Jacob Hacker author of The Great Risk Shift spoke on Oct. 27 at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park Ca. trying to raise individual awareness of how government, industry, and institutions such as insurers are passing risk to individuals least able to cope. His talk didn't go far enough in my opinion in revealing how rich and powerful groups get the individual to unwittingly accept risk when it is intentionally disguized in fine print or glossed over in complexity designed to make it hard to see it for what it is. Aside from fraud or assuming a risk such as an interest-free mortgage because one is overly optimistic about the future, risk is nickel and dimed in our direction either through the details of contracts an individual is least inclined to read throughly or institutionally in the legislative process by the sheer complexity of disclosure.
It is the complexity itself that comprises an unfair advantage to the rich and powerful and disclosure alone does not protect the indivudual from being defrauded. Surely, if you have a legal staff you can wade through the complex verbage of a lengthy contract or text of a proposed law and find out if it workes for you. The State Ballot Proposition process in California and elsewhere is a case of this in reverse. By exposing the votors to the true complexity of the legislative process in the guize of creating more democracy the special interests, the wealthy, the PACs, the lawyers, know from the outset that the average person will get confused and discouraged by the text of the proposed law, especially if the proposed law is constructed to confuse. Can the impulse on the part of votors to vote "no" on every proposition rather than accepting the risk of being duped be far off? Or if the votors get annoyed with the barrage of advertizing which now begins about six months to a year before each election, then out of sheer disgust, they will vote against either the proposition or the group that spent the most money, either approach makes sense.
I wonder if this complexity is the weight that causes civilizations to collapse. At least one componant of large scale change during times of revolution is a purging of the accmulatted precidents and the interest groups who are protected by them. A concept of law based on principles and precidents is what most people point to, but rearely do they add that from time to time there has to be a clensing and smplification of the codes. People are unhappy with the U.S. Congress beause it is corrupt and it doesn't address their interests. It is more that it seems to do so little, that angers people, than that there is corruption. A little graft is more acceptable than the belief that Congress is not helping us or even that it is working against us. Legislatures add to complexity by modifying existing law and not removing old law. It is the sheer weight of law that has to be delt with which disadvantages legislatures and in the tension of power grab between the Executive and Legislatitive, the former knows that he can get the upper hand by making the job of the latter more complex.
Thomas Jefferson said that there needed to be a bloodless revolution every 70 years or so. America seems to have the shifts in power usually only following a panic or economic depression as if it is a big failure in the private sector which beings everybody around in a like mindedness about attending to public policy. Or is it that plotocrats, with their ability to use complexity and confusion to keep factions off balance, are temporarily weakened by hard times, and the rest of us, individual citizens, become united in need and are able to put the Fear of God in legislators to listen to us?
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