So sorry to hear that TLP has ended. I particularly enjoyed your writing which is so even and calming. I have shared your posts many times. You and your cowriters have made a valuable contribution. Here’s hoping Ken Martin and the other Democratic powers that be have gotten the message. I enjoyed your music reviews and dog pics too. All the best.
Great article. Just one point: trust is always a two-way street. Citizens have to pay taxes, abide by the law and (ideally) vote in return. Or, that's how it works in my country. I'm not American. Oh and another point: there can be technically valid reasons for not trusting official stats, such as how they were collected and what they're actually measuring. Distrust isn't always undesirable or irrational.
Love this. The next thing is to design institutions with incentives that reinforce it. Demanding moral heroism isn't a strategy. It is morally justified, but doesn't deliver. This is about systems, not just the people in the chairs.
A short while back a bunch of my buddies, and me, were sitting around a fire sipping Scotch and smoking cigars. Dems, Rs, and unaffiliates. A guy said, "raise your hand if you think everyone in government is totally corrupt." All hands went up. I once knew a senator (a school was named after her). I think she was honest, but NOTHING she did was because it was the right thing to do. It was all horsetrading and power plays. I assume that nothing I read or hear about politics is true or doesn't have a hidden agenda. Just the way it is.
The condition you describe is real, but its cause may not lie where you have placed it.
You treat the loss of trust as a failure of performance. Agencies must operate more effectively, information must be more reliable, and leadership must better support those who carry out the functions of government. If these improvements are made, you suggest, confidence may be restored.
This assumes that trust follows competence.
Yet the difficulty appears deeper. A free government was not designed to be trusted in the manner of a well-managed enterprise. It was designed to be limited, divided, and subject to restraint. Confidence, in such a system, does not arise from the excellence of its operations, but from the assurance that no single authority may act without opposition.
When that condition weakens, trust declines for reasons that improved management cannot resolve.
You note that certain agencies retain public confidence. Those concerned with parks or scientific exploration are not generally entrusted with directing the daily conduct of citizens. Their functions are narrow, their authority limited, and their contact with the public seldom involves compulsion or controversy. They are therefore judged by their results alone.
Other institutions operate under different conditions. They interpret, enforce, and administer rules that bear directly upon the lives of those they govern. Their authority is exercised through discretion, and their decisions often produce unequal effects. In such cases, trust is not lost merely because outcomes are imperfect, but because the basis upon which those outcomes are determined is no longer clearly bounded.
The difficulty is therefore not simply that government performs poorly, but that its operations have expanded beyond the conditions under which public confidence can be sustained. Where authority is broad, continuous, and discretionary, disagreement becomes inevitable, and trust gives way to suspicion, not because the system has failed, but because it asks to be relied upon in a manner inconsistent with its design.
Your remedy seeks to restore trust by improving administration. Yet it may be asked whether trust, once extended beyond the proper limits of a free government, can be repaired by better execution alone.
A system that requires constant confidence in the judgment of those who operate it will, in time, encounter divisions that no degree of competence can overcome. For citizens do not merely differ in their evaluation of results, but in their expectations of what authority ought to decide at all.
The question, then, is not only how government may perform more effectively, but whether it has assumed responsibilities that render agreement about its performance impossible.
If so, the restoration of trust would depend less upon refinement of its operations than upon a reconsideration of its scope.
For confidence is most stable where authority is limited, and most fragile where it is expected to resolve the full range of human concerns.
Functions like that tend to be limited in scope, concrete in purpose, and judged by outcomes that are relatively easy to observe. Under those conditions, confidence can form and persist without requiring broad agreement about larger questions.
The difficulty arises as the scope of authority expands into areas where outcomes are less clear, or where citizens differ not only in their evaluation of results, but in their expectations of what should be decided at all.
In that sense, the contrast you are pointing to may not be accidental, but characteristic of the difference in the kind of responsibility being exercised.
