Americans Can Hold Contradictions – Why Not Lawmakers

Anyone bent on loosening regulations on water quality and environmental protection overall is well advised to look at the new Harris Poll.

It shows that 77% of Americans support stricter environmental protection, a ratio of more than 3-to-1. This includes 58% of Republicans.

Showing the strength of those sentiments, those who feel strongly are 4 to 1 in favor of stricter environmental protection.

Americans also support less government regulation by a ratio of 2.4 to 1, including 57% of Democrats and 76% of Independents.

Those who feel strongly are 4.6-to-1 in favor of less government regulation.

Of course, according to Republican friends of mine who have held high office, opposition in that party is more about the fact that regulations aren’t being enforced and when they are, all too often it is unevenly.

So why is it then, that seemingly well-intended Republican lawmakers at the state and national level seem so indiscriminate when it comes to what they call regulation reform?

Some pundits speculate that it is a passive-aggressive reaction among those who have not had to actually govern before.  Others think it is because they hear or listen only to an eco-chamber of confirmation bias.

Others fear it is due to “solution aversion,” or what’s called “motivated skepticism.”

But it might be as simple as the inability for many people to “hold contradictions in creative tension,” a condition that seems to escalate when people are elected to high office where they become adversarial listeners.

It’s the same discomfort that prevents so many of us from thinking strategically, a discomfort with uncertainty, paradox and ambiguity.

There is a term for the inability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously.  Researchers In psychology call it cognitive dissonance.

It makes some elected officials seem suddenly too stupid to accept what their constituents obviously can, the seeming paradoxical views that we need stricter environmental protection and less government regulation.

Or is it that special interests won’t let them?

The issue of gun rights is another example.  By a margin of 59% to 41%, Americans support stricter gun control including more than a third of Republicans.

Americans opposed to stricter gun measures also include 43% of Independents and 20% of Democrats.

Those who feel strongly in favor of stricter gun control (38%) outnumber those strongly opposed (24%) according to the Harris poll.

Even more telling though, according to recent Pew poll, is that even a majority of NRA member households while adamant about protecting gun rights are also heavily (74%) in favor some measures of gun control such as background checks for private gun sales.

In fact, a third also support bans on assault-style weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips.

Political ideology has been defined as “an interrelated set of moral and political attitudes that possesses cognitive, affective, and motivational components.”

It may be useful as a means to funnel and align ideas but it can also make us blind to subtleties and contradictions we hold.  At its worst though, in the words of Pope Francis, it makes us “hostile and arrogant” as well as stupid.

Many of us want desperately for our states and nation to be led by lawmakers who can hold contradictions such as those I’ve used as examples in this essay but that will mean more than a swing of the pendulum of whose in the majority.

As Americans, we each need to be better at expressing the contradistinctions we hold rather than just hoping elected officials more diligently read opinion polls.

In his extraordinary book entitled Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit, Dr. Parker J. Palmer, a Quaker educator and writer, notes that five interwoven habits of the heart are needed.

He uses two words to summarize all five: “chutzpah and humility.”

By chutzpah he means having “a voice that needs to be heard and the right to speak it.”

By humility he means “accepting the fact that my truth is always partial and may not be true at all – so I need to listen with openness and respect, especially to “the other,” as much as I need to speak my own voice with clarity and conviction.”

Usually, anyone running for office has the first on steroids.

When we elect representatives, I dare say that it is the latter that should guide our choice.

How Small Business Comes To Be So Misrepresented

There is one discovery I find especially intriguing when I drill down into surveys of businesses such as Bloomberg’s, which goes deep enough to reveal the sentiments of truly small businesses.

These are the concerns that make up 90% of small businesses nationwide, those that employ 5 or fewer employees including all startups.  Seventy percent are owned and operated by a single person.

Three-quarters, according to other polls, rely on locals for all or most of their business, making them the very backbone of economic development.

These so-called micro businesses, according to Gallup, make up an incredible 80% of all businesses in the United States.  Some calculations go as high as 92% by expanding the definition to include those that employ 10 or fewer employees.

Don’t even ask why the so-called Small Business Administration still defines small businesses in general by metrics as large as 500 employees.

But I have a hunch, that similar to the way official dietary recommendations were originally established, it was originally superimposed by special interests and politicians, not science.

However, these truly small businesses generate 7 of every 10 new jobs.

