Trends and stupidity.

I've noticed a trend in our society, looking to the government for protection. We talk about the government as though it is the panacea, the holy grail that will cure all of our ills, the ark of the covenant to destroy all evil.

It is, however, something subtly different, something disturbingly so at the visceral level when you think about it. It's a tool, much like any other, capable of being abused as a weapon, or used as a constructive tool. With any tool you can build or you can destroy.

With any tool there are safeguards in place, from the safeties of a firearm, or the lockouts on some construction and mining vehicles designed to keep them operating safely.

Just so, there are safeguards on our government, locked in at the beginning.
However, enterprising individuals have chosen to cut out the safeguards, to bypass them in the name of reducing time loss, and making things easier. There are a lot of safeties on industrial machines. From removing their power supplies and fuel, to removing the ability to move the drive or hydraulic units, safeties are there for a purpose, to keep you safe. Your safety was far more important than your convenience in most cases.

But what happens when all that is inconvenient is removed? You don't bother engaging that brake on the track of your rig, you forget to lockout the ignition, you forget to disconnect the power to the motor, and while you're doing maintenance, the unit slips, applying power to you, and mangling you beyond recognition. Any single one of the safeties would have potentially saved you, but you locked them out.

I'm an idiot, and even I see that's a bad idea. It's like working on an augur for moving coal, and trying to free the movement of the shaft with a heavy crowbar. You know the augur has more than enough power to pull you in, and wrap the crowbar around it. You also know that you're behind schedule.

Is it really worth it to stick that bar in there and hit that piece of stone jamming the system up? Is the risk worth the reward when you're crushed and bleeding, and someone else has to clean you out of the machine and tell your family that you're dead?

Our government is both a machine, and an operator. We are supposed to operate the machine carefully, and our representatives and senators are our operators by proxy. With effective supervision, and warnings, and safeguards, even an idiot can operate the machine of government. Any operator of a machine will try to take out safeties for convenience when the owner isn't watching. A flip of a switch here, a wiring around there, and a change in the hydraulic piping there, insufficient maintenance at another point... and you have all the makings of a disaster. A single replaced part can have profound effects on the rest of the machine, causing catastrophic failure... a misrated bolt replacing a rated, hardened, and nitrided surface, for instance, or an improperly set up blasting rig.

In our government we forgot that our senators and representatives are our employees, not those of the government. That government is our property, and we use them to oversee and maintain it. It's our job to maintain the supervision over those employees, including and up to the firing of them (by firing squad if necessary). It's our job to make sure they don't put their heads, hands, or other parts into the machine, or try to force others to do the same. It's also our job to make sure that they're not making deals behind our backs to sell our government, our inventory and stock, or allowing thieves in the back door to loot the place when we're not looking.

How did we get prepped for the greatest disaster in history? It's either sabotage, gross negligence, or both of the above. We've got a top heavy debt, a monetary system based on that debt, and no assets for the payment of the debt. We've managed to build industrial grade bureaucracies that burn huge amounts of fuel and do nothing but manage to get their operators a paycheck, and we can't even fire them. We have the government and the operators working to take the few controls we have left, and the ability of hiring and firing from our hands and give them to someone else, in treaties that remove our sovereignty and make us further subject to others who were our competitors until we stopped paying attention and they started a takeover with our own employees collusion.

What does this mean to us? I may be a total idiot, too stupid to shut up... but even I can see at that point you need to fire the operators, reassess the plant, and figure out where the hell things got screwed up and make sure the safeguards against it are strong enough to work. You also need to make sure that good habits are enforced, and bad habits leave the habitual offender working cleaning the port-a-potty until they shape up.

Even a total idiot can see that.