“We had a non-Obama president recently, his name was George W. Bush, it wasn’t all puppy dogs and rainbows,” says Reason’s Matt Welch. “Being Republican is not enough to counter Obama. Mitt Romney is not offering an alternative to Obama,” adds Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie.
From Newt Gingrich’s inexplicable campaign chatter about a taxpayer-subsidized colony on the moon to Mitt Romney’s refusal to discuss any specific spending cuts he would implement as president, Republicans continue to offer no real substantive alternative to President Obama’s spendthrift economic policies.
Welch and Gillespie, the co-authors of “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America,” hosted the discussion “Why Democrat vs. Republican is the Wrong Way to Look at the 2012 Election” at Reason Weekend, the annual donor event held by Reason Foundation (the nonprofit that publishes this website).
April 12, 2012
Reason.tv: Why Democrat vs. Republican is the Wrong Way to Look at the 2012 Election
Chinese vessels left in possession of Scarborough Shoal as Philippine ship withdraws
An update on the BBC News website about the stand-off between Chinese and Philippine ships in the disputed Scarborough Shoal area of the South China Sea:
Earlier on Thursday a Philippine coastguard vessel arrived in the area, known as the Scarborough Shoal.
The Philippines also says China has sent a third ship to the scene.
The Philippine foreign minister said negotiations with China would continue. Both claim the shoal off the Philippines’ north-west coast.
The Philippines said its warship found eight Chinese fishing vessels at the shoal when it was patrolling the area on Sunday.
The BBC article doesn’t name the Philippine ship, but it’s likely to be the BRP Gregorio del Pilar (formerly the USCGC Hamilton):
Photo from Wikipedia
China’s view of its borders in the South China Sea clashes wildly with those of its neighbours and the international community:
In a statement, the Philippines said that its navy boarded the Chinese fishing vessels on Tuesday and found a large amount of illegally-caught fish and coral.
Two Chinese surveillance ships then apparently arrived in the area, placing themselves between the warship and the fishing vessels, preventing the navy from making arrests.
The Philippines summoned Chinese ambassador Ma Keqing on Wednesday to lodge a protest over the incident. However, China maintained it had sovereign rights over the area and asked that the Philippine warship leave the waters.
Sweden pushes past “gender equality” to “gender neutrality”
Nathalie Rothschild in Slate:
But for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. The idea is that the government and society should tolerate no distinctions at all between the sexes. This means on the narrow level that society should show sensitivity to people who don’t identify themselves as either male or female, including allowing any type of couple to marry. But that’s the least radical part of the project. What many gender-neutral activists are after is a society that entirely erases traditional gender roles and stereotypes at even the most mundane levels.
Activists are lobbying for parents to be able to choose any name for their children (there are currently just 170 legally recognized unisex names in Sweden). The idea is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to, say, name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa.
I’ve always thought it a bad idea to allow governments to decide what names parents are allowed to give to their children. Obviously I’m an old fogey and should be ignored on critical issues like this.
Social Democrat politicians have proposed installing gender-neutral restrooms so that members of the public will not be compelled to categorize themselves as either ladies or gents. Several preschools have banished references to pupils’ genders, instead referring to children by their first names or as “buddies.” So, a teacher would say “good morning, buddies” or “good morning, Lisa, Tom, and Jack” rather than, “good morning, boys and girls.” They believe this fulfills the national curriculum’s guideline that preschools should “counteract traditional gender patterns and gender roles” and give girls and boys “the same opportunities to test and develop abilities and interests without being limited by stereotypical gender roles.”
The next step, of course, is to require the Prime Minister to address the Sveriges riksdag as “Buddies”. That’d set a proper tone of intimacy and co-operative inclusiveness, right?
To those who feel gender equality or gender neutrality ought to be intrinsic to a modern society, it probably makes sense to argue for instilling such values at an early age. The Green Party has even suggested placing “gender pedagogues” in every preschool in Stockholm, the Swedish capital, who can act as watchdogs. But of course toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do.
Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers. One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys “gender-coded” them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys. Another preschool removed “free playtime” from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.” And so every detail of children’s interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children’s lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.
And you thought helicopter parents were bad? Imagine living your entire pre-school-to-high-school career under the watchful gaze of “gender pedagogues” whose task is to ensure that you never display any behaviour or utter any phrases which are gender-specific.
