamaCare on a scale even we didn’t think possible, with unresolved discrepancies, rules violations and technology problems that expose taxpayers to massive overpayments.
In the first of a series of ObamaCare audits, the Health and Human Services inspector general found 2.9 million “inconsistencies” in applications submitted to the federal HealthCare.gov exchange in the first five months of open enrollment.
In other words, the Social Security numbers, income, family size, citizenship or other information applicants provided didn’t match existing government data. Some 1.3 million of the problems involved citizenship, and an additional million involved income, the IG said.
Worse, the IG found HHS was unable to resolve 2.6 million of these discrepancies because the ObamaCare “eligibility system was not fully operational.” This means the government “cannot ensure that an applicant meets each of the eligibility requirements for enrollment” or that they’re getting the right tax subsidies.
How huge are these numbers? Consider that only 6 million had filled out applications by the end of February and just 2.6 million had enrolled. And of the 300,000 problems the HHS was capable of resolving, it had managed to do so for only 10,000.
Meanwhile, the 11 state-run exchanges had a total of 422,772 problems — equal to 34% of the applications they’d received. These states didn’t say how many of these had been resolved.
If that wasn’t bad enough, a separate IG report found the federal exchange and two state exchanges didn’t have adequate internal controls to make sure they were protecting taxpayers from fraud and abuse.
Looking at just 45 randomly selected applications, the analysis found cases where income data were wrong, Social Security numbers hadn’t been checked, citizenship or legal status hadn’t been verified and information was entered incorrectly.
The IG said that, as a result, the exchanges had limited ability “to prevent the use of inaccurate or fraudulent information.”
Oh, and the government apparently hasn’t been properly reconciling its enrollment numbers with insurance companies to account for dropouts and cancellations — casting more doubt on enrollment numbers.
If ObamaCare were a private company, you can bet its executives would be facing criminal charges. Instead, Obama and the press are cheering ObamaCare as a great success.
Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/070114-707080-government-audits-find-huge-obamacare-failures-.htm#ixzz36JwsyFP4
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Man dominates man to his injury. No human form of government will ever change this, although some are better than others it doesn’t mean we should settle for smaller tyranny. We are going to see more extreme examples because subtlety isn’t working. Soon it will be undeniable.
Obama isn’t the last of his line. Nor are others around the world. How many have gotten away with assassinating opponents? The IRS scandal is almost as bad and politics is proving impotent in dealing with it (although I retain some hope.)
How bad does it have to get before people understand it will never work in any form?