"Doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting a different result each time is the surest way to guarantee that sooner or later a dinosaur is going to bite your ass."
- Gorak Einstein, one of Albert's ancient ancestors
One of the few things I like about having a problem is that it does provide an opportunity to rise to the challenge. At first, that may sound a little perverse to some but it really isn’t. How many of us don’t feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment for having met and overcome a challenge that was otherwise a problem we first thought insurmountable?
Sometimes we don’t succeed and I personally am less fond of those problems.
Nonetheless, problems exist and we have only three real options for dealing with them: do nothing, meet them head on or……………pretend to meet them head on by fixing something related that isn’t actually part of the problem.
We see a lot of that third option these days.
We see a lot of that third option these days.
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| Some problems are like T-Rex, big and scary |
Back in the days when the problem might have been that a Tyrannosaurus Rex had moved into the cave’s neighbourhood and was eating the livestock along with a few of your neighbours, you really only had a couple of options.
You could move the tribe to another area and hope the big guy didn’t follow you or you could gird up your loins, get the lads together and go out and kill Big Rex. Killing a couple of smaller dinosaurs or imposing new rules on the other folks in the cave really wouldn’t do much to keep the T-Rex from treating your clan like an all you could eat buffet.
You could move the tribe to another area and hope the big guy didn’t follow you or you could gird up your loins, get the lads together and go out and kill Big Rex. Killing a couple of smaller dinosaurs or imposing new rules on the other folks in the cave really wouldn’t do much to keep the T-Rex from treating your clan like an all you could eat buffet.
Unfortunately, that fuzzy thinking is too often the thinking that goes into problem resolution these days.
You see it all the time and it doesn’t matter how often those quasi-solutions fail, people are right back in there pitching them again even though they accomplished nothing the first, second or third time around.
Examples? Oh great. Now you want examples but fortunately I anticipated that and I happen to have a couple handy.
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| Former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin |
In Canada, our government is in the process of dismantling the Longun Registry which was a database of every legally owned rifle and shotgun in the country. It was established under the Paul Martin Liberal government a few years back in response to a shooting. Many think it was the response to a terrible shooting rampage at a college in Montreal but it wasn’t.
That tragic moment came and went with no government action. It was actually in response to the shooting of a young woman in Toronto who got caught in the crossfire between rival street gangs, none of whom were using either a rifle or a shotgun.
That tragic moment came and went with no government action. It was actually in response to the shooting of a young woman in Toronto who got caught in the crossfire between rival street gangs, none of whom were using either a rifle or a shotgun.
While progressives, who like to believe that serious crime is decreasing, are very upset with the current government for its omnibus crime bill which cracks down hard on convicted criminals, it was many of those same progressives who demanded action against firearms because they believed crime was on the increase.
Don’t try to figure that out, just pretend the logic makes sense to you and let’s move on.
Don’t try to figure that out, just pretend the logic makes sense to you and let’s move on.
The simple truth is that while they correctly identified that gun crime was on the increase, they incorrectly determined it was legal firearms and not illegal weapons that were at the heart of the problem. They demanded and got, not a crackdown on illegal gun crime but rather another layer of bureaucracy against legally owned and used hunting rifles and shotguns.
Criminals were trembling more from laughter than anything else.
The registry was supposed to cost $200 million, it ended up costing more than $2 billion and did not actually address the real problem. What was the real problem you ask? Too many illegal weapons were being smuggled into the country across a significant number of Canadian border crossings that were unstaffed between midnight and 6:00 am.
Instead of spending a few million to close those holes in the country’s border security, the solution to the problem was to spend a couple of billion to clamp down on legal firearms.
Those who supported the gun registry believe that it controlled the acquisition of firearms and thereby reduced gun crime. They are wrong. The registry was a database, not a licensing mechanism. There already existed an acquisition process before the gun registry was enacted and some firearms like automatic weapons and handguns were already restricted.
Believing that the gun registry prevented gun crime is like believing that registering and plating your car or truck reduces accidents.
I am not a proponent of having lots of guns around and in fact think there are too many but if you're going to fix that problem, having bureaucrats maintain a database isn't much of a solution nor is it gun control. It's the illusion of fixing a real and serious problem masquerading as problem resolution and we have too many illusions in our lives these days .
It is the same fuzzy thinking behind the tax the rich crowd. The problem is pretty clear. The tax system is unfair and places a higher and disproportionate burden on the middle class and lower income wage earners than on the affluent and the stupidly rich.
