As we wade through the “world that cried wolf” dumpster fire called COVID-19, partisans on the left see it as another opportunity to smear the President. I’m sure Mr. Trump is thinking ‘Bring It.’ Because the government is to blame but not in the way Democrat’s imagine.
Related: DHHS’ Own Numbers Show Coronavirus Probably Peaked in New Hampshire in February
The bureaucracy is the single most significant barrier to everything in America.
An endless mountain of regulations had to be bypassed with Executive Orders at the Federal level and Emergency Orders at the state level. Rules that only exist because Legislators gave away that authority to bureaucrats. Infamously defined during the Obama years with the term “the secretary shall.”
This phrase appears thousands of times in “laws” whose purpose is to both wash the hands of lawmakers and shield them from responsibility and accountability. A practice upon which much light has been shed in recent weeks. Barriers to speedy development, innovation, conversion, transition, production, and deployment of [insert name of desperately needed thing here].
Walls, unlike those along the border, erected by the progressive state which chief executives have had to leap, go-around, or knockdown to get things done.
Drew Cline at the Josiah Bartlett for Public Policy outlines the problem well, here.
In normal times, government prevents a lot of this innovation and cooperation by requiring permission before people can enter the market with a good or service. (Think of the police shutting down children’s lemonade stands.)
Why weren’t people making face masks for doctors, nurses, and patients before? Because they aren’t allowed to.
Nearly every question to the problems associated with slow response can be answered with four simple words. ‘Because they aren’t allowed to.’
But why?
Legislatures off-loaded decision-making power to paper-pushers whose primary purpose is not the mandate of their department. Agencies’ prime directive is to grow their budget and the scope of their relevance. They do this through rulemaking. Taking not just the permissions granted by the law to regulate but the spaces in between the words where their hands are not explicitly tied by the law.
Entire industries that can easily re-tool or innovate in a few days to respond to a sudden need must wait weeks or months for approval, or they can ignore the restriction.
A distiller in Vermont got to the heart of the issue when he told the Valley News after transitioning to hand sanitizer production, “Legally, we kind of weren’t supposed to be doing this, but no one cares right now.”
The opposite presumption has come to be called “permissionless innovation.” Duke University economist Michael Munger defines it as “a strong presumption in favor of allowing experimentation with new technologies and with new business platforms that use those technologies.”
It is, Munger says, the most important concept in political economy.
As he explains, “delays in processing ‘applications’ for permission to experiment sharply curtail the types and frequency of experiments that are possible.”
If Congress is looking for a culprit or a cure to the “response,” they can begin with how congress writes laws and ends with the failure of Congressional oversight to limit how agencies strangle innovation. Which, sadly, is the point.
The Deep State is a progressive construct birthed by Left-Leaning politicians (in both parties) who seek to advance central planning as the cure for what ails us. Their solution to every problem – including the COVID-19 response) is to make it more difficult. But we can see with our own eyes the lesson we need to learn.
The coronavirus pandemic is helping to expose many flaws built into our existing regulatory regime. A lot of regulations that prevent innovation and market cooperation are simply unnecessary.
If the emergency is exposing needless state regulations in health care, imagine how many there are in all the other fields the state regulates.
We need to elect politicians who, if they love us, will set us free to innovate and solve problems with less state and federal oversight, not more. Every day, not just by an Executive or Emergency Order. We do still have that power but are we (all in this together) prepared to exercise it? Or will we, as the State would prefer, defer more to their will and not less?
