Trego's Mountain Ear

I don’t tend to buy into conspiracy theories – generally, I view government as populated by well-meaning people who aren’t all that bright.  I think it was George Carlin who advised, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.”  In general, stupidity is an adequate explanation.  When it becomes inadequate, adding in a touch of venality or greed usually rounds the explanation out to my satisfaction.  I don’t often need to include evil to find adequate explanation (though the KKK and the Nazis tend to shift my views to include evil).

I was looking at an article about car theft in Canada – the figures I remember were that just under 2,000 cars were stolen and just under 200 were recovered – a recovery rate of somewhere on the close order of one percent.  The article described how new, high-end vehicles are stolen in Ontario, put into shipping containers, and shipped to new owners overseas.  Seems to me that you don’t need to have the police on the payroll in this operation – you just need to have police who don’t check shipping containers being exported.  I guess we can also add laziness and government rules as causes of explanation.

I think back a half-century ago, and I was sitting in a bar, drinking a beer, and an M-80 bounced off the wall behind me, bounced along my table, and exploded near me.  I had missed the “three stupids rule” -Don’t go to stupid places with stupid people and do stupid things.  So I wound up with the bouncer chewing me out for the explosion – it was a lot easier for him to spot the guy alongside the explosion than find the jerk who lit the firecracker and tossed it.  That I could understand – but it still puzzles me that he got angry when I politely suggested that the two of us should try to find the jerk who threw the firecracker, and that it was dumb to yell at the victim just because he (the bouncer) wasn’t capable of finding the perp.

It’s why we have some problems with our legal system – since it’s hard to ferret out the guilty, it’s easier to pass laws that punish the much handier innocent – the guy who is sipping a beer, minding his own business, when someone blows up an m-80 alongside him. 

In Relentless v Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, the Supreme Court overruled the old Chevron Case – limiting regulatory agencies from writing rules that made the people in the fishing industry criminals if they didn’t fund a ride-along inspector to the tune of $700 per day – be kind of like a town making me pay for a police officer to ride with me as I drove through, ticketing me if I was dumb enough to speed with a cop in the passenger seat.

I’m pleased with the ruling – the problem is that the agencies want to catch the bad guys, but choose to write rules that turn the innocent into criminals.  We watched the same thing with bump stocks – personally, all a bump stock would do for me is make an otherwise accurate rifle inaccurate.  Still, the Supremes did the right thing, because a loose fitting stock doesn’t turn a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun.  But it’s a lot easier to catch Bubba with a bump stock than a guy who is building actual machine guns.

It might not mean as much if I hadn’t had that damn dumb bouncer chewing on me for a firecracker someone else had tossed out in the bar.  Still, as I look back on it, I went to a stupid place with stupid people – and shouldn’t have expected a rational conversation.