I agree. I am about as middle class as you can get and would love to see a more equitable distribution of the tax burden.The solution for many, however, is simply to tax the rich and life will be better for all of us. Terrorists will no longer hate the west, Anonymous will use its technological skills to fix all of our computers for free and integrity will magically appear in politics. Most significantly, our budget deficits will disappear and there will be free tuition and coffee for all.
The issue is that the tax system in most democracies is the real problem and dumping a surtax on the rich doesn’t even come close to fixing that. It just makes us feel better because we have someone to blame and take it out on. But here’s the thing, the rich are merely paying what the tax act tells them they must. Even President Obama, that great progressive and visionary, ended up paying a lower tax rate than his secretary who makes significantly less income.
Then too, there are some among us who are not rich but who do OK and pay no tax at all. They would be groups like unions whose income is tax exempt and who are leading the charge to tax the rich at a higher rate.
How about this instead? How about everyone pays the same tax rate with no deductions and the poor pay no tax at all? Wouldn’t that be more equitable, more efficient and less divisive? It certainly would provide government with more money, not that this would be a particularly good thing considering what they did with the last stack of cash we gave them. But still, it seems to me that the solution to a complex, unfair tax system does not lie in picking one group and trying to treat them differently but rather lies in simplifying the system and taxing everyone exactly the same percentage and closing all of those ridiculous, impossible to figure out loopholes.
Everyone, including corporations, unions, NGOs and non-profit organizations pays 10-12%, no exemptions, no deductions, no monkey business and with absolutely no exceptions, no loopholes and no deductions for special groups or organnizations.
Progressives don’t like that idea, of course, because it doesn’t fit the narrative that all of the world’s problems can be traced back to the rich who they consider to be capitalist parasites. Conservatives don’t like that solution because it doesn’t fit their narrative that all of the world’s problems can be traced back to progressives who they consider to be socialist parasites.
It's the same kind of thinking that leads some to promote safe-injection sites in a city's downtown core. The thinking is that by providing a safe place for addicts to use illegal drugs, diseases like HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis will be contained. They are wrong, In cities that have safe-injection sites, the incidents of these diseases has increased along with violent crime and addiction. Successful harm reduction won't be found in enabling bad or dangerous behaviour nor will it result from keeping addicts addicted.
It isn’t all the fault of liberal thinking, the right is in there working overtime to try and ensure that no problem ever gets a real solution either. There is a looming foreclosure crisis coming again in the United States and some pretty serious credit card debt issues in Canada. You don't hear the current conservative government offering up solutions to address that and you never hear any of the GOP candidates offering any concrete solutions to prevent people from being thrown out of their homes. On issues like these, the right is like a deer caught standing in the middle of the highway, mesmorized by the headlights of an oncoming eighteen wheeler.
Instead of working to find a real solution, they will do what they always do; blame the people who are in trouble or about to lose their homes.
But why not put together a program that allows banks to protect their mortgage loan by applying the arrears to the mortgage and then negotiate a rental agreement with the current owner. That agreement would allow the bank to protect its investment while allowing the home-owner to continue to live in the home rather than being evicted. It could even include a mechanism for the current owner to reclaim ownership of the home by repaying the mortgage arrears within a certain specified time frame.
Ah, but that’s too simple and we are a society that prefers our solutions to be even more complex and draconian than the original problem. We don’t kill our dinosaurs, we pretend that by renaming them to something more politically correct and less offensive they will go away. We delude ourselves into thinking that by demonizing some within the village, the dinosaurs will only eat those we demonize and the rest of the clan will be safe.
Sadly, that doesn’t work and we’ve had ample examples of that for a very long time.
We can continue to play the game of almost solutions that we have played for so long or we can stop letting special interest groups on the left, the right and in government offer up card tricks and slight of hand illusions to the very real problems we face in our societies instead of real solutions these issues actually demand.
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| President Barack Obama |
Even as he took full advantage of paying a lower tax rate than his secretary, the President was calling on a surtax on the rich and if that isn’t one of the best bits of sleight of hand I’ve seen in a long time, I don’t know what is.
Politicians love pretend solutions. It gives them the appearance of doing something without actually having to do much that's effective at all, particularly if they get to blame someone else (in this case the wealthy) for the original problem rather than their own failed policies.
Politicians love pretend solutions. It gives them the appearance of doing something without actually having to do much that's effective at all, particularly if they get to blame someone else (in this case the wealthy) for the original problem rather than their own failed policies.
The simple fact is that we are facing real and serious challenges in our societies these days. Some of them are like huge dinosaurs with big gnarly teeth and a taste for their favourite prey....people. As a result, we are up to our necks in dinosaur poop.If we don’t soon start doing something about them we’re going to get eaten alive - either by those dinosaurs or by those among us who keep coming up with the illusion of solutions to very real problems.
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