According to the 2023 OECD Trust in Government Poll by World Population Review "The United States is well-known for many of its citizens being distrustful of the national government. The estimates largely support this notion. Americans have 30.93% trust in their government, according to the latest data – quite a drop from the 46.5% in 2020."
Your belief is incorrect; many see the federal government as a corrupt leviathan which has gone far beyond its constitutional powers. We want to see the government reduced back to the night watchman state the founders envisioned.
What would you think of someone who said, ‘I would like to have a cat, provided it barked'? Yet your statement that you favor an FDA provided it behaves as you believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify thebehavior of governmental agencies once they are established.
The error of supposing that the behavior of social organisms can be shaped at will is widespread. It is the fundamental error of most so-called reformers. It explains why they so often believe that the fault lies in the man, not the “system,” that the way to solve problems is to “throw the rascals out” and put well-meaning people in charge. It explains why their reforms, when ostensibly achieved, so often go astray.
One big problem is that when it comes to science/public health the only statement that is “ truly neutral facts and advice” is generally: We don’t know, but here is our best guess
Even limited positive polling is rather impressive considering recent fraud revelations, following the EV and Covid debacles.
Read a few days ago, just 2 people in NYC were able to scam Medicaid out of more than $350 million dollars, since 2021. They have been billing Medicaid for thousands of treatments that were either never required or administered. They kicked back small payments to people who claimed to be patients. Moreover, they sometimes billed for people who were not US residents. Some "patients" had never set foot in the US.
NYC has a Medicaid program that allows relatives to be paid up to $60K annually for eldercare. It has basically been run on the honor system. It appears, often, numerous relatives care for the same Senior, who may or may not dwell in the US. US Taxpayers are not only financing 6 relatives caring full time for the same elderly Bangladeshi woman, the services are being provided long distance, because she is a life long Bangladesh resident.
The scope and magnitude of the omnipresent fraud and incompetence is truly unimaginable, seemingly everywhere government dollars flow.
Billions were spent on electric schools buses under Biden. They replaced perfectly functioning, safe, gas powered school buses. Fewer than 1/2 of the EV buses are now on the road. Some were never delivered due to bankruptcies, and those that actually appeared, often will not function on a regular basis. Of course the Great EV School Bus Heist is minor compared to the tens of billions lost by US auto producers forced to produced EVs, few wished to purchase.
We will never know the true scope of Covid theft, because so many trillions went out the door, with no safeguards, it is literally impossible to determine where the money went.
Who knew death and taxes, were joined by incalculable government waste and fraud, as life's only inescapable certainties?
I continue to think that, as much as they would despise it, the only hope for restoring trust must begin with Democrats in the House and Senate, first by passing the SAVE Act. People don't trust government because they first and foremost do not trust elections. Without major pieces of legislation such as this, the House and Senate will continue to become increasingly irrelevant.
For people able to read, and with an interest, the information regarding covid and boosters was fairly transparent and readily available. The vaccines were safe and effective, contrails are not laced with chemicals, and there is no Charlie Kirk conspiracy.
- mask mandates even though it was never established that Covid spreads by droplets (we now know that Covid is airborne, not droplet, which means the particles are so small that only N95 masks filter them).
- spreading sand on skateparks, arresting surfers
- not letting churches have socially distanced outdoor worship but letting leftists have all the BLM riots they want - a major violation of the first amendment
- masks for children, which were never justified because children are essentially immune to Covid
- fired people for not getting the vaccine, even if they had measurable antibodies from natural immunity
- made people provide ID and proof of vaccine to eat dinner at restaurants (although we can't have ID to vote because that's racist)
- lockdowns that caused a global recession and put many small firms out of business
- remote learning in schools that both (1) created a permanent learning loss in children that has still not bounced back 6 years later, (2) widened the gap between blacks and whites (because teacher's unions imposed more remote learning on black school districts with weaker parent advocates)
- never did human challenge trials even though they would have sped up the vaccine testing by six months and saved countless lives. Every time conservatives did something leftists didn't like they were met with the charge of "killing grandma"
- waited 2 weeks to analyze the vaccine data because they didn't want to give Trump a major win right before the election. They should have announced within 24 hours of the data being available.