Fostering and fueling the retention and growth of these micro businesses is the “low-hanging fruit of economic development” overlooked by communities firmly addicted to providing incentives to larger but less fruitful concerns.

A study in 2012 found that micro businesses of 5 or fewer employees directly employed 26 million Americans and indirectly supported another 1.9 million jobs while inducing 13.4 million other jobs.

But these concerns don’t often show up on the radar or in the actions of self-described business advocacy organizations such as chambers of commerce.

Neither do they typically show up in any representative sample during public hearings regarding pending legislation.

While they are claimed as a cause celeb by many along the spectrum of political ideology, the sentiment that tells me these small businesses are not being accurately represented is how they regard government regulations.

In fact, in North Carolina, the political party now in power, often uses this group as an excuse to unravel these public protections.

However surveys such as the one conducted for Bloomberg, show that only 2.2% of these concerns rank complying with government regulations as one of their top problems, making it 10th on the list of concerns among small businesses in North Carolina.

The percentage with this view nationwide is 2.6%.

So what segment of business are Republicans really representing when they seek to undermine public protections in the name of being business friendly?

Well it isn’t large employers in North Carolina where it is a top concern for only 4.7%, making it 7th on their list of concerns and hardly emblematic for what partisan elected officials claim.

Nationwide, the view is held by only 4.3% of large employers, making it 9th on the list.

Taxes aren’t much of a concern either, ranking a top concern among only 7% of small businesses and 4.7% of large employers in North Carolina.

Of far more concern to small businesses are issues such as access to capital where studies show they are largely reliant on small, local banks which are being squeezed out of business by mid-sized and large banks.

Small, community-based financial institutions now have just 24% of overall banking assets and yet they make 60% of all small business loans while giant banks now control 59% of all banking assets and yet make only 23% of small business loans.

The reason is so-called regulation reform and the silence among the elected officials responsible is deafening.  This is in part because of the feed-back loop they helped create.

For instance, while only 2% of small businesses have regulations as an issue, nonetheless for having been caught for years in an echo chamber, this is one of the top two issues that Republicans say will influence their vote.

Just don’t blame small businesses.

So what is really forcing concerns of far less concern to small and large businesses alike, such as taxes and regulations, to the very top of the list for the Republican majority now dominating North Carolina’s three branches of government?

How does an ideology, any ideology, so often find itself so narrow in its representation?

I have witnessed personally, that in some cases, this happens when elected officials come to think it is their opinions they should push rather than those of their constituents.

I have also been privy to how large blocks of elected officials begin to view their constituency more as the special interests that financed their campaigns rather than all voters.

It doesn’t take much to form a vacuum-sealed feedback loop, especially when special interests have lobbyists that seemingly vote their opinions every single day at the state capitol while voters, in general, officially only get to weigh in every few years.

Cities that have taken the lead to require a livable wage aren’t just avoiding these feedback loops, they are fully disaggregating and examining the sentiments of employers rather than just listening to those who pay people to attend meetings.

This is an idea still novel to many officials.  But it is more complicated than that.

An understanding of how an entire political party or ideology can become out of step with business owners and other voters can be found in a paper published by Duke University business and psychology researchers.

It is entitled “Solution Aversion: On the Relation Between Ideology and Motivated Disbelief”, and weaves together a series of behavior studies.

“Solution aversion” explains a lot about how organizations such as business advocacy groups and elected officials can become so estranged from the views of their constituents.

It isn’t just because very few constituents have time to attend meetings or the patience to deal with the games played by those who do.

It is because we can all form cherished beliefs and then ideologically align with people who share those same beliefs based on biases rather than information in such a way that we are led to pair solutions and problems, not based on empirical and generalizable information, but on fear.

For anyone caught in an ideology or belief system that seems averse to solutions or trapped in positions where the same old worn out solutions are recycled with the same disappointing results, whether it be in business or politics or religion, this paper is an extremely worthwhile read.

It’s Healthy to be Skeptical, Just Not Cynical

Whenever I come across global warming/climate change deniers, I try to carefully listen or read what they have to say.

Some don’t really deny it’s happening.

They believe we’ll just overcome it somehow as we have major crises in the past without seeing that those were ultimately overcome by action, after being made worse by waiting.

I used warming/change in my opening because a new Yale University study shows that Americans feel a sense of urgency when the term global warming is used.

