Everyone loves a good movie.
Everyone also, on occasion, is thankful when a movie is just a movie.
I love a good zombie movie. I really enjoyed the newest installment of “Resident Evil.” With the recent popularity the genre has seen, I’d say a lot of people like a well-produced zombie movie. The idea of a zombie apocalypse is almost appealing to some, given the potential of the heroic/epic battles and the abolition of the 9-5 work schedule.
Unfortunately for thrill seekers, doomsday predictions have been less exciting and more inclined to revolve around an economic collapse rather than a widespread epidemic that reanimates the dead.
From a Breitbart article on Sept. 12, Nouriel Roubini, who was credited with accurately predicting the subprime mortgage crisis and the burst of the housing bubble, said, “The US has run out of bullets, any shock at this point can tip you back into recession.”
Yesterday’s fire and brimstone action sequence is today’s “foreclosure” sign and increasing unemployment rates.
Surely everyone can remember the feeling when they left the theater after seeing “Inception.”
Most of us gave thought to the idea that our reality could be a dream. Such a thought fades with time, but my concern lingers not for fear of a persistent dream, but of an inescapable nightmare.
In “Inception,” layers upon layers of dreams could cause distorted perceptions of reality and an inability to wake up.
These compounding dreams made the world tremendously complex and hard to follow. Now, wake up to reality. President Obama’s two signature pieces of legislation, the health care bill and the financial reform act, are strikingly similar to the unsettling complexity of “Inception.” The dreams of ‘coverage for all’ and an infallible economy are pleasant ones, but underneath lies a regulatory nightmare.
These two pieces of legislation forsake specifics for interpretation, shifting implementation to the hands of nameless and faceless bureaucrats. Some of these bureaucrats don’t even exist yet.
They will work for agencies that have yet to be established.
To implement the mammoth Obamacare law, the administration will establish at least 159 new federal boards and commissions.
With the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the verdict is still out as to how much it will cost the taxpayer and to what ends the regulatory web will extend.
The authors of the bill certainly couldn’t answer this question, but that’s not a problem because they created the “Office of Complex Financial Institutions” to sort this one out.
It will be years before we know everything these faceless bureaucrats intend to do.
In the real world, I hope one day we can wake up from these regulatory nightmares.
But as it is in the theater, the good guys still have a lot of ass kicking to do in the middle of the movie in order to make it out alive.
Bryan Griffin is a first-year law student. His column appears every Thursday.
