Several days ago the blog, MacDoctor drew our attention to a recent decision by public health officials to ban childhood education centres from being close to “dangerous” industrial sites. When reading it, the instinctive response is, How could the government and its bureaucratic agents be so stupid? We reproduce part of the MacDoctor post below. Be ready to shake your head in disbelief. How could it have come to this, you may ask?
Parents face tough choices over their children’s education after health authorities declared large parts of Auckland unsafe for early childcare centres because of pollution.
Concerns about health risks for young children mean new centres are unlikely to get medical approval to open within newly created “buffer zones”.
Existing centres may come under pressure to move if they fall within the zones.
. . . . The dangers of pollution on small children’s lungs is (sic) well-known. This is not about any new danger, just about a rather stupid policy that supposedly will reduce this danger.
This is a fine example of the perils of making public health policy without properly looking at the entire picture. Public health officials has (sic) decided on arbitrary “no-go” zones for early childhood care centres. They are not within (sic) 300m of an industrial zone, 150m of a motorway or truck route, 100m of a petrol station and 60m of a main district road. The astute will immediately realise three things:
1. These areas comprise a large chunk of most cities.
2. These areas are where low-income people tend to live because they are cheaper
3. Childcare centres will inevitably cost more to build if they are located outside of these areas.
The net result of these policies will be to increase the costs of childcare centres and place them in areas where low-income parents will have to travel long distances to use them. Moreover, the actual health gains for the children will be small. The air at 100m from a main road is only marginally better than the air at 50m. Does anybody really think that being 400m from an industrial area will be any better than 200m? What if the industrial area is mostly warehousing with little or no pollution? Arbitrary zones (as opposed to an actual air quality check) are a stupid way to attempt to deal with this issue.
But the real silliness is demonstrated at the end of the article. As Sarah Farquhar of the Early Childhood Council points out:
Why early childhood centres and not homes where children are spending much longer?
“Why not schools, churches, shops? If it’s as damaging as the service is saying, then nobody should be given consent to build houses in these areas, and motorways shouldn’t be allowed to be built near houses.
“Will it mean now that homeowners will be able to seek compensation for the fact that building consents were given for houses so close to the motorway?”
Exactly. Lots of traveling and dozens of childcare centres out of business - for five hours a day of slightly cleaner air.
This excerpt shows us that the Bureaucratic Plan for our nation is alive and well—and growing, mutating, assimilating in leaps and bounds. The Borg is here. The present government has done little to reverse this affliction. Our expectation is that it will not. The Bureaucratic Plan has a life of its own. It is self-sustaining. The Bureaucratic Plan increasingly masters the government, not the reverse.
Let us be clear. The present Government has proclivities toward the centre-right. They see themselves as basically decent chaps and chapesses who pride themselves on applying pragmatic common sense to government and the law. They are opposed in principle to the excesses of state welfare, socialism, and the extremes of left-wing social planning. On exactly what principles they ground their opposition is less clear. It's a bit of this and a bit of that. But they are all bound together with by a common, deeply held belief. They all want to employ and deploy the powers of government to “make thing better”. And in this they are no different from their political opponents. In this they are all dyed-in-the-wool Athenians.
They, along with just about every Unbeliever in our country, would affirm that the fundamental role of the State is to reduce social problems of whatever sort (drug taking, crime, drunkenness, road accidents, family violence, poverty, disease, unemployment etc. etc.) and improve the lot of everyone (higher living standards, education, justice, wellness, happiness, success, etc. etc.) We suggest that if you asked all politicians, every current government minister, and virtually every New Zealand citizen whether they believed it was the fundamental business of the State to improve things for its citizens, the overwhelming response would be in the affirmative. Political disputes and arguments between right and left, therefore, are merely over tactics—which is to say, they are debates over relatively minor matters.
This social consensus has not come about by accident. The Bureaucratic Borg has assimilated almost everyone; resistance is futile. It is a deeply religious position. It is completely consistent with the tenets of Unbelief. Because all mankind lives in a Fallen world, death and a whole host of other imperfections exist. Problems, shortfalls, mistakes, errors, and suffering, are intrinsic to the human condition. But Unbelief insists that this ought not to be. This is fundamental to the Unbelieving mind. Things can and should get better. Nature evolves; never devolves. (Have you ever stopped to think how pervasive and fantastical this assumption is. Intrinsically, impersonal matter constantly improves. Devolution is impossible, because--errrr, we believe so, hope so, wish so. Universal intellectual and spiritual myopia on a grand scale.)
Man, the rationalistic, intelligent being can turbo-charge this improvement process--working congruently with impersonal upwardly evolving matter--to make things right. A fundamental tenet in modern Western Unbelief is that since Man can makes things right, he has a duty so to do. In Unbelief the messiah and redeemer is Man himself. In this sense, every Unbeliever is a fundamentalist.
But, in order to improve things, Man has to have resources and capital—both monetary and human. In Unbelief, the State is the nexus of power. It has access to practically unlimited resources and capital; it can garner them and command them by law—which is to say, by force. Therefore, the second fundamentalist position of modern Unbelief is that the government is the delegated agent of redemption, improvement, and perfection. The State is Man corporately personified, if you will. The government is the prime problem solver. The government exists to make things better. These things are part of the undoubted non-Christian faith. But an idolatry it is and ever will remain. The Living God is a jealous God, and will not tolerate any idol whatsoever in His presence.
