The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of…
The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of anti-regulation political propaganda won’t make us look there for solutions. We’re told removing regulation = freedom. That’s completely backwards. Building can show why. /1 https://t.co/2j1I3PibY8
These are standard power plugs. Regulated standards. We regulate in building and engineering not to oppress anybody. We do it because it makes the building and engineering a lot faster, safer, cheaper and easier for everybody. It creates a foundation for action. /2 https://t.co/5G0Gdo9Myb
You can go to a hardware store and buy parts and tools that you know will work, because they’ve been standardised, by regulation. That’s all regulation really is, social standardisation. Not to oppress anybody, but to create MORE freedom for everybody. /3
It frees them from having to do constant negotiations over things, to get things to work together. You don’t have to reinvent the world every day, you standardise as much as possible so that becomes a new baseline for everybody to work from. /4
It’s why humans invented legal systems. Again, not to oppress everybody, but to FREE them from constant social battles. It’s an entirely practical, physical, logistical thing. You’ll always find examples of apparent over-regulation. Even in a workplace with too many policies. /5
But that’s not the fault of regulation. Nearly always that’s because the place is already dysfunctional, and people are madly writing policies to try to tame the dysfunction. Regulation needs to work with the practical situation, negotiated compromises. /6
We’ve seen all of this with Covid and public health. Our societies (in Australia at least) functioned at near-normal levels, in the middle of a pandemic, because of targeted public health regulation. Don’t listen to the liars who say we were ‘locked down’ for 2 years. /7 https://t.co/eloOTsEoBr
Even the word is offensively stupid. It’s the same anti-State, small government libertarians poisoning societies with their usual propaganda. The old bullies from high school trying to paint themselves as victims of rules and authority. /8
Rather than as what they really are, anti-social bullies. The only freedom they care about is their own, they’re freeloaders on the rest of us, happily gobbling up all the amenities of modern society, while undermining and destroying it with their beliefs. /9
If we want to beat climate change, Covid, poverty, shortage of housing, environmental destruction - any of the big social problems - we need to regulate. It’s fast, it’s the only thing that applies to all of us equally, and it’s fair. The symbol of law is all about balance. /10 https://t.co/4F8XjleaSj
The offensively stupid use of the word ‘balance’ by modern politicians is a long way removed from what it actually means. The whole rationale for law and regulation is to create balance. The scales, right there in the image. Justice is also ‘blind’, independent. /11 https://t.co/TtvMIC6erO
It will call out injustice and corruption, wherever it finds it. Including in ex-Premiers, no matter how much they cling to how popular they are to try to escape it. Like the schoolyard bullies they are. It’s time to regulate. It’s what we elect people to do, in parliaments. /end