Bureaucrats and Committees

Mark Styen writes about his kid's chocolate Easter eggs being seized at the border.

When you have people on a committee that is supposed to do something there is a great danger that they might do something.

The great problem with government bureaucrats is not that they are lazy but that they insist on doing things.

Now we have a report that the government is stopping children from bringing chocolate eggs back with them from Canada. It seems that there are small toys inside that could be a choking hazard. The rest of the children of the world seem to be bright enough to be able to eat the chocolate egg without scarfing down the little inside along with it but not the in US.

This is part of the reason that it is not sufficient to change the laws under which an agency operates, you have to kill it. You have to kill it because if you don’t the people will still be there and they will still have to justify their existence and that will still require making rules to make the world safer (or healthier or smarter or greener or whatever).

That is why you must use a hatchet rather than a scalpel. The scalpel leaves enough for it to grow back. Only the hatchet can slice through the trunk and prevent it from just growing back. The scalpel only removes leaves and it just grows back again next season, different leaves but same obstruction. It may even come back more resistant to the procedure you used before.

We have the FDA and three other agencies in charge of protecting children from dangerous foods (I am sure there are many more that are involved in some way) and they have the terrible problem that most of the obvious problems have been solved, at least the ones that can be solved by making a rule for some company to follow, which are the only kind that are politically easy for the organization to make. Other problems involve things that depend on the behavior and choices of parents, who are citizens and voters and might either a) object if they are ordered to do something that they don’t want to do or b) ignore the rule because the are too incompetent to do what is in their own best interests lest alone the best interests of their children. So the organizations go on justifying their existence by issuing orders to the entities to which it can issue orders, manufactures and border guards.

Hatchet time.