Does political season have a start and end date? Seems like it used to but not anymore. The emails and texts from every manner of politician and political cause seem to have ramped up a couple of years ago and have become completely overwhelming.
One might suppose there would be an easy fix. There would be, except that the fixers all love the way the system works now. Far from protecting us from this barrage, the government is enabling it and protecting it. Vast numbers of private consulting services are getting rich from the whole machinery, which is growing in sophistication by the day.
How did we get here?
In the early days of email and texting, the spam problem was completely overwhelming. They were mostly commercial emails, companies trying to get money by selling some product or service. Technologies to weed out the worst of it were slow in arriving. Throughout the late 1990s, the whole problem became nearly unbearable.
Keep in mind that in those days, email truly “arrived” in your inbox and rested on your local hard drive. There were a few online systems of mail storage but this was not the norm. Because of malware and viruses, spam became extremely dangerous for the well-being of the whole operating system.
Click the wrong email and your system would be eaten alive. If you weren’t around in those days, count yourself lucky. The new technology seemed so awesome but also sometimes more trouble than it was worth. Email was consuming vast resources on the hard drive. Moving to a new computer was a day-long process of moving all archives, and malware along with it.
The spam problem nearly doomed the mainstream operating system sold by Microsoft. Bill Gates was nearly wrecked by the whole disaster. My own theory is that this is why he much later became consumed by virus control—while failing to understand the difference between human bodies and computers—and later vaccines as the method for zapping malware from the human body. Yes, he is insane but that is another story.
The politicians in D.C. celebrated their great achievement but the reality is that it didn’t do much good at all. The real fix came not too many months later as online email services like Gmail built into their system algorithms that recognized spam and put it away in a different folder. That combined with virus scanning services mitigated the issue.
The spam problem became less vexing as the years went on. Politicians took the credit.
But a closer look shows something remarkable. The legislation at the federal level, as well as the implementation regulations by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), all created carve-outs that made it possible for politicians—but not commercial institutions—to email and text with impunity.
In other words, in the name of fixing a problem, the government actually created the very conditions that allowed the problem to continue in ways that benefit politicians and the government!
Like your phone, my phone has been blowing up in recent months. The messages are from every manner of politician. They are raising money. Or trying to. The numbers seem almost random, and changing, so there is no chance of blocking them. You can type STOP but that only works for one number.
Here’s the rub: by law, politicians campaigning for office are exempted, which is to say that the law protects their right to bombard you with texts.
Incredible, right?
I’m well aware of the hypocrisy of politics. As Bastiat never tired of pointing out, states legalize for themselves what they make illegal for the rest of us. You know, things like stealing, counterfeiting, kidnapping, fraud, and the like. For that matter, murder too. There is one law for them and one law for us, and yet they are also charged with enforcing the laws against us that they ignore for themselves.
Somehow, that my phone lights up with their fundraising pitches underscores the point in an especially salient way. Why would government assume that I need protection against texts from the local Italian eatery but I would be delighted by a text from the Biden campaign?
Of course it is not really about protecting me from anything. It is about creating the appearance that I’m being protected from evil actors—but I need no protection from political texts because I should be absolutely thrilled to know that various politicos are seeking my money to fund their rackets, I mean campaigns.
Here’s the great irony: the law purporting to ban spam texts actually ends up permissioning the political class to break the terms of the law for themselves. Otherwise, technological innovation alone would likely have fixed this problem already.
There is a lesson in this. When we allow government to pretend to be the fix for very real problems in our lives, there is a good chance that they will “fix” the problem in a way that benefits themselves while perpetrating the very issue they promised to solve. This is a good general rule.
Where does it apply? Probably nearly everywhere. Certainly it applied in the case of COVID but it pertains to climate change, substance abuse, crime, foreign policy, education, economic health, environmental conservation, the drive for fairness and equality, and pretty much any other issue you can name.
To recognize and anticipate this is not cynicism. It is realism.
As with the issue of spam emails and texts, the real answers to our most pressing problems come from within our own lives in cooperation with entrepreneurs, innovators, and market participants who have a genuine stake in the outcome.
Outsourcing solutions to political forces only perpetuates the problems. I wish I could think of exceptions but nothing comes to mind.
