We’ve all been hearing about the scandal at Volkswagen, in which the company installed “cheater” software that restricted emissions only during testing. The CEO, Martin Winterkorn, has resigned in disgrace, reviled by all goodthinkful people.
The software cheat was a crazy move, because it was bound to be discovered sooner or later. Why would the chief executive of a sterling brand like Volkswagen — it would be hard to imagine a more stable and successful manufacturer — risk everything on such a foolhardy gamble?
A recent article from The Week might help us to understand:
Volkswagen has apparently been deliberately and flagrantly cheating on its nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions for years. How the car giant thought it could get away with this scam boggles the mind. There is no way to describe its actions other than stupid, arrogant, and probably criminal.
But here’s the thing: The whole episode should call as much attention to the Environmental Protection Agency’s unrealistic, even crazy, car emissions standards ”” the toughest in the world ”” as VW’s flouting of them. Indeed, VW’s scam might be a harbinger of things to come if the EPA itself is not curbed.
When you place people in impossible situations — when you demand that they do what cannot be done, and give them the choice between compliance and survival — they will do desperate, and often criminal, things. (Other automakers may have taken similar measures.)
Another example that you may remember: the Atlanta test-scores scandal, in which teachers and school administrators were told that their continued employment depended upon getting their students to meet arbitrary (and non-negotiable) goals on standardized tests. To make such a demand is symptomatic of the fashionable but hallucinatory dogma of absolute human universalism, which assumes that any and every difference in educational outcomes depends entirely on factors exogenous to the students themselves — an assumption that, to anyone not infected by this historically unexampled mind-virus, is obviously false. That it was false was clear enough to Atlanta’s wretched educators, who, unable to spin straw into gold, and faced with the loss of their livelihood as a result, did what you and I might also have done: they cheated. No doubt they knew it was risky, but they were in a bit of a cleft stick, through no fault of their own.
Churchill said: “If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.” The Federal Register now has upwards of 75,000 pages.
You can read the Volkswagen article here. We note also, from yesterday’s news, that the EPA is at it again.
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Just curious – as in, I don’t actually know but, when the EPA does the emissions testing are those standards to meet the requirements as set by California?
(And as the connoisseur in me enjoys occasional re-visits … Well Hello Musey, funny finding you here.)
http://malcolmpollack.com/2014/06/14/egalite/
Environmental Protection(racket)Agency. HT David Duff.
This is a lengthy excerpt from Rose Wilder Lane’s “The Discovery of Freedom”, but it explains the absurdity of the regulatory state perfectly and this example is when Lane lived in Paris in the 1920s:
“Suppose that during the Armistice you bought a spool of thread in a French department store. Not that it is a spool; the thread is wound on a scrap of paper, for the thrifty French do not waste wood.
It takes a few seconds to say, “A reel of cotton thread, please; white, size sixty.” With leisurely grace, the clerk takes the thread in her hand, comes from behind the counter, and courteously asks you to accompany her.
She escorts you across the store, perhaps half a block, and indicates your place at the end of a waiting line. In twenty minutes or so, you reach the cashier’s grating. He sits behind the bars on a high stool, a wide ledger open before him, ink bottle uncorked, and pen in hand.
He asks you, and he writes in the ledger, your name, your address, and– to your dictation– one reel of thread, cotton, white, size sixty. Will you take it, madame, or have it delivered? You will take it. He writes that. And the price? Forty centimes. You offer in payment, madame? One franc. He writes these amounts, and the date, hour, and minute.
You give the franc to the clerk, who gives it to the cashier, who gives you the change, looks at the thread, and asks if you are satisfied. You are. A stroke of his pen checks that fact.
The clerk then wraps the thread, beautifully, at a near-by wrapping counter, and gives you the package. You have spent thirty minutes; so has she; the cashier has spent perhaps five. An hour and five minutes, to buy a reel of thread.
French department stores were as good as the best in the world. The French are expert merchandisers. They knew pneumatic-tube systems; the Paris government owned one that carried special-delivery notes more quickly than anyone could get a telephone number. Department store owners admired the cash-systems in American stores. But if they had installed them, they would still have been obliged to keep the cashier, his ledger, and his pen and ink.
Why? Because in the markets of Napoleon’s time, sellers cheated buyers. Napoleon protected the buyers. He decreed that the details of every sale must be written in a book, with pen and ink, in the presence of both seller and buyer, by a third person who must see the article and the transfer of money; the buyer must declare himself satisfied, and the record must be kept, permanently, to verify the facts if there were any future complaint.
During this past century, French merchandising had grown enormously. It had completely changed; but not this method of protecting buyers. I asked an owner of the largest French department store why Napoleon’s decree was not repealed. He said, But, madame, it has been in operation for more than a hundred years! It cannot be repealed; think of the sales girls, the cashiers, the filing clerks, the watchmen who guard the warehouses of ledgers. They would lose their jobs.
He was shocked. He saw me as the materialist American, thinking only of profit, caring nothing for all those human beings.”
Lane, Rose Wilder (2012-05-02). The Discovery of Freedom (LFB) (Kindle Locations 1209-1235). Laissez Faire Books. Kindle Edition.
Libertybelle, a nice excerpt. Sounds a bit like a labor union that has no competition. If the Left could command and control the US economy, this example is what we would have. We would also have a growing number of citizens who could no longer afford the price of all that “compassion”.
Thanks for that, libertybelle.
I was driving around the Outer Cape with a friend last spring, and after the awful winter we had, the roads were full of potholes. Road crews were out fixing them, in the usual desultory fashion. I mused that by now there ought to be some paving material that wouldn’t be as susceptible to weathering. My friend said “but then what would all these people do?”
It’s a fair question. We’ve already had several revolutions in the way people make their living: from agricultural to industrial, industrial to office, and now another move to distributed information-processing (for example, I earn my daily crust sitting at home writing and troubleshooting software). So far, each transformation has created new sorts of work as the old kinds died. But when the next revolution comes — and it’s already underway — it will be toward robots and AI. Machines will displace ordinary workers from many, if not most, ordinary jobs, and I see little reason to think there will be anywhere for them to go. What happens then?