Crispian Jago’s Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense
QotD: Atheists in America
This ongoing conflict between sectarianism and secularism is the raison d’etre for a non-theist movement, and it is why categorical disrespect for godlessness matters. The assumption that religious belief is essential to morality advances mistrust of secular governance. Of course, religious people have a right to their biases, and the irreligious have a right to challenge them. Non-theists can always voice their opinions individually, but, like other ideological and demographic minorities, they need a movement to amplify their voices. And regardless of their individual psychic needs for recognition (which do not interest me), non-theists have a collective political need for a movement that encourages openness about disbelief: The more godlessness is normalised, the less it will seem inherently immoral, the more likely the perspectives of non-theists will be considered, instead of reflexively condemned.
What should they bring to the church/state debates? As a small, disrespected, irreligious minority, non-theists should appreciate freedom of conscience. Non-theism is often associated with hostility toward religion, thanks partly to the prominence of a few ‘New Atheists’, but it can and should promote respect for religious liberty. People who believe in no religions are not apt to privilege any one of them: evangelicals tend to be wary of Mormonism, as the Republican primaries have demonstrated, but to an atheist or agnostic, belief in the resurrection is no more or less worthy of respect than belief in the Angel Moroni.
Scepticism is a great leveller; it favours extending equal speech and religious rights to all orthodoxies, which is the essence of civil liberty. Freedom of conscience doesn’t distinguish between new, outré religions derided as cults and traditional mainstream faiths, as former American Civil Liberties Union executive director Ira Glasser tried explaining to an interviewer years ago. He was asked about the chanting, saffron-robed Hare Krishnas, who commanded little popular respect. They were ‘weird’, the interviewer remarked to Glasser. ‘I don’t know’, he replied. ‘Have you taken a look at the College of Cardinals?’
Wendy Kaminer “In America, atheists are still in the closet”, Spiked!, 2012-04-11
April 11, 2012
Britain is suffering from Mourning sickness
Brendan O’Neill castigates Liverpool FC and their refusal to play a game on the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, but says that all of Britain is suffering from an advanced case of Mourning sickness:
In many ways, the reaction to Hillsborough was the prototype for later outbursts of emotional correctness, from the weird weepy reaction to Princess Diana’s death in 1997 to the media hysteria that greeted the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in 2007. In all those instances of public mourning, in all the Shared National Experiences of ostentatious grieving, the rules and rituals set in motion after Hillsborough have come into play. Thou must make a public performance of sorrow. Thou must never deviate from the emotional script. Thou must not question why we weep, year in and year out, and just get on with weeping. Thou must wallow in one-off tragedies forever and severely chastise anyone who says “Life moves on”. Those are the stifling, speech-restricting, thought-policing, miserable, mawkish rules of emotionally correct modern Britain, and they were written and made gospel on the back of the Hillsborough disaster 22 years ago. God help anyone who deviates from them, as Davies has discovered: he has received hate mail and death threats for daring to question the grief gospel.
Some people attribute the enforced emotional sensitivity over Hillsborough to the peculiar touchiness of Liverpudlians. Liverpool is “self-pity city”, we are told, where they love nothing more than to play the victim card. Perhaps. But if that is true, then we are all Scousers now. Mourning sickness and emotionally correct hysteria are widespread in twenty-first-century Britain, stretching from Liverpudlian housing estates to the London eateries of the Guardian-reading set. It can be glimpsed in everything from the hunting down and imprisonment of an offensive drunken tweeter who refused to go along with the “Pray for Fabrice Muamba” trend to the broadsheets’ haranguing of Jan Moir for not being sufficiently mournful following the death of Stephen Gately. The post-Hillsborough era is one of extraordinarily restrictive emotionalism and censoriousness.
Davies has now repented for his sins, making a public apology for his comments and offering to make a donation to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign — the modern equivalent of doing penance. He shouldn’t have apologised. We need more upfront, unapologetic criticism of the backward modern idea that there is a correct way to feel, a correct way to grieve, and even a correct way to think.
“Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever”
An interesting analysis of the Instagram takeover by Facebook:
First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.
Now consider Instagram. If Facebook is a sprawling, intertextual garden of forking pokes, Instagram is no more complex than a chapbook of poetry: It lets you share pictures with your friends and keep track of strangers who post interesting pictures. It barely has a website; all the action happens on mobile devices. Thirty million people use it to pass time in the bathroom. You can add some fairly silly filters to the photos to make the pictures look like they were taken in the seventies, but that’s more of a novelty than a requirement. So that’s Instagram. It’s not a site, or an app. What it is, really, is a product.
