Trust

 

Trust Me

You trust the teachers to teach your children
Trust the mechanic to build your car
Trust the carpenter to build your house
And yet you don't trust your brother at all

Trust but verify?

Regulations that require disclosure, such as Environmental Impact Statements,  weren’t adopted because they are fun.  Regulations that require disclosure were adopted because there was an absence of trust. It is like showing an ID to buy alcohol.  You are required to be a certain age to buy and consume alcohol.  A store clerk might not know you (or if they do, maybe they have to act as if they don’t know you, in order to treat every customer equally).  When you show your ID, the clerk trusts your ID and THAT proves your age.  If a customer uses a fake ID that is a criminal act by the customer, not the clerk.

Regulations are not adopted because of the people who we can trust.  We can be sorry that those people also have to go through the steps required by the regulations .  But there are those who we can not trust, who said they considered something but did not, or did consider it, but in a way that was not acceptable. They are why we have regulations that require full disclosure.  I wish we could trust everyone, but we can’t.  We can empathize with those who should be trusted, that they have to follow these disclosures, but they are not why the regulation were written. And in all likelihood, the ones complaining most loudly about the regulations are the ones who can not be trusted and why there are regulations in the first place.

If I don’t trust you, and you say that you should trust me, you could be lying. Ronald Reagan famously used the old Russian proverb,  “Trust but verify”.  If you trust Ronald Reagan, how can you then object to verification. Environmental Impact Statements are the verification that he required.