The Me Decade

Tom Wolfe once designated the 1970s as “The Me Decade”. It seems to me that this label better applies to the 2020s. Consider this action by the New York state Senate:

ALBANY — Under cloak of darkness, the state Senate moved to help more than 130,000 reckless drivers avoid accountability in a middle-of-the-night watering down of the Stop Super Speeders bill, which only targeted the worst-of-the-worst drivers in the first place. . . .

Instead of requiring drivers with six or more speed-camera or red-light camera tickets in any 12-month period to install a speed-limiting device in their cars, the bill now only carries that requirement for drivers with 16 or more tickets — and only speed-camera tickets rather than a combination. . . .

It’s common Albany knowledge that if legislators can imagine themselves being hurt by a bill, they vote against it.

You might think that this is no big deal, as “almost everyone goes over the speed limit”. I routinely go 10 miles over the limit on interstate highways, but I’ve only received one speeding ticket in my entire life–despite driving an enormous number of miles. (And that was for going 66 on a rural New York interstate highway back when the national speed limit was 55.)

People racking up 10 or 15 speeding tickets in a 12-month period are not normal speeders; they are reckless drivers. Unfortunately, many of these drivers do not recognize the consequences of their recklessness:

And there’s the sheer fact that lawmakers see themselves as drivers first and foremost — and are therefore reluctant to do anything perceived as punishing drivers. Assembly Member Michaell Novakhov (R-Midwood) famously said that six speeding and red-light tickets in a single year was too low a threshold, for example.

“I think this is too little,” Novakhov told Streetsblog. “Any driver can get much more than six. It’s the regular constituents, just people like me and you are getting those tickets.”

It’s worth noting that he made those comments at the funeral of Natasha Saada and daughters Diana and Deborah, who were killed in March by a recidivist speeder who had just racked up her 16th speed-camera ticket of the year days before the crash.

The fact that you might be charged with breaking a law is not a good reason for failing to enact the law.

Crypto regulation is another example of where lawmakers put self-interest ahead of the public interest. Here’s The Economist:

When Mr Trump nominated Jay Clayton to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (sec) in 2017, crypto received no mention at all during his confirmation hearing in the Senate. As recently as 2021, the president disdained digital assets. “Bitcoin just seems like a scam” he said of the biggest cryptocurrency. “I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar.”

Then President Trump discovered that crypto assets would allow business interests to give him hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars without triggering laws against bribery. Here’s The Atlantic:

When it was all over, Trump apparently decided he had been thinking too small. In his first term, he made improper millions. In his second term, he is reaching for billions: a $2 billion investment by a United Arab Emirates state-owned enterprise in the Binance crypto exchange using the Trump family’s stablecoin asset. An unknown number of billions placed by Qatar in a Trump-family real-estate development in that emirate, topped by the gift of a 747 luxury jet for the president’s personal use in office and afterward. Government-approved support for a Trump golf course in Vietnam while its leaders were negotiating with the United States for relief from Trump tariffs. Last week, Trump hosted more than 200 purchasers of his meme coin, many of them apparently foreign nationals, for a private dinner, with no disclosure of the names of those who had paid into his pocket for access to the president’s time and favor.

The record of Trump real-estate and business projects is one of almost unbroken failure; from 1991 to 2009, his companies filed for bankruptcy six times. Few if any legitimate investors entrusted their money to Trump’s businesses when he was out of office. But since his return to the White House, Trump has been inundated with cash from Middle Eastern governments. Obscure Chinese firms are suddenly buying millions of dollars’ worth of Trump meme coins. So are American companies hard-hit by the Trump tariffs and desperately seeking access and influence. After Trump invited major holders of his crypto funds to dinner, Wired quoted a crypto analyst about the coin’s value proposition: “Before, you were speculating on a TRUMP coin with no utility. Now you’re speculating on future access to Trump. That has to be worth a bit more money.”

During Trump’s first term, he argued that TikTok should be shut down. Then he discovered that TikTok was a valuable way of reaching his supporters. In his second term, the Trump administration has repeatedly failed to enforce a law that required TikTok to be sold or shut down.

To be clear, I am not taking any position on these two issues. It may well be true that both cryptocurrencies and TikTok are worth preserving. Rather, I’m suggesting that decisions on these issues are not being made on the basis of what’s in the public interest; rather they reflect the special interest of policymakers. That’s always been true to some extent, but I’ve never seen it to be as blatant as during the 2020s.