fix your gun laws too (children practising hiding from gunmen in schools? Really??). And your legal system. And women’s rights. And police corruption.
I’d say they are all symptoms of the same problem, economic insecurity and misaligned incentives. People like to blame communism and praise capitalism for the results of the cold war, but I see the US making the same mistake that lost the USSR the cold war, but inflexibility and misaligned incentives. The US in the 20th century went from almost unregulated capitalism to a regulated market economy. IMO, it was that ability to change that brought the US ahead, not some magic of capitalism or brokenness of communism. Now we are stubbornly stuck on the ideology that could very well could have led to the collapse of the US in the 1930s.
Take the freight rail strike fiasco and recent train wrecks. Capitalism creates an incentive for the companies to reduce costs as much as possible. The rail unions are practically useless due to a terrible federal law. What we need is a more pragmatic government and population that will allow them to be and pass legislation that deals with it. One reasonable approach is to deregulate the unions a bit to ensure a quality workforce. Another is regulations that micromanage operations. Maybe fine companies in key industries for both preventable environmental disasters and failure operate under the threat of forced liquidation if they can’t get their act together. Another is professionalizing rail workers so no worker will risk personal liability or loss of licensure for cutting corners. Something else?
At the scales we are talking about, there is so much complexity that it is almost impossible to predict the outcome of a policy, so I am a big advocate for flexibility.
I’d say they are all symptoms of the same problem, economic insecurity and misaligned incentives. People like to blame communism and praise capitalism for the results of the cold war, but I see the US making the same mistake that lost the USSR the cold war, but inflexibility and misaligned incentives. The US in the 20th century went from almost unregulated capitalism to a regulated market economy. IMO, it was that ability to change that brought the US ahead, not some magic of capitalism or brokenness of communism. Now we are stubbornly stuck on the ideology that could very well could have led to the collapse of the US in the 1930s.
Take the freight rail strike fiasco and recent train wrecks. Capitalism creates an incentive for the companies to reduce costs as much as possible. The rail unions are practically useless due to a terrible federal law. What we need is a more pragmatic government and population that will allow them to be and pass legislation that deals with it. One reasonable approach is to deregulate the unions a bit to ensure a quality workforce. Another is regulations that micromanage operations. Maybe fine companies in key industries for both preventable environmental disasters and failure operate under the threat of forced liquidation if they can’t get their act together. Another is professionalizing rail workers so no worker will risk personal liability or loss of licensure for cutting corners. Something else?
At the scales we are talking about, there is so much complexity that it is almost impossible to predict the outcome of a policy, so I am a big advocate for flexibility.