Which, in part, is why more than a decade ago savvy Republican researchers suggested the substitution of “climate change” to make it seem less threatening.

That warm and fuzzy approach to global warming turned out as predicted to not only divide Americans but cause 1-in-5 to be not at all worried (p. 16.)

As an Independent I may have been cynical about the motives of “professional confusers” behind today’s gridlock but now having read this memo I’m not even skeptical.

Ironically, the 2002 Republican research called for a flip-flop.

A decade earlier conservatives had teamed in a bipartisan effort under the first Republican President Bush to break a 13-year logjam by deploying market-based “cap and trade” to successfully curb another harmful emission.

In 2002 there wasn’t the overwhelming scientific consensus there is today that climate change/global warming is a real and present danger or that it is due to human actions above and beyond natural causes over the last 250 years, especially the last 60.

If you are a skeptic who happened to read this far, you may want to read the research by scientists at Berkley Earth who until recently were also skeptical.

It is summarized their new report entitled, Know The Facts: A Skeptic’s Guide to Climate Change.

Then again, studies of “motivated reasoning” find that in many people skepticism is really a cognitive cover used to deflect unwelcome information.

This is especially true when it is sincerely held that what ordinary people believe will not make a policy difference.

Showing irrationality is often rarely enough to “induce individuals to process information in a different way.”

There is a difference between being skeptical and being cynical.

Skeptics have reservations.  Cynics believe others are motivated by selfish concerns and don’t believe in altruism or even honesty.

If you’ve never been into reading and understanding various philosophical outlooks, a new book illustrates each one instead, entitled Philographics.

Deniers often fall into both categories though it seems more often the latter while global warming believers sometimes can get caught up in being cynical about deniers.

New science shows that cynics on both sides run a much higher risk of dementia, especially perhaps those cynical about scientific studies.  The study also shows that cynics won’t die any earlier, perhaps they just won’t remember.

That 2002 Republican research memo predicted more than a decade ago what a new Yale study confirms: use of the terms global warming and climate change are synonymous to Republicans and Conservatives (or as we Independents often joke, is that now redundant?)

But the term climate change “actually reduces engagement” among Independents, Democrats, moderates and liberals.  Fortunately, groups that will soon dominate elections such as minorities and young adults light up when global warming is used instead.

And that might be why global warming is still the most used by Americans personally, as well as in the news media, and in conversation according to the Yale study.

The Berkley Earth report meant for climate change/global warming skeptics includes a breakdown of what events are unrelated, e.g. tornados and earthquakes.

Hurricanes, droughts, forest fires and floods may change due to global warming/climate change but the amount hasn’t been established.

There is a link established to increased heat waves and coastal flooding.

New research also shows that global warming is not only reducing snow pack where water has historically been stored until released into rivers and reservoirs each spring, the means by which 1-in-6 people worldwide receive fresh drinking water.

But paradoxically, the resulting switchover to rainfall also means these water ways are less full in part because it is held in place by soil instead.

Sitting idle, we are likely to see much more rainfall but much less available for human use for drinking water.  This also mean less available for electrical power and agriculture.

Of course the use of climate science has been outlawed for the time being by the legislature in North Carolina because it was inconvenient for a few coastal land developers.

And some members of Congress are trying to do the same regarding military research which over the last 60 years has been the foundation of nearly all of the technological changes driving American innovation.

Fortunately, corporations are paying no heed and building the price of reversing global warming into strategic plans. Nor are many states.

Nine northeast states which banded together to cap emissions in 2009 have seen their economies grow faster than the other states while reducing greenhouse gas emissions nearly five times quicker.

A similar combine of five western states and two Canadian provinces fell apart after conservatives seized control in 2010.  But British Columbia in 2010 and California last year moved ahead.

Regressives such as those banning the use of studies on global warming and other research are easy to spot.

Even those who make it onto the governing boards of much smaller organizations where research is a core value are obvious by using every opportunity to demean it and to starve it of resources and focus.

All conservatives are not regressives, nor are all regressives conservatives. What they have in common is a disdain for research and resistance to progress.

In the words of the famous Brooklyn Dodgers then Yankees announcer Red Barber, “back, back, back, back (smile.)”

Regressives in the North Carolina General Assembly today are failing to head the warnings in that landmark 2002 research for Republicans, because that would, uh, be using scientific research.