The COVID vaccines are effective at reducing hospitalizations and deaths, which made them a godsend that saved the lives of people in high risk groups especially against the initial strain, which was nasty. They provided minimal benefit to young healthy people against the initial strain and no benefit to the healthy by the time it had evolved into omicron which was just another case of the crud. The myocarditis risk to young males is real and nasty.
They have no efficacy at preventing the spread of the disease and as such never should have been mandated. This is a classic example of what KDB wrote about below. When you force someone to take a vaccine and they still contract the disease, they will never trust you again.
I get my Covid vac regularly. I haven't caught Covid since 2020, and then it was nothing. I'm 74. People around me get Covid but I don't. Not a big universe (1), and merely anecdotal. Just sayin'.
OK, but because of your age you were deemed high risk so congrats on getting the shot. But why did healthy people have to quarantine?? My doctor doesn't even recommend it any more. Do you remember the video of a screaming, crying, writhing baby and a daycare worker forcing a mask on him/her? How stupid would you have to trust that the government knew what it was doing?
The efficacy endpoints for the clinical trials were reductions in hospitalizations and deaths. That’s it. There is zero clinical evidence that the vaccine reduces transmission and plenty of anecdotal evidence that it doesn’t. E.g. COVID tore through our entire family a month and an half after we all got shot #3. The teenagers were all mild to asymptomatic. My wife and I each spent a day on the couch. I was back to lifting by day 3 and HIIT by day 5. A year later everyone but me got shot 4 and when COVID hit us a few months later I was the only one who didn’t test positive.
I’m not saying don’t get it, especially if you have a risk factor like age. I’m simply saying that mandating it based on the data at hand was unconscionable, and created a lack of trust when it didn’t work as advertised.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you can still get measles. Vaccinations are mostly a societal benefit. They give the individual some protection but their greatest benefit is in reduction of the spread.
Death Rates by Status: In late 2021 (Delta period), unvaccinated people were approximately 11 to 17 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated.
The "Booster" Effect: Risk reduction was even greater for those with boosters. By late 2022, the CDC reported that unvaccinated adults had a 15 to 19 times higher risk of death compared to those who had received the updated bivalent booster.
Preventable Deaths: Research estimates that between May 2021 and September 2022, at least 232,000 deaths in the U.S. could have been prevented if the deceased had completed a primary vaccine series.
I'm not one to mock religions however, and covid brought out a religious type response from many on the right, and many people died because of it. There were no deaths from covid vaccine. There are no chemicals in contrails, Kirks murder was not a conspiracy.
A friend who is anti vax was very sick and his wife was hospitalized on a ventilator. Both are still vaccine conspiracists.
The OP was specifically about the COVID vaccines which are a mixed bag. More akin to the flu vaccine. Unlike the current iterations of COVID, Measles remains a nasty disease no matter how healthy you are, and the vaccine has proven efficacy of preventing the spread. Each disease/vaccine has its own cost/benefit calculation.
You’re also ignoring my points about risk factors being a primary driver for bad outcomes, that my beef is with the mandates, and that the virus became less virulent over time.
My entire point is that forcing a vaccine that does very little for healthy people and does carry side effects on the population at large depleted trust in public health in general. It a prime reason for the increase in overall vaccine hesitancy we’re seeing now.
So sorry to hear that TLP has ended. I particularly enjoyed your writing which is so even and calming. I have shared your posts many times. You and your cowriters have made a valuable contribution. Here’s hoping Ken Martin and the other Democratic powers that be have gotten the message. I enjoyed your music reviews and dog pics too. All the best.
When half the country loathes the other half, do you expect anything else?
Great article. Just one point: trust is always a two-way street. Citizens have to pay taxes, abide by the law and (ideally) vote in return. Or, that's how it works in my country. I'm not American. Oh and another point: there can be technically valid reasons for not trusting official stats, such as how they were collected and what they're actually measuring. Distrust isn't always undesirable or irrational.
