Michael Tavoliero: When incompetence becomes evil

By MICHAEL TAVOLIERO

There’s an old adage, that evil triumphs when good men do nothing. But in modern politics, especially here in Alaska, evil often triumphs because incompetent men and women occupy the seats of public trust and do nothing well. The danger is not just what they fail to do, it’s what they enable by failing.

The Alaska Legislature is a perfect case study. Sixty elected officials, all sworn to uphold the Constitution and act in the public interest, preside over some of the most consequential decisions affecting our lives, from energy policy to education funding, health care, and beyond. Yet when we follow the money, by examining Alaska Public Offices Commission reports, we find that many of these officials are financially tethered to special interests who routinely write the very bills these legislators sponsor.

This is not representation. This is outsourcing — moral, intellectual, and democratic outsourcing.

Instead of engaging deeply with the challenges facing their districts, our legislators are rubber-stamping prepackaged bills crafted by lobbyists, political action committees, national nonprofits, and public-sector unions. The legislative process becomes a theater of deliberation while the real decisions are made elsewhere, behind closed doors, at luncheons, or in carefully curated donor roundtables. Competence is neither required nor rewarded.

This is not just laziness. It is a systemic betrayal. When you are elected to serve the people but act on behalf of those who funded your campaign, you are no longer simply incompetent. You are participating in a moral inversion. You are facilitating harm through negligence and cloaking it in the procedural rituals of democracy.

And the consequences are real. We get laws that expand bureaucracy rather than reduce it. We get educational mandates that serve unions, not students. We get Medicaid policies that reward monopolies, not patients. Most disturbing, we get a citizenry that begins to believe corruption is normal and competence is impossible.

Some will say this is just how politics works. But that’s a coward’s answer. It is precisely this mindset—the passive acceptance of systemic failure—that allows evil to metastasize in the body of government.

If we are to rescue Alaska from this descent, we must restore legislative sovereignty and competence. Every bill should come with a transparency tag disclosing its true authorship and affiliations. Campaign contributions must be viewable in real time as floor votes happen. Legislative leadership should be earned through demonstrated integrity and expertise, not partisan loyalty or donor clout. And perhaps most importantly, we must build local drafting capacity—allowing legislators and their constituents to shape laws rooted in lived experience, not distant ideology.

We cannot afford a legislature that governs by submission. Alaska is too vast, too rich in potential, and too vulnerable to waste another decade on political caretakers unwilling to think for themselves.

Incompetence may be forgivable in a rookie. But when that incompetence becomes a mask for power serving everything but the public good, it becomes something far darker.

It becomes evil.

A Decade of Evil Through Incompetence: Year-by-Year Breakdown

• 2015 – Walker’s Unilateral Medicaid Expansion: The legislature fails to stop a constitutionally questionable executive overreach. The long-term financial liability is silently transferred to future Alaskans, and Indian Health Service obligations are quietly absorbed into the state bureaucracy.
• 2016 – Education Budget Bloat: Lawmakers increase the Base Student Allocation with no performance accountability, while rural schools collapse under administrative weight. No structural reform is proposed or passed.
• 2017 – Oil and Gas Tax Credit Flip-Flop: Legislators cave to lobbyist pressures and reverse course on needed reforms, bleeding the treasury to subsidize corporate risk with no long-term strategy for reinvestment or ownership.
• 2018 – PFD Cuts Institutionalized: After the initial raid, the legislature fails to restore the statutory Permanent Fund Dividend, solidifying a precedent of using citizens’ money to fund government waste.
• 2019 – Criminal Justice Chaos: House Bill 49, rushed under public panic, replaces SB 91 without proper analysis or local input, increasing incarceration without solving root causes.
• 2020 – COVID Spending with No Oversight: Billions in CARES Act funds are disbursed with minimal legislative oversight. The legislature recesses rather than taking charge of the emergency budget process.
• 2021 – Federal Dependency Deepens: Lawmakers eagerly accept American Rescue Plan funds without considering the long-term regulatory strings, further tying Alaska’s sovereignty to Washington.
• 2022 – Education Industry Capture: Despite abysmal test scores, the legislature gives more money to a failing system without opening it to competition or performance-based reform. Unions write the talking points.
• 2023 – Ranked-Choice Voting and Voter Confusion: No serious effort is made to reform or repeal a voting system passed by a narrow margin and riddled with confusion. Legislators stay silent to avoid donor retaliation.
• 2024 – Statehood Undermined in Silence: Legislators fail to act meaningfully against federal land lockup, IHS delegation, or ESG regulatory creep—allowing Alaska’s autonomy to shrink year after year.
• 2025 – Aggressive Leftward Shift Without Accountability:
  • Plans to expand the Base Student Allocation move forward without any performance metrics or student outcome requirements.Defined benefit pensions return, exposing future taxpayers to unsustainable financial obligations once abandoned for their risk. A suite of “progressive” election reforms, including softened recount procedures, synthetic media loopholes, and ambiguous definitions of “election interference,” are rushed through under the guise of modernization. Energy legislation championed by special interests threatens to raise home heating and utility costs, especially for working families in Alaska’s coldest regions.
  • And once again, the statutory Permanent Fund Dividend is gutted, diverting wealth from individual Alaskans to a bloated government apparatus that refuses to shrink, reform, or justify its cost.

This is not just a list of legislative missteps. It is a chronology of dereliction. These failures weren’t inevitable; they were chosen. Or worse, they were tolerated.

If Alaska is to survive the next 10 years with what spirit and sovereignty it still has intact, we must end this fusion of cowardice and capture. We must demand competence as a moral imperative, not just a political convenience.

Because evil doesn’t always arrive with malice. Sometimes, it walks in dressed as indifference and makes itself at home.

Michael Tavoliero writes for Must Read Alaska.