Home of Today's Common Sense

Published Brownsville Herald 1/18/2004
We are beginning an election year and the discussion has started as to the path to follow to more and better employment and a better economy.
We are seeing the economy get better but the improvement in the number of new jobs does not appear to have done the same. The aspirants to political office are trying to blame the opposition; others say that many workers do not really want to work because the potential loss of public benefits is more than the gain achieved by working. Then there are those that blame the social influences and the educational system for diminishing the competitive nature and traditional social values resulting in the loss of the traditional work ethic.
Some and possibly all of those are contributing factors, as well as many others. Most approaches have been to focus on a highly politically visible instance, create a false sense of total blame for it and then fix the perceived problem. I have seen over and over that when something goes wrong or even a bump in the night, our public servants (elected or appointed) and managers of all sorts, try to place the blame on some some set of circumstances, then create a new law, regulation or practice to prevent this from ever happening again. Forget that there are probably a ton of rules and regulations already that are not enforced and likely forgotten. This is so that the individual can escape criticism, and be seen as doing something – anything.
The trouble is that some things go wrong regardless of all the best efforts, because not everyone on the planet has the same interests and some folks just choose a different direction. Granted there are occasions that some problems are endemic of a larger issue but those are far fewer than the responses we have seen.
Recently, Ernesto Velarde, President of CODEM, a Maquilladora Organization in Mexico, was quoted in the “World of Opportunity” supplement to the Brownsville Herald, in an article entitled “Mexico Adapts”. He hit the issue directly and provided incredible insight with the quote:
“Mexico, earned a reputation for over taxing and over-regulating….The new rules that popped up were well founded…..The goal was intended to put an end to the abuses of the system. But instead the laws ended up hurting the good and bad .. alike…”
This concept of unintended consequences can apply to all government levels in the U.S. as well as around the world. One need only look around at some of the less prosperous countries and see that whenever there are more and more regulations and control the economy declines and foments corruption. Freedom is what brought us our past successes; the declining freedom we are bringing on ourselves is beginning to suffocate us.
I think that our public officials need to take these thoughts to heart and reform how the public business is done before our good intentions and political correctness “corrects” us into even less jobs.