It warns that while conservative attempts to negatively brand environmentalists had been successful by 2002, Americans as a whole remain overwhelmingly sensitive about the environment.

They just prefer instead labels such as pro-environment and conservationist.

The memo warns that “when we [Republicans] talk about ‘rolling back regulations’ involving the environment, we [Republicans] are sending a message Americans don’t support” and when it comes to regulations, Americans are “most comfortable with local oversight.”

The last part is lost on North Carolina regressives seeking every means possible to strip local governments of any oversight while demonizing science and regulations meant in the publics interest.

Not all narcissists in high office (found in greater proportion and much further up the spectrum than the general populace) are regressives, but uber narcissism among regressives may explain their claim “we don’t give a damn how many people this hurts.”

Oops, I hear someone banging on my door but keep the faith.  Whoever it is that thinks I’m part of a conspiracy probably won’t remember long.

Probing the Pluralistic Small Business Views

Having spent the better part of four decades working with local businesses, one thing I know is that they have always exhibited far more diversity of opinion than represented by the news media or associations portending to represent them.

State and national associations often give a distorted impression to policy makers and news media by disguising that their misuse of the term small business is dominated by the concerns of companies with hundred of employees and tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

Further distorting the views of small business, association legislative committees and related PACs are often hijacked by cabals of narrow viewpoints of formulaic-type businesses unrepresentative of the either the membership or businesses of that type in general.

A quick check of their membership lists or board members, which reporters and elected official seem to rarely do before giving credence to their claims, reveals that most are using the term small business only as a disguise.

What most of us think of as small businesses are now called micro businesses.  These have around 5 or fewer employees.  The majority have annual revenues of $100,000 or less and most never want to grow beyond 10 employees.

They are primarily sole proprietorships, far more likely than other businesses to be locally based with owners living in the same community as their business.  About half depend at first, on another job.  Half are based outside the home as they grow.

About a third of microbusinesses depend primarily on locals for their business but 4-on-10 rely on a mix of locals and visitors including day-trippers from surrounding areas and clients outside the community.

Micro businesses are the backbone and true drivers of local economies.

In North Carolina where I live, micro businesses represent nearly 60% of all business establishments and more than 60% of those considered small businesses overall.

Rarely are they members of local chambers of commerce which today are dominated by much larger concerns many with mid-level executives who are paid to attend meetings, many watching out for special interests.

Chambers often complain that the threshold small and micro businesses can pay to be members is too low to provide the services they need.  In desperate need of membership revenues they turn to larger businesses instead.

Truly small or micro businesses rarely find time away from the cash register for meetings of any type, let alone getting involved in the push and shove of politics.

Their voice is also not found in the positions taken by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (no relation to local chambers) or most state chambers.

Without typically charging a fee, community marketing organizations, most of which are apolitical, usually incorporate all businesses regardless of size under their promotional umbrella.

The handful that still firewall benefits behind outdated membership models continues to shrivel.

Guess which approach is more customer-driven?  These are also the DMOs that are far more effective on behalf of the communities they serve.  Of course, most community marketing organization migrated to or were founded with self-funding models years ago.

That community marketing organizations incorporate small and micro businesses under their tent is significant because surveys show that to grow and thrive, their greatest need, outside of capital, is marketing.

Showing the diversity of opinion among small and micro businesses are two Gallup tracking polls, one with Wells Fargo as a partner which uses a cut off of $20 million in revenues and a new one focused on truly small or micro businesses with Sam’s Club as a partner.

The Wells Fargo definition captures 80% of all business establishments with employees, small to the size of a mega-bank maybe.

The definition for Sam’s Club’s new tracker captures micro business owners which, according to Gallup, represents 80% of business owners overall including the 44% that do not employ anyone other than themselves.  This excludes hobbyists or paper only businesses.

Micro business is now far more representative of the definition of small business.

Showing the pluralism of views among small business owners under either definition is a comparison of views regarding an increase to the minimum wage.

The Wells Fargo index found that nearly half of those surveyed had no problem with raising the minimum wage.  More than 4-in-10 felt it would help most small business employees and another quarter felt it would have little effect.

A similar proportion believed it would have no effect on small business or might actually help them.

Of course these findings escape those in Congress pushed to block the increase by those lobbyists who feign to represent small business there.

