Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:00 PM | August 16, 2026
meme

When liberals talk about government, they almost always do so in the context of all the good they imagine it could do if we only let it. 

There is one exception, of course: preserving order and people's safety, which is also the bedrock on which government legitimacy rests. To the extent that government is legitimate at all in acquiring coercive powers, that legitimacy rests in our ceding to the centralized power the responsibility to maintain law and order. Everything else follows from that, since the "state of nature" pre-government is anarchy and rule by whoever is strongest at any moment. 

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Liberals don't like that part of government; instead, they spin yarns about how, if we only allow government to take our money and our freedom, a near-utopia can be created. 

To the extent that the government is reasonably good at providing baseline services, people become willing to cede more power to it, and that is especially true when they have a say in how that power is used. This is why we tend to think liberal democracies are particularly legitimate, although, as we have seen, well-run but less democratic regimes can be seen as basically legitimate, as happened in the Asian Tigers, where government efficiency justified their less democratic forms well enough that people were happy enough. 

Experience shows that governments can be reasonably good, if hardly perfect, at providing basic services like police and fire protection because they are what we could call "blunt" tasks that don't require complicated judgments in most cases, and as the experiences of places such as the United Kingdom and other European countries show, the more complicated you make the jobs of law enforcement the worse they become at it. 

Add "hate crimes" to the "don't steal and don't hurt people" role, and look at what happens. 

Things completely break down once you create what amounts to invisible centers of power, such as regulatory agencies, which are mostly immune from basic oversight by populations or even their representatives. The need for basic regulations is indisputable: you need health and safety enforcement, regulation of things like pharmaceuticals, and basic environmental regulations show a clear public benefit. But regulatory power has an even greater tendency to expand indefinitely because oversight is limited and bureaucrats need to justify their jobs. 

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That's how you get this:

Elon Musk reveals what happens when a rocket launch needs approval from Fish and Wildlife

Elon: "Nonetheless, we were forced to kidnap a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on the seal and play sonic boom sounds to it to see if it would be distressed."

Elon: "This is an actual thing that happened. This is actually real. I have pictures."

Before the seal, there was a shark.

Elon: "One of the things that was a bit of a challenge at one point is that they were worried about our rocket hitting a shark."

He asked for the data to calculate the odds. They refused, in case shark hunters got hold of it.

Elon: "Then they said, well, there's another part of Fish and Wildlife that can do this analysis. I'm like, well, why don't you give them the data? They don't, we don't trust them. Like, excuse me, but they're literally in your department."

Then a second agency raised whales.

Elon: "If our rocket does hit a whale, which is extremely unlikely beyond all belief, that whale has some seriously bad luck. It's the least lucky whale ever."

The seal test was for launches out of Vandenberg, where the seal population has been rising for years.

Elon: "So if anything, rocket booms are an aphrodisiac based on the evidence."

Elon: "The amazing part is how calm the seal was. Because if I was a seal, I'd be like, this is the end. They're definitely gonna eat me."

Elon: "Its seal buddies are never gonna believe him that he got strapped to a board and they put headphones on his ears."

They did it twice.

Elon: "I don't think the public is quite aware of the madness that goes on."

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When laws are made, there is some logical connection between the "will of the people" and the outcomes we get. The law may turn out to be a bad one, but that can be corrected over time (usually far too long a time). Regulatory power is extremely difficult to pull back, though, because every change goes through a long, horrific process, and bureaucrats can be very recalcitrant about giving up power, or the legal system can be manipulated to prevent change when interest groups don't want to see it. 

Congress thoughtlessly delegates modern regulatory power to bureaucracies, and bureaucracies act as an unelected fourth branch of government and consider themselves independent of the president. As such, common sense has very little impact on what gets done in bureaucracies, which tend to be accountable to nobody. 





















































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