Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 80. Sunrise is 6:17 AM and sunset 7:34 PM for 13h 16m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1996, Netflix is founded.
Consider a sheet of paper divided into quadrants. Each of the four sections might contain a portion of something. For someone, a libertarian blogger, let’s say, the four portions might describe possible topics: government (state or local) performing well, government (state or local) performing poorly, private activity going well, and private activity going poorly. Into each of these quadrants would go topics to discuss, each topic requiring reading, observation, and writing.
In a well-ordered community, most topics would describe positive private activity. (There are more private residents than politicians and officials, and private action accounts for most of a community’s productivity and prosperity.) One would expect in that same well-ordered community the fewest topics that described government failures. There one would find a happy prevalence of successful private action over failed government.
A dilemma, a choice between unfavorable alternatives, emerges when the unfortunate necessity of addressing government error and misconduct draws attention from positive private accomplishment. In this way, government failure is a problem in itself and for the diversion from better subjects and opportunities that government forces on others.
The principal tragedy of finding the occasional misfit, mediocrity, ignoramus, confidence man, or sycophant in government is that a community foolishly chose that type for authority over others. (That this ilk has been recklessly chosen does not make them any less repulsive.)
The secondary tragedy is the time the occasional misfit, mediocrity, ignoramus, confidence man, or sycophant in government takes from better topics of private success.
For Whitewater, when private activity was more robust, government failure disturbed less within a healthy community, as attriting that public failure simply removed an impediment to flourishing private activity. Now that private activity is less robust, government failure is a double blow to a community, for the harm it causes and the private accomplishments from which it distracts.
An inadequate politician in Whitewater now is even more objectionable than twenty years ago.
Addressing the dilemma that political inadequacy imposes on Whitewater requires scrutiny of politicians’ inadequacies, but something more: filling another quadrant of the sheet with attention & suggestions for positive private action that inadequate politicians fail to offer.
Interesting perspective. Is it because damage from local politics is worse now?
Yes, worse for the community overall.
A response requires both addressing more diligently & directly politicians’ failures and providing notice & encouragement toward positive actions.
It’s more work now — a multi-year effort on both fronts — but there’s no alternative.