Another more recent poll probed much deeper down into truly small businesses, including micro businesses in the state of New York, and found that 74% support raising the minimum wage and indexing it to rise with the cost of living.

A similar percentage agreed that cities and towns should be able to set the minimum wage even higher.

By political affiliation 45% identified themselves as Republicans, 40% as Democrats and 15% as independent or other.

Republicans and Independents who lean Republican may claim they represent business but over time their numbers have included only about 4-in-10 small business owners, just a notch or two different than the ratio of those who identify themselves as Democrats.

Survey findings by associations of the political affiliations of small business members often skew differently depending on the ideology the association uses to recruit members.

But even polls of those that skew right show, for instance, that only 1-in-3 members express concern to elected officials with hopes of reducing and reforming government regulation.

This hardly makes it the hot button issue that legislators in states such as North Carolina claim to justify gutting state and local regulations.

Even polls by those in sympathy show that a far greater proportion of members just want existing regulations to be actively, fairly and evenly administered.

Polls by less ideological associations including pioneers of the micro business definition show that more than 3-in-4 members felt regulations on the books should be enforced, especially those that an even larger ratio felt were important to protect business.

While special interest “whiners” are using pretense to undermine the North Carolina Environmental Bill of Rights that voters embedded in the constitution by a vote of 7-to-1, it is clear they are not representative of North Carolinians in general or those who own small or micro businesses.

Serious members on both sides of the aisle know that any concern about regulations is only solved by energetic, passionate, fair and even enforcement by the executive branch, unfettered by interference by special interests or legislative allies.

Only 20% of micro businesses worry about regulations, a percentage similar to those who worry about taxes.  Of more concern is consumer demand and the rising cost of supplies and materials. 

It is clear that a recent op-ed by a small business owner advocating for a more livable minimum wage is representative of the majority of small and micro businesses.

More certain is that the viewpoints of small and micro businesses are far more pluralistic than the impression we're given.

The Privatization of Regulations & Sustainability

According to a new report on sustainability trends by the network 2degrees, the primary aim by companies and organizations for taking a sustainable business approach is cost savings 53%, followed by regulatory compliance 46%, reputation 39% and branding 38%.

But of those businesses and organizations that put sustainability as a central, strategic focus, brand and reputation also leapfrog compliance, a signal that sustainability is considered first and foremost, just good business.

Some, as I will share below, are even privatizing regulations to establish higher standards.

This movement also leaves the “whiner economy” more transparent.  These are the special business interest lobbies who are bottom feeders.  These are the interests that feel their only way to create value is to undermine government and sustainability.

By this, I mean they hammer public servants into submission and open their wallets wider and wider to influence election campaigns as a means to secure favorable legislation at the expense of the public interest.  This includes lowering the bar as every opportunity.

Of those businesses and organizations focused on cost savings as the reason to be sustainable, 57% put energy efficiency as the top priority, 50% put reducing waste at the top and 25% want to reduce or improve water usage.

Among businesses and organizations of various types, retail is leading the way with sustainability as a central focus (41%,) ahead of telecoms/media (39%,) utilities, heavy industries and even government (37%,) and far above finance (15%,) and logistics (13%.)

Engaging management and co-workers remains the biggest hurdle to sustainability efforts including, as there is with local governments in Durham, North Carolina where I live, a huge disconnect between sustainability goals and budgets to reach them.

This is a strategic failure.

A long-time friend of mine was an executive at a major router manufacturer for many years and involved in the company’s first cross-functional teams responsible for making packaging more sustainable.

He jokes to me that when they did their first assessment, it seemed as though those responsible had set out to make the company’s product packaging as environmentally unfriendly as possible.

It made me take a close look at the environmental performance reviews and reports that Apple, now #6 on the Fortune 500, provides on each of its products including the one at this link for the iPhone 5s.

Even more telling is the company’s newest Supplier Responsibility Report.  It covers not only the environment but health and safety performance, education and empowerment of workers, labor and human rights, business ethics and most interesting, accountability and performance audit results.

In addition to the results of 451 annual audits at all levels of its supply chain, Apple released for the first time 100 pages of its comprehensive requirements for suppliers.  In other words, Apple has set up its own system of regulations as well as compliance transparency.