Love this. The next thing is to design institutions with incentives that reinforce it. Demanding moral heroism isn't a strategy. It is morally justified, but doesn't deliver. This is about systems, not just the people in the chairs.
President Harry S. Truman, once said, “That There Isn’t A Dime’s Difference Between the Republicans and the Democrats!
Our UniParty Representatives are still enriching themselves and their families and our National Debt is now over $ 40 Trillion
President Harry S. Truman, once said, “That There Isn’t A Dime’s Difference Between the Republicans and the Democrats!
Our UniParty Representatives are still enriching themselves and their families our National Debt is now over $ 40 Trillion Dollars!
The Runaway Train is still barreling down the tracks to oblivion!
"...the work of the public sector and government agencies is often grueling, underpaid..." everyone raise your hands if you believe this.
Not raising mine.
A short while back a bunch of my buddies, and me, were sitting around a fire sipping Scotch and smoking cigars. Dems, Rs, and unaffiliates. A guy said, "raise your hand if you think everyone in government is totally corrupt." All hands went up. I once knew a senator (a school was named after her). I think she was honest, but NOTHING she did was because it was the right thing to do. It was all horsetrading and power plays. I assume that nothing I read or hear about politics is true or doesn't have a hidden agenda. Just the way it is.
Sir,
The condition you describe is real, but its cause may not lie where you have placed it.
You treat the loss of trust as a failure of performance. Agencies must operate more effectively, information must be more reliable, and leadership must better support those who carry out the functions of government. If these improvements are made, you suggest, confidence may be restored.
This assumes that trust follows competence.
Yet the difficulty appears deeper. A free government was not designed to be trusted in the manner of a well-managed enterprise. It was designed to be limited, divided, and subject to restraint. Confidence, in such a system, does not arise from the excellence of its operations, but from the assurance that no single authority may act without opposition.
When that condition weakens, trust declines for reasons that improved management cannot resolve.
You note that certain agencies retain public confidence. Those concerned with parks or scientific exploration are not generally entrusted with directing the daily conduct of citizens. Their functions are narrow, their authority limited, and their contact with the public seldom involves compulsion or controversy. They are therefore judged by their results alone.
Other institutions operate under different conditions. They interpret, enforce, and administer rules that bear directly upon the lives of those they govern. Their authority is exercised through discretion, and their decisions often produce unequal effects. In such cases, trust is not lost merely because outcomes are imperfect, but because the basis upon which those outcomes are determined is no longer clearly bounded.
The difficulty is therefore not simply that government performs poorly, but that its operations have expanded beyond the conditions under which public confidence can be sustained. Where authority is broad, continuous, and discretionary, disagreement becomes inevitable, and trust gives way to suspicion, not because the system has failed, but because it asks to be relied upon in a manner inconsistent with its design.
Your remedy seeks to restore trust by improving administration. Yet it may be asked whether trust, once extended beyond the proper limits of a free government, can be repaired by better execution alone.
A system that requires constant confidence in the judgment of those who operate it will, in time, encounter divisions that no degree of competence can overcome. For citizens do not merely differ in their evaluation of results, but in their expectations of what authority ought to decide at all.
The question, then, is not only how government may perform more effectively, but whether it has assumed responsibilities that render agreement about its performance impossible.
If so, the restoration of trust would depend less upon refinement of its operations than upon a reconsideration of its scope.
For confidence is most stable where authority is limited, and most fragile where it is expected to resolve the full range of human concerns.
— CIVIS AMERICANUS
In Oregon, the only trustworthy arm of government is DFW. Department of Fish and Wildlife. Efficient, polite, and very helpful.
That is a useful example.
Functions like that tend to be limited in scope, concrete in purpose, and judged by outcomes that are relatively easy to observe. Under those conditions, confidence can form and persist without requiring broad agreement about larger questions.
The difficulty arises as the scope of authority expands into areas where outcomes are less clear, or where citizens differ not only in their evaluation of results, but in their expectations of what should be decided at all.
