WHO THINKS FOR YOU?
NOVEMBER 21, 2011. In the wake of the EU decision to ban claims that water can rehydrate the body—with criminal penalties for offenders—it’s appropriate to note that government bureaucrats must meddle. It’s in their job description.
They have to invent problems and then solve them.
When bureaucratic agencies submit their budgets for the upcoming year, what happens if they say, “It’s been pretty quiet these past twelve months. People seem to be figuring out things for themselves. No disasters to report.”
Professional suicide.
The CDC, for example, needs epidemics, even if they’re not real. Ditto for the World Health Organization. And if the FDA led their report on nutritional supplements by admitting another year had passed without any deaths, they would have no reason to cook up new regulations punishing the industry.
Bureaucrats must meddle.
And this doesn’t even begin to explore selective meddling and the protection of favored sectors of the economy.
On the other hand, if you reduce the size and reach of government entities, actual problems must be solved.
Imagine a town that’s in charge of its own schools. All two of them. And student performance is horrible. Kids can’t read, they certainly can’t write, and their math skills are barely visible to the naked eye. But the town council and the mayor can’t say, “Well, this is part of a larger national problem.”
No, the town has to fix the problem. Somebody has to go into those two schools and find out what’s really going on, at ground level. Not a task force, not a committee that takes two years to come up with a report.
“We have 19 teachers who are incompetent, and we have 37 kids who are significantly disrupting classrooms. The math textbooks are treating long division as if it’s metaphysics. The principal of one of the schools is whining and making excuses. He says every child needs an iPad.”
Those are all fixable problems. Fire the incompetent teachers and the principal. Find used math textbooks that make sense and get rid of the nonsensical books. Bring in the 37 sets of parents of the disruptive students and tell them that if they can’t get their kids to fly right immediately, the kids will be expelled, and if they then come on to school property, they’ll be arrested and charged.
That’s at least a decent start.
What I’m describing here is terrifying to bureaucrats. It threatens their very existence.
“We here in East Southwest Derbyshire, population four thousand, notice that our citizens drink a great deal of bottled water, and our overall health is quite good. So whether or not water can actually rehydrate the body—it seems obvious to us, but we don’t care. It’s irrelevant. We don’t care what the bottling companies claim. We don’t need the EU. Thanks anyway.”
“Thirty-three or 45 vaccines for young children? In our town of North River, population two thousand, the kids are very healthy, and only four percent are vaccinated at all. We suspect our good health stems from from the fact that we eat fresh food and drink raw milk. But we don’t need a study group to analyze the situation. No thanks. Butt out.”
Big bureaucrats serve a fictional entity called “everybody.” The bureaucrats can adjust this fiction in any direction they want to.
What would happen if they suddenly found themselves on a deserted island, with immediate needs, and nobody to boss around? That’s an episode of Lost I’d like to see.
“Let’s appoint a committee to decide how to build a fire. Before the sun sets.”
Of course, you notice this kind of behavior in corporations, too. How many layers of middle managers do you need to bring a product to market? But there is a difference. Presumably, in a company, if you fail to sell a new product and your bottom line takes a strong hit, some people are going to get fired or demoted. Maybe the whole company goes down (unless you’re General Motors). But in big government, you can use taxpayer money to pay for one worthless program after another, and no one feels a thing. You just appoint a study group to figure out what went wrong. And you lose their report.
The EU is a giant bureaucracy on top of already-too-large European governments. So it stands to reason the EU would be fabricating problems that are more bizarre than usual, like the ban on health claims for water. The people of Europe can undoubtedly look forward to edicts detailing allowable standards for toilet paper, shower heads, coffee cups, and nail clippers.
Let me indulge in a little science-fiction speculation. Suppose the technology existed to read your thoughts. I’m not talking about making broad classifications. Rather, specific content. Well, since thought does, sometimes, lead to action, what are the chances that a big bureaucracy like the EU would eventually move to banning certain thoughts? And since that would be impossible to implement, they would proceed to technologies for thought control.
For bureaucrats, opportunities are gold. The ability is there; they would use it. Or try to.
And to them, it would look very logical. Simple. “If we control thinking, we can avert crimes.”
One thing I’ve learned over the years. Many researchers whose area is the brain believe, without a shadow of a doubt, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with replacing one set of brain responses with another set. Because for them, that’s all there is. It’s the basis of their work. Words like mind, spirit, soul, psyche, creativity have no real meaning in their eyes. Everything is conditioned response.
And if bureaucrats, working with these researchers, can think for you, they would try. They would do it.
Jon Rappoport