by Richard Schulman
Three exemplary government actions took place in the past week — two by the Trump administration and one by Indonesia’s Transportation Safety Committee.
First, the Trump administration and Pentagon awarded a lucrative and security-critical cloud storage contract to Microsoft rather than Jeff Bezos’s Amazon-Washington Post enterprise, which has been a repeat conduit for national-security leaks. Amazon thought it was going to win the contract on the basis of its having provided cloud services since 2013 to the leak-prone CIA.
Second, the administration and US military, intelligence, and allies succeeded in cornering in northwest Syria Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader. Rather than let himself be captured, the ISIS leader blew himself up along with his three children. The action wouldn’t have been possible without the presence of at least some specially-capable US forces in the Middle East.
Third, the Indonesian government issued an honest and exemplary report on the errors that contributed to the crash of Boeing’s 737 MAX airliner operated by Lion Air, an Indonesian low-cost airline. The Indonesian investigators cited nine errors, the absence of any one of which might have saved the flight from crashing and killing all 189 people on board. These included design and implementation errors by Boeing, regulatory lapses by the FAA, and errors by Lion Air pilots and maintenance personnel. The Indonesian report, which did not spare its own nationals from criticism, stands in stark contrast to the many blame-shifting cover-up reports by developing-country investigatory authorities in previous crashes, including one by Indonesia itself following a December 1997 crash.
…But not California
California is the poster child for governments that consistently do the wrong thing. It is reducing inequality by raising taxes on the rich, forcing them to flee and leave behind the poor and middle classes to make up for the tax loss. It taxes working people to subsidize expensive electric cars and charging stations for the well-to-do, but the cars can’t operate because of electricity shutdowns. California’s governor Gavin Newsom scapegoats the electric utility PG&E for not doing needed maintenance on its transmission lines, ignoring the fact that Democratic pols in Sacramento mandated that PG&E waste billions of dollars on quixotic green boondoggles to reduce CO2 emissions. That deprived the company of the funds it needed to perform maintenance. The state regulators who enforced the green mandates were surely aware of the trade-offs they were compelling and the predictable consequences.
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