At the very time that the “whiner economy” is fast at work in states like North Carolina seeking to undermine regulations, high-value, global concerns like Apple are not only practicing sustainability as good business but raising the bar for the businesses in its huge, global supplier network by raising the bar with its own, tougher regulations.

Elected officials and public servants at every level who are obsessed with deregulation need to read this best practice report.  They are going in the wrong direction.  But they know that.  For many, it is purposeful.

Elected officials and regulators should also take a look at the ethics practices and systems requirements Apple requires of its suppliers including audits of business integrity, disclosure, handling of complaints and protection of intellectual property.

I suspect those with interests in roadside billboards who pushed through a sacrifice of publicly owned roadside forests would fail the test to be a supplier for Apple products such as smartphones and tablets.

Unfortunately, it is this cozy relationship with special interests that will undermine any reaction to the tragic chemical and toxic sludge spills recently in West Virginia and North Carolina.

Maybe until democracy is restored and decisions made in the public rather than private interest, we’d all be far better off under Apple management.

Just sayin’.

Open Source Rule-Making

“The problem with ‘self-regulation’ is that it’s usually ‘no regulation’.”

 Seth Godwin

My involvement in scenic preservation since retiring four years ago from a forty year-career in visitor-centric economic development has given me a front row seat on how regulations evolve, at least in North Carolina, and it isn’t what I thought.

Equally distressing has been learning of the lack of vigor with which they are enforced at the federal level when states and their constituent counties violate or end-run agreements such as those related to the Highway Beautification Act.

A variety of studies by experts explain why this is the case, but also why it is counterintuitive to what those in high office seem to think. But while drilling down, I’ve also come across some future solutions.

Many politicians attack regulations in the name of being pro-business, others defend them as being necessary to compensate for marketplace failures, especially where costs are not fully incorporated by the market but are instead pushed off on the general public.

Economists call these negative externalities.

The latter view is called the “public interest” approach, which is how I have always naively viewed regulations.  But there is a far more insidious rationale called “public choice,” which turns out to be much more prevalent now.

This “public choice” approach refers to the fact that, once enacted, regulations and the very agencies in charge of imposing and enforcing them are “captured by the businesses and industries they are supposed to regulate.”

Often, as has been the case with outdoor billboard companies, regulatory “capture” is gained with the complicity by billboard interests in elected office which in North Carolina were deemed by their peers not to have a conflict of interest because the benefits will accrue to all billboard companies, not just to the billboard owners behind the legislation or regulations.

This convoluted reasoning is why transparency isn’t what it is so often cracked up to be and as shown in studies, often serves as an enabler for others to cross the line, a shady quid pro quo.

An excellent study published in 2006 revealed that business interests have far greater influence in regulatory rule-making than either public interest groups or the general public, more than twice as much, and not because their input was more substantive.

Ironically, or maybe cynically, Republican candidates seem prone to pose the issue of regulatory reform as being pro-business.

Democratic party candidates often defend regulations as being pro-consumer but seem to fail to understand that this is the very reason regulatory reform as a means to cleanse them of “capture” should be so important as a bipartisan issue.

The news media, as with most things counterintuitive, usually settles for just parroting “bumper sticker” slogans. Unraveling misperceptions such as this must seem too daunting.  So regulatory reform is often reported with little or no penetrating analysis and never with persistence.

This all clouds the issue of regulatory reform which has real day-to-day consequences.

While it doesn’t explicitly account for “externalities,” an excellent analysis co-authored by Dr. John Dawson, a peer with my friend Dr. Dana Clark who heads the hospitality degree program at Appalachian State University’s Walker School of Business, calculates that federal regulations have reduced economic growth by 2% a year between 1949, the year after I was born and 2005.

Regulations in the public interest are meant to act as a sort of hidden tax on activities where the free market fails to account for negative costs that are pushed off onto the general public instead.  But because the regulations aren’t revisited for simplification or to simplify or remedy unintended consequences, they often fail in that purpose.

Regulatory reform is far from simple even when genuinely and/or astutely undertaken.

Findings from studies about regulatory reform among states are mixed as to whether legislatures or governors are more effective, but most give the nod to governors.  Courts are shown to play an ineffective role, especially where judges are elected such as in North Carolina.

Here, the legislature set up a commission to oversee rule-making, but failed to insulate it from partisanship, abuse of power by individual legislators or “capture-driven” by business interests.  Unfortunately, this commission often pretends to be a court, although unauthorized.

