Capital Cynics

Who do they think they're fooling?

Virginia Postrel from the August/September 1997 issue

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Or we just ignore them. "I'm a tough person to ask about politics. I'm sort of apolitical," says a Silicon Valley entrepreneur I recently interviewed for Forbes ASAP. People in the Valley, he continues, don't bother fooling with political structure: "We can change the world. If we don't like the way it is, why worry about modifying the structure? We'll just create a new world--create a workaround or a bug fix that co-opts them completely."

On good days, I think such optimists are right. True, the nation's capital still has enormous power to do harm, often through esoteric regulations only specialists can comprehend. (For a good example, see Michael Fumento's "Polluted Science," page 28.) But that power is limited, and getting more so. Hence the march of micro-issues, each more trivial than the last.

The good news, then, is that Washington-the-annoying is the natural result of Washington-the-ignored--and Washington-the-irrelevant. A lot of people, not just Bill Gates, are more influential than senators, cabinet secretaries, and all those other camera-seeking self-promoters. Now if we could just get the cynics in D.C. to shut up.