I will be unavailable for interviews, e-mail or phone calls  — there’s no Internet on K-2 or Base Station Alpha — until I decide the consequences of my writing this have blown over, so don’t even try to speak to, or at, me.

So, here is how I see it.

You have a business; say a farming operation, a university, a widget factory or maybe an oil company.

Your mission is to run your business or organization as effectively as you can, at the lowest cost and with a maximum return of investment.

Yes, even universities or non-profits are expected to run their “businesses” that way.

So you conduct your business, and keep a sharp and constant eye on all the people in and out of government, local, state, national and even international who are trying to tell you how to run your business?

Many of them may have good and noble reasons for trying to meddle in your affairs. Many of them may have some neat ideas. However your mission is to run your outfit as best you can within the parameters you and your overseers — stockholders, state legislators or whoever — have laid out for you. Most of what these outsiders want you to do is gonna cost you big bucks — smaller classes, safer breaks.

You hire lobbyists; everyone does that. You set up a PR department; everybody does that. You spin how great you are and try to avoid or even suppress the bad stuff.

Think not? See how effectively U.S. universities have suppressed data on crime on their campuses and surrounding areas. See how effectively institutions of higher learning have been dead, cold silent about bad teaching by their faculty, or silenced criticism about professors and TA’s teaching course without having any command of the English language.

So if the noble universities “Education for the Greater Good,” to paraphrase TIAA-CREF, the favorite investment platform for academics, fuzz up or hide stuff, lets move on to the other players.

Of course coal mines fight safety regulations because mining is so dangerous it should be outlawed. To make a coal mine safe you’d have to spend so much nobody would buy or could afford your coal.

Of course drilling for oil is dangerous and messy. Remember those pictures from Pennsylvania and Texas during the oil rush — wooden drill platforms with crude blowing out the top and oil covered workers and owners dancing in the black rain. Or, even see what the drilling areas around sites in Nigeria, Ecuador, Iraq and other places look like. Yeesh!

So all these businesses fight off regulation — yup you got it, even banks, big insurance and investment firms — and if Congress and the regulators give the green light, they go about their business.

Let me ask you this, what are they supposed to do say, “Oh, no, this is way too little regulation. We would like you to double the expense we have doing our business please because we want to do this right.”

I don’t think so.

How many medical facilities, farmers, pharmaceutical companies, toy makers, car makers, plumbers, electricians, builders, mechanics and restaurants go out and ask for more regulation? Zero is the correct answer.

So all of these folks and the tens of thousands of others — day care centers, dentists, elder homes, boat builders, tutors — try to comply with regulations they’ve had imposed on them as best they can. But they are not compelled to, nor will they go at their own expense and peril, because competitors will NOT be doing so, to over-regulate themselves.

So, when things go wrong in the peanut butter industry, with imported toys or in the oil and gas industry, it is always the fault of the regulators; always.

They failed to do their job. They wrote rules that were weak. They had spotty and sketchy inspection and enforcement regimes.

So you see, the deep-water oil drilling industry will enforce whatever rules are imposed on them and they will pay fines for “omissions and mistakes” or for “accidents” but it’s the regulators who did not do their job.

Yes, these companies, like everyone named above including the ethanol industry and seed companies, will try to influence regulators and politicians. They will even use revolving doors at every opportunity: promise to hire politicians and regulators from agencies for fat, juicy jobs as soon as the waiting period is over.

The reason so few people you and I might consider scoundrels go to jail is that in fact they may not have broken laws so there’s nothing to prosecute. That’s why most of the Wall Street “Rock-n-Rollers” and “Real Estate Scammers” are still breathing outside air and are not in detention.

So it may be wrong, unethical, despicable and hideous, but everyone is bending the rules and avoiding over-regulation every single day of the week; including you.

Have a nice weekend.

— Steffen Schmidt is a professor of political science at Iowa State U.