Let me tell you a story of my
childhood. My school was located about a mile from a park. About midway down
the road to the park was an intersection with another road that, were one so
inclined to walk down, would find themselves some five or ten minutes later at
the foot of the drive of my childhood home. Now one day at school, the teacher
had planned for my sixth-grade class to walk from the school to the park,
participate in some science based activity that escapes me at the present time,
then walk back to the school arriving back just before dismissal. And so, on
that day, my class made the trek to the park, we completed that activity of science,
and we started down our return path to the school. Let me reiterate, the plan
was to walk back to the school and arrive just in time for dismissal. Now as we
walked back to the school, we passed by the intersection that led back to my
house and I thought to myself. How silly is it that I am going to walk a half
mile away from my house to get on a bus that is then going to drive me back to
my house?
Now imagine you are the teacher
responsible for the class. If a student had asked you if they could leave the group
and just walk home from here, it doesn’t matter that they are twelve and
perfectly capable of walking safely down a neighborhood road to their house.
You are responsible for that child until such time that they leave the school
at dismissal or are received by a parent or guardian. There is no way on your
life you would let that child leave on their own.
Accountability is very important. If
you are sending your child to school you are entrusting that school to keep
your child safe, and failing that any reasonable person would expect
repercussions. However, can we just all admit that bureaucracy has gotten a little
out of hand. Have you ever read a law. They can be pages and pages long. Laws
used to be: Don’t kill anyone. Don’t steal anything. But as loopholes are
exposed and precedents are set, red tape gets put up. The problem is it never
gets taken down. We just keep putting up more and more and eventually we are
all just going to be wearing red mummy costumes.
Think about how many things you sign
a month. How many privacy policies, terms of use, and various other contracts
of accountability you adorn with your infamous three loops with a line through
it. Why do you think people sign like that anyway? Especially if they have a
long name. Ain’t nobody got time to neatly present their signature every time
they charge a pack of gum to their credit card. Where are all of these credit
card signature logs going anyway. Do you know how many people these days just put
everything on their credit cards? If someone actually needed to retrieve one to
settle a dispute it would be a nightmare to locate.
So, one childhood story and a bit of
rambling later, I guess what I am actually saying is that, the overburden of bureaucracy
has more or less bureaucracy ineffective. Disclosure does no good if people are
so jaded they don’t even care to read the disclosure in the first place. What
good is a law that isn’t enforced? Well, there are so many laws anymore, we’d
have to lock up the world. Intervention for a hoarder: have less things but
nicer things. It applies to bureaucrats too. Let’s do away with all of the
redundancies and unnecessary requirements and reserve the red tape for when we
really need it.
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