To me there is not a very large difference between "kindness & handouts" and The reason I shared this is because to me, it represents a line of thinking I keep seeing more and more on the left: deregulating to enable growth and progress. This is/was in my mind a sternly right-wing idea. Deregulation still is, but I hear calls for reforming regulation more and more from the left, not the right. As a government bureaucrat myself now, I'm noticing I'm becoming more receptive to the idea that a rainforest of well intentioned regulations can ultimately make it too hard, too expensive, or even impossible to build things or make things work. We have been adding hurdles and my impression is that it wouldn't hurt less than the status quo to have the pendulum swing the other way for a while. I'm not under the illusion that it will reduce grift and corruption. The DOGE bulldozer is arguably the purest distillation of said corruption. Now I'm also not blind to the advantages that have been made in the past decades through regulatory improvements/additions. I am however keenly aware (slash worried) that we have lost focus away from what gets us to better results and instead have put too much focus on improving the process instead. The price per mile of new rail (from high speed to local tram tracks) varies wildly. It's not just because of corruption, not just because of technical differences, but for a significant part it is the regulatory process that takes an ungodly amount of paperwork to wade through. An example over here is the Friesenbrücke. A single, rural railway bridge got hit by a cargo ship in 2015, the primary railway corridor between the Netherlands and Germany in that area. After eight years it's demolished. The estimated date of finishing construction is this year, so more than a decade after it was hit. It was first estimated to cost €48M, later €66M; now, the total costs have ballooned to well over €200M. The slowness and expensiveness was because it had to comply with more laws and requirements than a simple replacement. On the one hand, that's great, now you've accidentally made this bridge future-proof. On the other hand, it is now par for the course now that these kinds of projects balloon in time and money. We shrug and go "oh well that's just what infrastructure is these days". But the more expensive it is to do anything, the less we do of it, there's no way around it. We used to have multiple large rail projects ongoing at any time. December marked the first time the Netherlands has zero new rail being built for a while - everything we do is replacing or removing existing infrastructure. I think the two are related.The answer to a politics of scarcity is a politics of abundance, a politics that asks what it is that people really need and then organizes government and markets to make sure there is enough of it.
That's bait'n'switch, though. He can say "politics of abundance" but his whole schtick is "let's deregulate everything and run it like the place with no building codes." i've bitched about the simplistic YIMBY impression of building codes before - the general millennial/GenZ impression of building codes is that "they are things that prevent me from getting what I want." Fuckin'A bubba they exist so that your KIDS can still get the shit THEY will want. Look - wanna see what a steering column looked like when I grew up? It's perfect in its execution. You put on your lap belt so that you will pivot into it with all the leverage available. The spokes holding the rim are phenolic on a thin metal armature so they will break away with minimal force. And the structure of the device is a piece of inch and a half steel pipe held in place by structural reinforcement and a u-joint capable of withstanding a ton of force. If you want to stake a driver like he's Nosferatu, you can't beat a '60s era Ford/Chevy/Dodge/Volkswagen/Volvo/Everything every fucking car was like this. let's deregulate some shit tho I grew up BREATHING more lead than everyone was whingeing about in Flint. Like, by a factor of 5. We all did. Asbestos? I HAZ it. A friend had giant sheets of the stuff. But we were talking building codes. Hey, hey, I have an example there, too, who knew. See where it says "A"? That's a culvert in my 1970 electrical as-built. Back when the house was put in, there was a 24" culvert under the road, which was elevated compared to the properties around it. This is rather novel as the road is no longer elevated - they backfilled six feet of dirt on either side back in '86 (and buried my electrical box). And what was a culvert on the other side of the street is now a lawn. Wanna see something awesome? That blue line in the middle of the frame is a "drainage basin" boundary. My property is the big square to the left of it. You'll notice that stormwater goes every direction away from my property... but that culvert is nowhere in evidence. Now - my city considers my property to include a 'wetland.' It's not demarcated as such but we all know that were I to ask the state, they'd go "yup, wetland" immediately. That's because there's a permanent year-round pond in it. No bugs! Relatively clean water! But for a drainage basin, and a "critical wetland" (their words) it's awfully mysterious. But last Thursday I continued my War Against The Blackberries and found the source of the Nile: That's after digging at it for 20 minutes and getting out some of the purest clay I've ever seen... 'cuz all the sand has been filtered out over 50 years. Dunno what the other side looks like, don't know where it goes, but that's what a 24" conduit forgotten to time looks like. What's super-cool is after digging it out we got a bunch of rain, and now half my lake is full of muddy water. half of it. Because water pressure is now blowing out a mountain of clay and emptying it into my pond. I'll be at it for years, I imagine, but slowly and steadily the drainage in that "drainage basin" is going to actually drain. LET'S PUT SOME REGULATION ON IT When I first found the Source of the Nile I took a picture of it and walked it down to city hall. I'm on a first name basis with the city planner by now and I wanted to show him how bright red it was. "That's a lot of iron bacteria," he said. I agreed. I asked what interest the City had in my un-fucking my culvert because it seemed to me that while it's a wetland, it's in everyone's best interests for me to practice some stewardship. He looked at me and gestured me over to the "official" window. Yep, it's that kinda place. He there informed me that while he is legally responsible for the shoreline, anything that is ever covered by water is considered a "navigable waterway" and is the purvey of the state. My move is to (A) call the state, wait for them to get back to me, find out if they consider it a local, state or national jurisdictional issue, and if state, wait ten months, fill out at least eight forms, get a 90 day window to respond to all requests and carry out any work I may need to carry out or if national, hope the person responsible for addressing my request hasn't been laid off by the Trump administration. If they say it's local, I can do whatever the fuck I want, he only cares about the shoreline. "Or," I said, "maybe I'll find the solution I need without doing anything." "If I don't know about it I can't report it," he said. HERE'S THE THING, THOUGH That neighborhood floods. And it floods because there's no flood control. And there's no flood control because the culvert was buried in 1986. And if I run it up the flagpole, this discrepancy is going to come to light and probably unleash a ten year bajillion dollar flood remediation extravaganza. Or it would, if the agencies responsible for this shit hadn't been so starved for cash that it now takes ten months to get an answer to "can I clean out my culvert." The regulations are pretty clear - so long as I'm not running a hydro plant I'm good to go. But this is an area that should get reviewed. But it won't. Because here's the move: 1) Decry the situation 2) Regulate the shit out of it 3) Starve the shit out of the regulators 4) Declare that business is the only solution Do you see where the bait'n'switch happens? Do you see Ezra Klein's part in it? Everyone hates the IRS. They take away your money. The solution for a fairer IRS is, ironically, more IRS agents. Then they won't go after the easy prey they'll go after the big game. Picking up nickels? That's easy. Robbing a bank? that requires planning and for a generation we've been arguing that the way to success is make sure no government agency has the manpower to do more than pick up nickels and then we bitch about how regulations are bad. I see your Friesenbrucke and raise you a Key Bridge.To me there is not a very large difference between "kindness & handouts" and
