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7 months agoThis whole thing of ridding the civil service of expertise and leaning on external consultants instead was done under the guise of cutting costs, but in practice they’re more expensive and do a worse job. Not only because they’re incentivised to do the least amount of work possible for the most amount of pay possible, but also because quite often they’re little more than the government’s sock puppets. They get paid to tell the government what it wants to hear, and then the government can say (and technically meet some legal requirements) that they’re listening to the experts.
This is not unique to NYC or the US, but it’s good that someone in the public eye is trying to do something about it. May it inspire others.
What you’re saying feels kind of circular. Regulations and their enforcement being lacking doesn’t have any explanatory power for people’s behaviour, when those same people are actively trying to prevent regulation from happening. To begin with, someone with a shred of morals wouldn’t need regulations to try to minimise harm to their employees’ health on the work floor.
Also, lawmakers doing the bidding of evil people doesn’t make the lawmakers any less evil; it’s not as though their children are being held hostage or something.
I’m not really seeing any logic that here doesn’t ultimately boil down to “they’re evil”. Of course, being aware of the problems with current regulations is important and can lead to practical solutions that can improve people’s lives and be implemented in the relatively short term, but focussing exclusively on that obscures the more fundamental problem: that our society is set up so that greedy, unempathetic bastards float to the top. And that too, requires a solution.