Opinion

Too much of a good thing leads to mass indigestion

Bill Plante
Published: November 28, 2009

Big Freddy was late for our midmorning coffee break when he showed up looking somewhat the worse for wear.

"Big night?" I asked as he heaved himself into his seat.

"Big day, lousy night," Freddy said.

"What did you lose and where?" I asked.

"Sleep," he said, "and in my bed."

"A lot on your mind?" I asked.

"Too much in my digestive system from Thanksgiving," Freddy said.

"The law of unintended consequences," I said.

"For which there is no appeal," Freddy said, "there is only antacid in one form or another."

"And a change in diet habits in your case," I said.

"Food is like partisan politics," Freddy said. "You get hung up on anything, it's hard to change."

"That's certainly true in one-party states like ours, because Republicans are an endangered species," I said.

"They self-destructed," Freddy said. "Parties always self-destruct, long run."

"Too much of a good thing is not always a good thing," I said, "but it depends on your definition of what's good."

"What's good for a political party is being in charge of all the marbles with the power to control who gets to play with them," Freddy said.

"What's bad is what happens when the cost gets too high and there's no way to hang it up on the party out of power."

"That's not happening in Massachusetts," I said. "Republicans have no clout at all."

"Which they lost because they didn't get with the social agendas way back when," Freddy said. "They tried to hang onto their old formula of trickle-down too long, which opened the door to public unions and bottom-up social activists and a daisy chain of programs needing oversight by regulatory authorities with all the clout necessary to write and enforce the regulations."

"Which nobody likes," I said.

"Wrong," Freddy said. "Regulations are the feeding grounds for the economy. Regulations are an economic stimulus package, because we can't live without them. The more laws we have, the more regulations we have to conform with. Lawyers would go hungry without laws and regulations. Law schools would close. Government couldn't function."

"Enough with the sarcasm," I said. "All societies have to have laws and rules, but regulations can be like what barbed-wire fences were to free-range cattlemen."

"Of course," Freddy said. "What I'm saying is that when times are good, nobody pays much attention to what's going on. When times are bad, they look for who made it that way, and whoever's in power gets the shaft."

"Or whoever was in power," I said.

"Right," Freddy said, "which, we look at Washington, and it was George W. Bush and the Republicans, so it was off with their heads last year."

"And you're saying what about the Democrats now being in power?" I asked.

"It's no longer Thanksgiving," Freddy said. "There's mass indigestion over the so-called stimulus package of multi-zillion dollars, which so far is more frizzle than sizzle; there's a lot of hypertension over increasing the troop level in Afghanistan for a strategy that's less about going after terrorists than it is about nation development, no matter what face Obama puts on it."

"House Speaker Pelosi is caught between the rock and the hard place on that because she wants us out of there," I said.

"Because she can read the tea leaves," Freddy said. "She wants to maintain power, the war is unpopular enough for Democrats to lose seats, and Obama is about to put too much on the table to digest for a lot of voters."

"But it just may be the right thing to do," I said.

"Long range, maybe," Freddy said. "But it won't be in time with what's needed in the next 12 months, and survival has many faces, most of which belong to Democrats."

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Bill Plante is former executive editor of Essex County Newspapers. His e-mail address is plantejr@comcast.net.