Is Government is Another Word for Incompetent?

By Rich Kozlovich

My personal motto is De Omnibus Dubitandum, (Everything is to be questioned) and as it turns out, I have a lot of questions.  Here's one that's a bit thought provoking....at least I think it is.  How many government employees, bureaucrats, boards, commissions, agencies or elected officials picked Microsoft to be a winner?  None!  

Government isn't very good at picking winners and losers.  Market analysts devote themselves to trying to find the winners before they become winners, and winners that will become losers, and don't get it right a lot.  Why would we expect government bureaucrats to do better? 

However government isn't necessarily that good at "making" winners either, even while rigging the game through taxes, subsidies and regulations.  When one takes a look at all the 'green' companies that have fallen into the precipice of bankruptcy, to the tune of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, one has to conclude that government can't even seem to "make" winners competently,  even with all the artificial mandates they've failed to make ‘green’ companies successful.

The fact that government doesn’t govern well should automatically force us to ask why we would expect it to administer anything involving business with any lesser degree of incompetence. (Thought provoking verbiage there, don’t you think?)

This brings me to an article by Jim Powell dealing with the real history and reality of what has been touted as a ‘jewel’ of success of the New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Authority! The truth is somewhat different. Jim Powell is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and is the author of FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression and Bully Boy: The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy, both of which thoroughly exposes the failure of "progressivism",  originally wrote an article in March of 2009 appearing in Reason, entitled How Big Government Infrastructure Projects Go Wrong. It is no less profound today (perhaps more so) than it was then.

[The Tennessee Valley Authority] was heralded as a program to build dams that would control floods, facilitate navigation, lift people out of poverty, and help America recover from the Great Depression. Yet the reality is that the TVA probably flooded more land than it protected; much of the navigation it has facilitated involves barges of coal for coal-fired power plants; people receiving TVA-subsidized electricity have increasingly lagged behind neighbors who did not; and the TVA's impact on the Great Depression was negligible. The TVA morphed into America's biggest monopoly, dominating an 80,000 square mile region with 8.8 million people—for all practical purposes, it is a bureaucratic kingdom subject to neither public nor private controls……… 

On top of that, the TVA is exempt from federal antitrust laws and many federal environmental regulations. It's also exempt from some 165 laws and regulations in Alabama and hundreds more laws and regulations in other states in which it operates…….. 

TVA "has the poorest safety record with [nuclear] reactors." …Tennessee coal-fired plant, the dike of a 40-acre holding pond broke, spilling as much as a billion gallons of coal sludge with elevated levels of arsenic. The sludge covered some 300 acres up to six feet deep, damaging homes and wrecking a train. This spill reportedly was much bigger than the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker that went aground in Alaska...

Did you know any of that? If not, do we think.... perhaps... .just perhaps.... we should be asking why? The TVA has always been touted as an example of how government can do wonderful things for society, yet that is abundantly false.

Where is all of this going?  It lays intellectual foundation to justify the position there's a huge difference between businesses and businesses, and their needs, wants and desires juxtapositioned with big government corruption and incompetence based on the seriously flawed ideology of leftism in all it's manifestations.

Big government and big business aren't necessarily on the side of business in general, or even on the nation's side.   

Over the years I involved myself in defending the pesticide manufacturing, distribution and application industries against unwarranted legislation, foolish policies, stifling regulations and completely idiot philosophies, such as 'green pest control'.  I came to realize that as allies, the large companies and the large chemical manufacturers, are at best leaky vessels as allies.

The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act are being used in ways that the Congress never intended when they voted on it, and Members of Congress openly say so, and yet I've seen corporations take the side of destructive regulations under those acts.  Many times based on fraudulent data creating false scares over Colony Collapse Disorder, Pollinator Protection Act, and the Sixth Mass Extinction, and these frauds are just a few examples, with all the folly of the Precautionary Principle, which is the foundation for all this junk science.

We've seen pesticide manufacturers doing things and taking positions that seem incomprehensible, and supported by industry trade associations. We're seeing big corporations going insane over the frauds involving Global Warming, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion clabber, Vaccination Mandates, and every leftist insanity that's come down the pike, all of which have been shown to be fraudulent and as destructive as a lava flow.  Even after we see the negative consequences of these actions, we find they continue to promote these failed destructive policies.  We see government agencies piling on regulations with absolutely no clue as to the end result, except it's costing Americans 1.9 trillion dollars a year, literally leading the nation into dystopia. 

There is a reason I have chosen, De Omnibus Dubitandum, "Everything is to be questioned" as my personal motto. Mostly because I have read a history book or two, and when you do that three things become abundantly clear.  

• People will always be people.  
• People, like nations, will act in their own best interests at the expense of everyone else.  
• The patterns of life will keep repeating over and over again.

But in order to see the patterns we must start reading the history of....everything! Without that we fail in defining reality, resulting in failing to have of clarity of  thought.  Without definition and clarity, we fail in understanding.  Without understanding we just fail, and will continue down the path of folly and destruction. 

As my final thought.  

I have been absolutely assured by close friends, for whom I have great personal affection, there is absolutely no such thing as a conspiracy.  However, between me and Joe Biden, they're now having serious doubts about that, and perhaps defining government as another word for incompetent is being too generous.