Institutional Trust and Trade-Offs

Photo by Nheyob, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

It seems the public health establishment, the NIH and the CDC, are completely incapable of doing cost/benefit analysis. At least publicly. It shouldn’t be hard to reopen the schools in the fall, seeing as how minor COVID is to a vast majority of children under 12. But Fauci and Collins would rather scare the crap out of parents with thinly sourced anecdotal data. We need hard numbers to make accurate decisions or people will just flout their directives. A good chunk will anyway, seeing as free will is a thing. But these directives are not marketed to those people.

Institutional trust is a problem. Congress, the mainstream media, and various segments of the federal bureaucracy have horrendously bad approval ratings. We can blame some of this on the age of negative hyperpartisanship, but there is a reason for it. Building trust is hard, especially after losing it. The CDC and the NIH have decided to light their reputations on fire for little real benefit. I do realize politics and the bureaucracy attract Karens, meddlers, “This is for your own good” types. But this is ridiculous. COVID is almost surely here to stay. We have to learn to live with it. I assume it’ll become like the flu, with an annual shot and the whole nine yards. Life has to go back to normal at some point. Would someone please think of the movie theaters?

Seasonal lockdowns are stupid and can cause more harm than good, especially among kids and young adults. Murders, overdoses, and vehicular deaths caused by impairment all shot right up last year. The gang problems of Chicago and other major cities were put into even sharper contrast. The loosening of theft and bail provisions has led to an explosion of blatant daytime shoplifting in some major cities, most notably San Francisco. And mask mandates (when the type of mask isn’t specified to be the types that actually do anything) are largely pointless.

We need to address the unseen, the unintended consequences of any government action. Until we do that, garbage policies such as this will keep happening, with their attendant flimsy rationale. It’s all about control and power. People tend to love centralized government when it’s their side deciding the rules. Without the foresight to realize these same powers can be used against them in two to eight years.

Elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats have lost most people’s trust and respect going on several decades now, but people, of course, still tend to love their specific Congressman. I hate the collective machine, but my cog is fine! Congressmen have absurd reelection rates, likely due to the fact that a solid chunk if not a majority exist in enclaves where winning the primary just about guarantees a victory in the general election. We need a better class of politician, but we probably don’t deserve it.

Hell, Andrew Cuomo resigned as I was writing this. He deserves to be in prison but will likely live out his days comfortably. The biggest problem with institutional elites and institutional trust is that the rules they create and enforce just do not apply to them. Hard to trust the rules and laws politicians put out when the politicians themselves flout them whenever the rules conflict with their comfort. Rank hypocrisy is one of the greatest sins a politician can commit, somehow worse than killing thousands of nursing home patients by incompetence and neglect (and then covering it up.) Cuomo even had about half a dozen or more ongoing corruption investigations that ran the gamut. He was a big supporter of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. A lot of male feminists seems to do stuff like this to assuage their guilt for past, current, and future actions. Harvey Weinstein is only the most infamous example.

In conclusion, don’t follow the rules if the people creating and enforcing them don’t follow them themselves. That would be stupid.