CONFUSED BY MORALITY OF REGULATIONS

There I something about the push back people often make against regulations that bothers me. A segment of the population frames their political argument against regulations by demanding deregulation. As you might expect, they are talking about something that has recently affected them In some way. Congressional hearing involving the financial industry are classic: presidents of banks, for example, demand that the government “get their nose out of their business”. If they want to lie, cheat and steal, it is their right. The mysterious shift of blame is not so mysterious. During the mortgage crisis, the “dumb” people were at fault because people signed contracts with financial obligations they knew they could not fulfill. Loan company executives vigorously opposed as unwarranted intrusions any regulation that obligated the loan industry to give full disclosure, verify the truthfulness of applications, regulate the loan company’s capital obligations, etc. There is a profit motive based on innate greed, which everyone can understand; however, there seems to be something innate and almost universal buried in the minds of some people that goes beyond this.

A young father speeding down a rocky dirt road on a motorcycle with his infant son in his arm objected vehemently to the idea that someone would have the nerve to tell him he “could not do that”. He declared he liked living in a country where he was “free to do what he wanted to do”; he would fight to keep it that way. There was no law to tell him he could or could not do it. Apparently, he felt that the lack of law empowered his freewill, as if there existed in his mind a specific law that covered every instance of what he considered his independence but was bad judgment.

A friend, a state epidemiologist, was involved in writing and passing a “helmet law” in the state of North Carolina as it relates to bicycles and motorcycles. He related an incident in which an elected “legislator” threatened him with a fistfight over “his” new law.  Voters had elected a man they thought was a reasonable individual but who was willing to start a brawl on the floor of the state legislature over what he saw as a violation of what he considered “his rights”.

People have a fundamental understanding of what is right and what is wrong. It is “morally” wrong to be greedy beyond what a person needs to survive. It is morally wrong to endanger one’s own survival and especially wrong to endanger the life a child. Nonetheless, in the mind of this young man on the motorcycle, it was somehow “morally wrong” for anyone to have the audacity to say he did not have the right to do what he wanted to do. Excessive greed is morally wrong in the non-business world yet in the business world it is the objective; we overlook how accumulated wealth happened and admire it as a measure of hard work and success. It is somehow morally wrong to accuse a businessperson of being a crook. In addition, for these people it is somehow wrong or shameful not to be in the 1%—the “haves verses the have nots”. In another twist of meaning comparable to this is the idea that the 47% are greedy: they are on the dole; and they are lazy and want to live off the hard working members of society—the Ayn Rand view of society. It is somehow morally wrong to be poor.

All of this would look so different if we defined morality on the biological principle of right and wrong; it is bad, wrong, or evil not to survive but it is, correct, right, or good to survive.  Because we are humans and not Ayn Rand disciples or beasts, we must consider quality of life. 

URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated