I’ve just returned from the beach, where I was tumbled by a wave in water too shallow for me to regain my footing. I scooted as best I could toward the sand, but Megan and a nice young father had to help me to my feet. Kathleen was terrified that I’d broken my neck, and Will, in his father’s arms, was just plain terrified.  What a dope I was! I was never in serious danger, not for a second, but I certainly appeared to be in distress, and now I’m exhausted. I ought to have been a better judge of the surf.

From The Power Broker, I’ve moved back to Jeff Madrick’s The Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present. It’s not quite as depressing as Robert Caro’s book, possibly because so much of the material is in the air, as it were — the public conversation about the “financialization” of American business would be hard to ignore, if I wanted to. But both books have set me to thinking even more arduously than I usually do about the problem of regulation — why it so often fails. It’s clear that a big part of the problem is the word itself, “regulation.” Like so many words in common parlance, it has taken on an insidious mechanical connotation. For example: “He couldn’t take the pressure anymore; no wonder he blew up!” We may no longer be conscious that this figure of speech derives from the behavior of faulty steam boilers two hundred years ago and more, but we persist in thinking of many human processes as if they were mechanical — dependably mindless. Another example: A Machine That Would Go of Itself, the title of Michael Kammen’s insightful 1986 book about the American Constitution. No constitution could be a machine (much less one that “would go of itself”), because the men and women whose actions realize its force in the real world would not be machines.

Machines invariably do the same thing with whatever power they’re given. Men and women invariably don’t. When we speak of “regulation,” we’re dreaming of “systems” that could be “put in place” to “maintain” public “order.” In Europe, where the Frankish passion for uniformity has been imprinted on the bureaucracy of the European Union, the size of almost everything has been prescribed down to the last millimeter by fiat. Americans like to think that we’re more flexible, but by giving our regulators greater discretion we also give them more power, and it is power, above all things, that needs to be regulated. Who regulates the regulators?

Across the table, our laptops back to back, Kathleen is working on a document. She worked all through yesterday afternoon as well. In a well-regulated working world, big deals would not simmer during August. Just the sun.   

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 21st, 2011 at 1:00 pm.