But how can the government make things better? It must have a plan and a programme. Resources need to be gathered (taxes), policies needs to be promulgated (legislation and regulations), and then the policies and regulations need to be carried out (bureaucratic agencies of government develop implementation plans, programmes, policies, rules, regulations, reporting, information gathering, and compliance regimes.) Within a very short space of time the bureaucratic agencies of government develop an individual life of their own. The bureaucratic plan to improve things (in whatever area—and they are legion) becomes the powerful tail wagging the government dog. Rapidly the State and the burueacracy converge into one. Politics becomes a side show.
Why do bureaucracies inevitably end up controlling governments? Firstly, the Law of Unintended Consequences mean that every attempt by government to break out of its God-given sphere of competence and "improve things" creates manifold additional problems, which require further rules, regulations and bureaucratic plans to solve. The bureaucracy becomes self-propagating as it moves incessantly to solve additional downstream problems which it has created in the first place or exacerbated by its meddling.
Second, governments do not exist in a vacuum. They receive advice and briefing papers and "information flows" from bureaucrats. Therefore, the context in which government decisions are made is dominated by the bureaucratic mind and shaped by the agendas and realities of national life as the Bureaucratic Plan has created them to be.
Thirdly, once the Bureaucratic Plan becomes multi-form, multi-level, and multi-complex, addressing problems of second, third, and fourth tier which the Plan itself created in the first place, dismantling the Plan becomes a truly revolutionary act. It becomes painful. It results in problems. It makes things worse for many, many people. It is akin to an addict coming off a drug. Withdrawal can be a difficult and painful business. The pain of coming off is greater than the pain of continuing.
The seduction of having a duty to make things better, not worse is powerful to the Unbelieving mind. It is easier to promulgate one more programme, one more policy tweak, one more funding boost. It plays to the fundamentalist beliefs of the non-Christian that Man can make things better. The opposite is impossible for the Unbeliever to contemplate. It is blasphemous. It attacks the very fundament of the modern secular humanist's self-concept.
Let us trace just one example. Compulsory education is one Unbelieving response to improve the lot of mankind. It requires that all children will be treated in fundamentally the same way, and that all schools will operate at (or above) certain minimal levels. But the State is neither a true messiah nor a true redeemer. It cannot achieve these naively utopian goals. Inevitably a proportion of children are disengaged from school from an early age. They operate below the minimum level required by the Plan. Resentment, boredom, and frustration mount as their compulsory years of service within the state educational reformatory continue. Truancy levels rise. Drugs, drunkenness, and vandalism increase. The result? More programmes, more reporting, more bureaucratic plans, more staff, more courses, more remedial attempts, more government spending, more research, more pilot programmes. And so the cycle continues.
But the next generation of children are sons and daughters of already disfunctional parents: therefore, their disaffection and disengagement occurs much earlier than their parents. It is also more extreme. These children likely come from broken homes; their parents are second or third generation welfare dependants; they don't know who their biological fathers are; oftentimes their parents or successive caregivers are in prison. The solution? The government tries harder. It needs more programmes, more plans, more bureaucracy. On cue, the proportions and incidence of truancy, vandalism, disengagement rise still further. More programmes, more spending, more planning, more rules, more corrective regulations result. The reach of the Bureaucratic Plan becomes far greater than ever before. In order to "deal" with the problems, the Plan becomes more pervasive and far reaching, extending now into homes, families, pre-schools, and into every aspect of human life. Resistance is futile.
Eventually we get the to ridiculous kind of situation exposed by MacDoctor. Public health officials and other bureaucrats increasingly plan in greater and greater detail every aspect of peoples' lives and endeavours, because the problems crop up everywhere, incessantly and inevitably. The result is that any government of the day dances to the tune of the Bureaucratic Plan, not the reverse. The all governing Plan is an inevitable outcome of Unbelief. If Man is the redeemer and saviour, the dead weight of government bureaucracy will end up crushing humanity. It is an inevitable corollary of secular humanism.
Some of the quantum leaps in bureaucratic planning and control in New Zealand have come from National governments: the Resource Management Act, the Occupational Safety and Health regime, the Children Youth and Family Services regime, to name but three. All were promulgated with the best of intents: to solve problems. We believe the present National Government will prove to be no exception. It will go on to extend the reach and orbit of the Plan much, much further. But the “right” will be strangely silent. Somehow it feels better when “we” are doing it. If the previous regime had done something similar, they would have been outraged.
We are not surprised. Both the political left and the right share the same fundamentalist views about life and being. In their pneumopathic world all agree that Man is the measure and master of all things. Therefore, governments exist to solve problems and make things better. In the end, political discourse in Athens retreats to debates over tactics. But as the Bureaucratic Plan comes to exercise more and more control over governments, tactical differences inevitably reduce. All that is left is ad-hominem debates. “We are better, nicer, smarter people than you 'rich pricks' or 'socialists' or whatever.” Politics devolves into a mere spectator sport to entertain the Colosseum crowd, while the Bureaucratic Plan assimulates everyone.
The Living God is not mocked. Sow to the wind and we will reap the whirlwind. If we will not thankfully acknowledge and accept His Son as the only Redeemer and Messiah of mankind, He will ensure that we will experience in time the consequential curse of all false alternatives. In the world of Western Unbelief, that curse is the crush of the Bureaucratic Plan, ever growing to siphon the life blood out of the people.
Those whose god is Government will end up being broken under its weight.
No comments:
Post a Comment