If you had stopped
by my house last Saturday, you would have seen me seated on the front porch in
a folding chair, watching a presentation on a laptop connected to a notebook
computer, which was in turn operated by a woman seated in another folding
chair. The woman works for a
contractor to the U. S. Department of Commerce. The contractor, Abt SRBI, performs high-tech surveys for
government agencies. Instead of
pencils and clipboards, the woman brought along the aforementioned technology
that she used to show me the options I had for each answer, as well as
photographs and other information related to the survey questions. My subject today is not so much the
actual content of the survey (which she requested I keep confidential so as not
to bias other potential participants), but the entire process of which the
survey was a part, which I'm calling "democracy by sampling."
One vital aspect
of engineering ethics is to consider all the stakeholders in a given case,
including members of the public liable to be affected by a proposed course of
action. I think it's okay for me
to say this much about the survey:
it dealt with a proposed program that the Department of Commerce may
implement, and would entail substantial costs to be borne by the U. S.
taxpayer. The program would
address an environmental issue which it turns out I have discussed in this
space in the past, and it would deal with it in a way that struck me as
egregiously boneheaded. And I told
them so.
But unless you,
gentle reader, are one of the 1500 or so people nationwide selected to
participate in this survey, if you wish to register your opinion on this
subject with the government, you are out of luck. This is unfair, but all too symptomatic of a disheartening
trend that has picked up the momentum of an avalanche in recent years.
The ideal of
democratic government is that it is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "of
the people, by the people, for the people." The preposition in question here is "by." Ultimately, the authority of government
is to vest in the people governed.
The means by which this power is exercised in our type of government is
through the legislative branch, meaning Congress. Originally, the only role of the executive branch was to see
that the laws were "faithfully executed."
But beginning in
the Progressive era of the early 1900s, a different view of government arose,
which can be summarized as government by experts. The basic idea is that modern life is too complex to leave
governance solely to the slow, messy process of legislating laws. Instead, new powers should devolve upon
educated specialists in such fields as finance, technology and its regulation,
commerce, and human relations, and we should allow these experts to make such
rules as they think best—rules that have the full force of law. So far, any agency of this type still
holds before its face a mask of democracy, in that the agencies exercising such
power have to be established by Congress.
But there are so many of them now that Congress can no longer exercise
anything like proper oversight anymore.
The result is that executive agencies like the Department of Commerce and
its divisions are left to their own devices and desires.
I will grant this
to the Department: in
commissioning the survey I participated in, they are genuinely seeking the
input of the public, or at least a sample thereof. They didn't have to do that—as far as I know, they could
just haul off and implement the new program they're considering without asking
anybody, and we would all just have to live with it. So they are at least making a gesture toward the idea of
democracy. But it is an
ineffectual gesture, in my opinion.
As a part of the
survey, I had an opportunity to "vote" for or against the program,
and to give reasons for doing so.
But this "vote" is to real voting as hypocrisy is to
holiness. What if we
"voted" to elect the President this way? It would save tons of money and trouble. Instead of the Electoral College and
all that campaign fundraising and advertising and so on, we'd just hand the
whole thing over to Abt SRBI, whose experts would come up with a carefully
selected sample of 1500 or so voters, and the rest of us would just wait to find
out the results, as determined by the experts. So much more efficient—so much more scientific.
And so much more
opposed to the basic notion of rule by law, and not by men. One of the big reasons that the
thirteen British colonies broke away from England was that they were being
taxed by those whom they did not elect.
Based on the information I received during the survey, the proposed
program would have done exactly that—nothing was mentioned about any enabling
legislation. This sort of thing
happens all the time. The
Environmental Protection Agency's decision to categorize carbon dioxide as a
pollutant is a shining example of how unelected bureaucrats can unilaterally proclaim
costly regulations, and those injured are forced to undertake expensive legal
battles as their only recourse.
The Department of
Commerce deserves one small cheer for consulting me about their idea. But the whole executive branch gets a
loud razz for continuing its drive toward government by bureaucracy that has
compromised freedom and due process in this country so severely, that some days
I wonder if we can ever get them back again.
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