Sentences lifted from the comments

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1. A commenter writes,

At the core of the problem is the reality that government and culture are both making American life a bit more complex and demanding an experience each year. We aren’t using expanded knowledge and technology to make our lives easier, but to have more and to do more.

If you can keep up, this is good. If you can’t, this breaks you down. The size of the group that can keep up gets just a bit smaller each year.

It should be possible for people to live a simple, dignified life if they want to, and government should facilitate that. But instead, we slowly ratchet up the complexity of every aspect of a normal life. The answers aren’t with strategies to help everyone live faster. It’s to allow some to live slower, the way they want to.

2. A different commenter writes,

As the firm grows, each employee’s self-interest is slightly more separated from the owner-entrepreneur. As the firm gets larger, the joint production of all employees is increasingly divergent from what the market requests. Instead, some of the employees’ joint production is used to create longer coffee breaks, more internet shopping, and more personal story-telling. Eventually this firm is no longer competitive in the market, because too much cost and effort is channeled into non-profitable activities.

…Therefore the employees’ individual pursuits of self-interest are constrained by the discipline of competing in the marketplace, and that’s why firms don’t continue to grow boundlessly.

Government bureaucracies are not constrained by the discipline of the market. They therefore grow largely to serve the needs of their employees.

2 thoughts on “Sentences lifted from the comments”

  1. The first commenter’s “the size of the group that can keep up gets just a bit smaller each year” is a paraphrase of natural selection. There is a lot of diversity in the human gene pool. Everyone is good at something, but the bottleneck keeps tightening so that only a narrow subset of human diversity with elite skills can be successful. If you lack the ability to master specialized knowledge, like technology and tax law and the medical marketplace, and to adjust rapidly to new social arrangements, then you are out of luck.

  2. Once upon a time I wrote about “the accessible society”. And here is James Madison in Federalist #62:

    It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

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