In that sense, the contrast you are pointing to may not be accidental, but characteristic of the difference in the kind of responsibility being exercised.
According to the 2023 OECD Trust in Government Poll by World Population Review "The United States is well-known for many of its citizens being distrustful of the national government. The estimates largely support this notion. Americans have 30.93% trust in their government, according to the latest data – quite a drop from the 46.5% in 2020."
Your belief is incorrect; many see the federal government as a corrupt leviathan which has gone far beyond its constitutional powers. We want to see the government reduced back to the night watchman state the founders envisioned.
This is a classic, “how to reshape a government agency to our liking.” Excerpt from-
BARKING CATS - Milton Friedman, Newsweek, 19Feb73,
What would you think of someone who said, ‘I would like to have a cat, provided it barked'? Yet your statement that you favor an FDA provided it behaves as you believe desirable is precisely equivalent. The biological laws that specify the characteristics of cats are no more rigid than the political laws that specify thebehavior of governmental agencies once they are established.
The error of supposing that the behavior of social organisms can be shaped at will is widespread. It is the fundamental error of most so-called reformers. It explains why they so often believe that the fault lies in the man, not the “system,” that the way to solve problems is to “throw the rascals out” and put well-meaning people in charge. It explains why their reforms, when ostensibly achieved, so often go astray.
https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/214107/full
One big problem is that when it comes to science/public health the only statement that is “ truly neutral facts and advice” is generally: We don’t know, but here is our best guess
Even limited positive polling is rather impressive considering recent fraud revelations, following the EV and Covid debacles.
Read a few days ago, just 2 people in NYC were able to scam Medicaid out of more than $350 million dollars, since 2021. They have been billing Medicaid for thousands of treatments that were either never required or administered. They kicked back small payments to people who claimed to be patients. Moreover, they sometimes billed for people who were not US residents. Some "patients" had never set foot in the US.
NYC has a Medicaid program that allows relatives to be paid up to $60K annually for eldercare. It has basically been run on the honor system. It appears, often, numerous relatives care for the same Senior, who may or may not dwell in the US. US Taxpayers are not only financing 6 relatives caring full time for the same elderly Bangladeshi woman, the services are being provided long distance, because she is a life long Bangladesh resident.
The scope and magnitude of the omnipresent fraud and incompetence is truly unimaginable, seemingly everywhere government dollars flow.
Billions were spent on electric schools buses under Biden. They replaced perfectly functioning, safe, gas powered school buses. Fewer than 1/2 of the EV buses are now on the road. Some were never delivered due to bankruptcies, and those that actually appeared, often will not function on a regular basis. Of course the Great EV School Bus Heist is minor compared to the tens of billions lost by US auto producers forced to produced EVs, few wished to purchase.
We will never know the true scope of Covid theft, because so many trillions went out the door, with no safeguards, it is literally impossible to determine where the money went.
Who knew death and taxes, were joined by incalculable government waste and fraud, as life's only inescapable certainties?
I continue to think that, as much as they would despise it, the only hope for restoring trust must begin with Democrats in the House and Senate, first by passing the SAVE Act. People don't trust government because they first and foremost do not trust elections. Without major pieces of legislation such as this, the House and Senate will continue to become increasingly irrelevant.
Trust the vaccines! They’re safe and effective! You just need infinity boosters and you’ll still get Covid anyway!
What a joke that was.
For people able to read, and with an interest, the information regarding covid and boosters was fairly transparent and readily available. The vaccines were safe and effective, contrails are not laced with chemicals, and there is no Charlie Kirk conspiracy.
- mask mandates even though it was never established that Covid spreads by droplets (we now know that Covid is airborne, not droplet, which means the particles are so small that only N95 masks filter them).
