Fifty years ago this week, I was planning the events for my high school’s version of the first National Environmental Teach-In (later called Earth Day). All of the speakers my friends and I invited were either politicians or government officials. If I knew then what I know now, that event would have been much different. Here are a few of the main lessons I’ve learned since then.
- Don’t trust the government
Everyone knows that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” is a joke. Yet too many people still believe that government works the way their high school teachers taught them. I recently watched some college students debate whether to privatize public transit, and one of them said, “I think transit should be run for the public interest and not for profits.” I wondered what made him think that any public agency operates in the public interest, but that’s what we are taught and that’s what many implicitly believe.
People in Congress and state legislatures know better; they’ve seen how the sausage is made. Yet most of the legislation they pass assumes that the bureaucracies they create and fund will automatically work in the public interest. The Supreme Court put this assumption into a legal precedent called the Chevron decision. In reality, we can’t trust any level of government — the legislators, the executives, or the bureaucrats — to work in the public interest, even if we could define it. Continue reading