Recent regulatory legislation starts off with a few pages of just that. Then it succumbs to six times that number of pages filled with “regulatory capture” by extremely narrow “whiner” business interests.

This legislation sets back true regulatory reform by decades.  You can often see these same “whiner” interests at work in a local chamber of commerce.

Years ago, committees in these member-driven local business advocacy organizations were carefully balanced to represent all interests including the general public’s and that of the communities whose business climates they were meant to represent. 

Many have now devolved to be havens for self-appointed committees of “whiners” working to end run more legitimate forums that are free of conflicts of interest, or worse, to push on behalf of special interests including the “capture” of regulatory rule-making.

Executives who once safeguarded the integrity of these organizations from whiners now often enable them instead or lead ambushes in hopes of gaining a member or two.

Rather than pro-business, many groups like this are complicit in regulatory “capture” and anathema to business climates.

They would have been well served to have attended a one-day symposium last spring at NYU’s Stern School of Business entitled “Darwin’s Business: New Evolutionary Thinking About Cooperation, Groups, Firms and Societies.”

In writing recently about the event in Forbes, Stern business professor Dr. Jonathan Haidt and Binghamton University biology professor Dr. David Sloan Wilson noted that:

“…people have been applying Darwin to business since Darwin’s day, but they applied a cramped and crippled version, assuming that Darwinism’s primary postulate was that the strong do (and should) crush the weak.”

Instead, evolution is actually far more about cooperation.  Haidt provides Chapter 9 of his best seller The Righteous Mind as background to this notion, which is highly recommended to anyone interested in legitimate regulatory reform.

The Stern School of Business is the first to think about and seriously relate modern evolutionary science to the world of business.  Visit Evolution: This View of Life or click here for snippets as well as full-length versions of the talks at the spring symposium held at Stern. 

Integral to regulatory reform should be the notion of “coopetition,” a term we used during my now-concluded career in community destination marketing.

It refers to the integration of cooperation with competition.  What is good for public interest is good business, what is good for business must be in the public interest.

Regulatory reform is critical.  As a society we can no longer afford regulatory “capture,” a form of hostage taking.

We must break the strangle-hold that narrow-interest whiners have among business interests and on regulatory rule-making.  This means rebalancing business groups, agencies and elected officials to pursue only the most practical, proven and cost-effective regulations possible.

This means regulations that are both in the broader public and business interests.

But since regulatory rule-making is now dominated by business interests, often to the detriment of business in general, a good start for any effort at regulatory reform would do well to begin with Dr. Haidt’s overview entitled “Working With Human Nature To Improve Business Ethics.

Another intriguing idea is open-source regulatory reform and rule-making.  A good overview of how this might work is gained by listening to a TED talk by Beth Simone Noveck who led President Obama’s Open Government Initiative who also founded the “Do Tank.”

Three years ago, the President issued a an executive order to improve regulations and rule-making.  It called required government agencies among other things to (underlining is mine):

(1) propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify its costs (recognizing that some benefits and costs are difficult to quantify);

(2) tailor its regulations to impose the least burden on society, consistent with obtaining regulatory objectives, taking into account, among other things, and to the extent practicable, the costs of cumulative regulations;

(3) select, in choosing among alternative regulatory approaches, those approaches that maximize net benefits (including potential economic, environmental, public health and safety, and other advantages; distributive impacts; and equity);

(4) to the extent feasible, specify performance objectives, rather than specifying the behavior or manner of compliance that regulated entities must adopt; and (5) identify and assess available alternatives to direct regulation, including providing economic incentives to encourage the desired behavior, such as user fees or marketable permits, or providing information upon which choices can be made by the public.

More importantly, the President called for more public involvement in regulations and rule-making, a 21st Century approach.  In a related move he issued an order opening up government data for public and private use.

As noted by Noveck in her speech, what we have done to involve the public until now is primarily with voting and juries. This is much too slow and cumbersome in today’s world.

In her speech, she gives a number of examples where open source government is at work, including the U.S. Patent Office and states such as Texas which use “policy wikis” to craft better regulations and policies and to simplify the ones that exist.

It is not about privatization or transparency, both of which have serious drawbacks.  She gives a number of examples.  There may not yet be legal precedent for open-source government but there should be.

I think she is on to something.