- spreading sand on skateparks, arresting surfers
- not letting churches have socially distanced outdoor worship but letting leftists have all the BLM riots they want - a major violation of the first amendment
- masks for children, which were never justified because children are essentially immune to Covid
- fired people for not getting the vaccine, even if they had measurable antibodies from natural immunity
- made people provide ID and proof of vaccine to eat dinner at restaurants (although we can't have ID to vote because that's racist)
- lockdowns that caused a global recession and put many small firms out of business
- remote learning in schools that both (1) created a permanent learning loss in children that has still not bounced back 6 years later, (2) widened the gap between blacks and whites (because teacher's unions imposed more remote learning on black school districts with weaker parent advocates)
- never did human challenge trials even though they would have sped up the vaccine testing by six months and saved countless lives. Every time conservatives did something leftists didn't like they were met with the charge of "killing grandma"
- waited 2 weeks to analyze the vaccine data because they didn't want to give Trump a major win right before the election. They should have announced within 24 hours of the data being available.
The COVID vaccines are effective at reducing hospitalizations and deaths, which made them a godsend that saved the lives of people in high risk groups especially against the initial strain, which was nasty. They provided minimal benefit to young healthy people against the initial strain and no benefit to the healthy by the time it had evolved into omicron which was just another case of the crud. The myocarditis risk to young males is real and nasty.
They have no efficacy at preventing the spread of the disease and as such never should have been mandated. This is a classic example of what KDB wrote about below. When you force someone to take a vaccine and they still contract the disease, they will never trust you again.
I get my Covid vac regularly. I haven't caught Covid since 2020, and then it was nothing. I'm 74. People around me get Covid but I don't. Not a big universe (1), and merely anecdotal. Just sayin'.
OK, but because of your age you were deemed high risk so congrats on getting the shot. But why did healthy people have to quarantine?? My doctor doesn't even recommend it any more. Do you remember the video of a screaming, crying, writhing baby and a daycare worker forcing a mask on him/her? How stupid would you have to trust that the government knew what it was doing?
The efficacy endpoints for the clinical trials were reductions in hospitalizations and deaths. That’s it. There is zero clinical evidence that the vaccine reduces transmission and plenty of anecdotal evidence that it doesn’t. E.g. COVID tore through our entire family a month and an half after we all got shot #3. The teenagers were all mild to asymptomatic. My wife and I each spent a day on the couch. I was back to lifting by day 3 and HIIT by day 5. A year later everyone but me got shot 4 and when COVID hit us a few months later I was the only one who didn’t test positive.
I’m not saying don’t get it, especially if you have a risk factor like age. I’m simply saying that mandating it based on the data at hand was unconscionable, and created a lack of trust when it didn’t work as advertised.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you can still get measles. Vaccinations are mostly a societal benefit. They give the individual some protection but their greatest benefit is in reduction of the spread.
Death Rates by Status: In late 2021 (Delta period), unvaccinated people were approximately 11 to 17 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated.
The "Booster" Effect: Risk reduction was even greater for those with boosters. By late 2022, the CDC reported that unvaccinated adults had a 15 to 19 times higher risk of death compared to those who had received the updated bivalent booster.
Preventable Deaths: Research estimates that between May 2021 and September 2022, at least 232,000 deaths in the U.S. could have been prevented if the deceased had completed a primary vaccine series.
I'm not one to mock religions however, and covid brought out a religious type response from many on the right, and many people died because of it. There were no deaths from covid vaccine. There are no chemicals in contrails, Kirks murder was not a conspiracy.
A friend who is anti vax was very sick and his wife was hospitalized on a ventilator. Both are still vaccine conspiracists.
The OP was specifically about the COVID vaccines which are a mixed bag. More akin to the flu vaccine. Unlike the current iterations of COVID, Measles remains a nasty disease no matter how healthy you are, and the vaccine has proven efficacy of preventing the spread. Each disease/vaccine has its own cost/benefit calculation.
You’re also ignoring my points about risk factors being a primary driver for bad outcomes, that my beef is with the mandates, and that the virus became less virulent over time.
My entire point is that forcing a vaccine that does very little for healthy people and does carry side effects on the population at large depleted trust in public health in general. It a prime reason for the increase in overall vaccine hesitancy we’re seeing now.