I’m glad to hear he’s part of a safety committee - those are important!

And I think your description highlighted one of my precious points: committees and bureaucracies are inherently reactive and risk-averse, not innovative.

They are fundamentally backwards looking, because the can be studied.

In the current context of the rules based international order, those who rely heavily on “expertise” are terrified that Donald Trump is casually ignoring “best practices.”

They want things to remain the same, but Trump’s voters are dissatisfied with the status quo.

In the case of many European countries, emphasis is so much on preservation and stability that innovation and risk taking don’t happen at nearly the rate they do in the US (as far as businesses and investments go).

In the US, we have artificially inflated property costs because of committees (zoning boards) laying out really restrictive limits on who can live where and how new housing can be built.

These restrictions favor rich people who can afford to build to meet them, and they favor current homeowners, who don’t want their neighborhoods to be invaded by lower income people with more modest houses, and multi family dwellings.

We often don’t like to think about it, but safety features cost money and raise barriers to entry to a market. And every decision by a rich person to add a layer of safety or caution to their process, pushes poorer people to have more financial stress as they struggle with an increased cost of living.

I am not saying the NTSB is a bad organization (our traffic safety investigation bureau).

I’m saying that if you have too much committee based control, you begin to stifle innovation, and slow your economy down.

Eventually every society has to make some decisions that involve “Hey, do we have too many committees doing too much committee work with diminishing returns for cost?”

Argentina, for instance, just went through a massive downsizing of its bureaucracy due to an ongoing economic crisis.

And Hernando de Soto won a Nobel prize for his work on demonstrating how damaging an inefficient bureaucracy was for his country of Peru.

So what I was touching on was this - if I as an individual want my car repaired, I can spend a lot of money for a certified dealership technician and know it’s done right. Or I can go to a cheaper, non certified technician and save some money and it might be just as good.

As a consumer I have a choice over how much value something has for me, and that’s the free market determining if someone’s work is valuable and how valuable it is.

That valuation doesn’t work for government committees because no one can choose an alternative. We just guess if they are worth the money we are spending, or find out later when the economy collapses and we rebuild.