Hubris Is The New Tyranny

I believe regulatory reform is necessary, not because I agree with the 4% of Americans who believe they are too regulated, but because I believe any regulation needs periodic performance evaluation.

A month ago, I was listening to my grandsons play at a Washington lake, a mile as the crow flies from the border with Northern Idaho.  I read a lot and even more next to a Rocky Mountain lake.  Two things I was reading struck me that day.

One was the so-called North Carolina Regulatory Reform Act of 2013 (referred to as House Bill 74,) the second was the just-released 2013 Economic Values Survey of Americans.  One does a disservice to regulatory reform, the other sheds light on the values we as Americans have on issues such as that.

One was driven by anecdotes and special interests, the other scientific and generalizable.

The first few pages of the North Carolina bill are indeed a step toward regulatory reform.  The other 60 pages more than justify a veto of the bill by North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory.

Stuffed with gross and vindictive overreactions to petty grievances, the bill violates the values of the vast majority of members of his party and very possibly even the state constitution while aggrieving every North Carolinian.

In my opinion, as a moderate Independent,  regulatory reform should periodically ensure regulations are being robustly executed and that the enforcement is not only even-handed but nimble.

Reform should also update and streamline regulations, purge them of pollution by special interests or political corruption and embed metrics to ensure cost-effectiveness.

Of greatest need regarding regulations is establishing a much more transparent, easy to understand and non-political process.  Much of what was dumped into HB 74 was to appease whiners and special interest lobbyists whose influence continues throughout the process of re-writing regulations.

Tragically, if signed, it comes at the expense of the general public and taxpayers.

Published last month, the 2013 Economic Values Survey is a much more scientific and accurate reflection of the way Americans think about things such as regulation.  Only 4% think we are too regulated by government.  I suspect even that percentage would not approve of what special interests dumped into legislation in my state.

The hubris that polluted the regulatory reform bill in North Carolina may be reflected in the survey,  which shows that roughly one-quarter (26%) of Americans say that people like them take absolutely no benefit from government.

This percentage zooms to close to half of Tea Party members and more than a third of Republicans and 35% of white working-class Americans.  Really?  They get no benefit from even such things as roads, schools, clean air and water?  Nothing?

One thing the majority of Americans agree on (by 6-in-10) is that government should do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor and take care of people who can’t care for themselves.  This holds consistent across all groups including white working-class Americans.

Millennials, by 7-in-10, even support “universal” healthcare insurance.

Americans have concerns about Capitalism with 9% believing it is working well and 16% not at all.  Forty-five percent see it working somewhat well and 26% not too well.

Tellingly, Democrats think capitalism is working because it provides equal opportunity, while Republicans think it is works because it encourages personal responsibility.  Faith that it works well is consistent across affiliation, 56% Democrats, 54% Independents and 52% Republicans.

A real divide in America is that 69% of Democrats and 54% of Independents believe that one of the biggest problems in the country is we do not give everyone an equal chance.  Meanwhile, 58% of Republicans and 57% of Tea Party members think that really isn’t a problem.

Another divide is that 54% of Americans in general, including 62% of Democrats and 54% of Independents, believe that hard work and determination no longer guarantee success for most people…55% of Republicans and 56% of Tea Party members disagree.

As for overall work ethic, the percentage of Americans who think they  can get ahead without working hard and making sacrifices has fallen from 63% in 1999 to 56% in 2013.

Big majorities of Americans across all political persuasions, religious affiliation and ethnicity believe that promoting freedom, liberty and to live responsibly are very important guides to economic policy.

There is a gap however between Democrats and Independents and Republicans and Tea Party members about the importance of promoting equality and fairness when it comes to economic policy.

We generally vote by districts for elected officials but all of this suggests that we all probably need to vote as well with an eye to balancing the make-up of elected bodies in keeping with opinions among the electorate.

Apparently, it no longer goes without saying that governance is of all of the people, not just narrow interests.

It seems no longer likely that we can rely on elected bodies to vote based on the make up of electors which leaves them vulnerable to special interests and narrow ideologies.

Or we can become a true democracy and cut out representatives.  To me, when they study nuances with the objectives of doing what’s right, they perform an invaluable service.  It just seems like today, representative bodies are vulnerable to being high jacked by special interests that do not represent the majority of the people.

Maybe what we have to fear is no longer tyranny but hubris.