[. . .]
To some users, this looks like a sellout. And that’s because it is. You might think the people crabbing about how Instagram is going to suck now are just being naïve, but I don’t think that’s true. Small product companies put forth that the user is a sacred being, and that community is all-important. That the money to pay for the service comes from venture capital, which seeks a specific return on investment over a period of time, is between the company and the venture capitalists; the relationship between the user and the product is holy, or is supposed to be.
So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.”
F-22 pilot air supply issue still not resolved
Strategy Page has an update on the F-22 and the ongoing investigation into air supply problems for the pilot:
The U.S. Air Force is admitting that it is having a problem with the pilot air supply on the F-22, a problem they have not been able to find the cause of. Despite this, the air force is going to continue flying its F-22s. The decision to keep flying was made because the air supply problems have not killed anyone yet and they are rare (once every 10,000 sorties.)
The 14 incidents so far were all cases of F-22 pilots apparently experiencing problems. The term “apparently” is appropriate because the pilots did not black out and a thorough check of the air supply system and the aircraft found nothing wrong. There have been nearly 30 of these “dizziness or disorientation” incidents in the last four years, with 14 of them serious enough to be called real incidents. Only one F-22 has been lost to an accident so far and, while that did involve an air supply issue, it was caused by pilot error, not equipment failure.
Meanwhile the air force is spending $7 million to install commercial oxygen status sensors in the air supply systems of its F-22 fighters. This is part of a year-long effort to find out what’s causing the air supply on F-22s to get contaminated and cause pilots to become disoriented or pass out. Twice in the past year the entire F-22 fleet was grounded because of the air supply problems. The first grounding lasted 140 days and ended last September. The second grounding lasted a week and ended five months ago. The 180 F-22s comprise the most powerful component of the air force’s air combat capability and the brass are eager to find out what is wrong.
QotD: The silly claims about “capitalism in crisis”
Yes, times are tougher than they otherwise could be; however, to claim that the bumps in the road over the last few years show that “capitalism is in crisis” is absurd.
[. . .]
Even with the a few recessions, Real per-capita Gross Domestic Product is a lot higher than it was in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, or 2000. The truly unique fact about the world as it has changed in the last few centuries is that, as a number of economic historians have emphasized, we live in a world where economic growth is taken to be the norm. […]
Indeed, as the economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out long ago, capitalism has given us the time and energy to criticize capitalism. People content themselves by being outraged at working conditions in Foxconn plants in China. However, it is the economic growth we have achieved in the western world that allows us the comfortable working conditions from which we express horror at working conditions elsewhere in the world. Further, not all the workers are greeting the reformers as saviors (HT: Doug Stuart). If people are willing to trade off longer working hours for higher incomes, I don’t see how it’s my right to stop them.
[. . .] Donald J. Boudreaux points out how we have to be very careful with income data if we are going to get an accurate picture of trends in standards of living.
If we’re going to talk about “stagnation” we also have to be very clear about precisely what we mean. Consider the near-ubiquity of the iconic gizmo of the early 21st century and its technological cousin: the smart phone and social media. My Forbes.com colleague Erik Kain reported in February that “472 million smartphones were sold worldwide in 2011.” In a world of 7 billion people, the top 1% would be 70 million people. If all the gains really went to them, that would be about six and a half smartphones each for the members of the world’s Top 1%. I’m pretty sure that isn’t what’s happening.
Art Carden, “It’s the Final Crisis of Capitalism, Charlie Brown!”, Forbes, 2012-04-10
HMCS Windsor scheduled to return to the water today
One of the Royal Canadian Navy’s four submarines, HMCS Windsor, is supposed to be getting wet again later today:
Good news, of a sort: One of Canada’s four Victoria-class submarines is set to achieve a major milestone Wednesday. It’s going to be in the water. Huzzah!
After years of extensive refit work, HMCS Windsor is set to be lowered — lowered “extremely slowly,” but lowered — into the Atlantic Ocean. Assuming it does not instantly sink, explode or simply dissolve like a giant, oddly shaped sugar cube, the Windsor will then begin a long series of tests at sea. It is hoped that the sub will be fully operational by early 2013. Fingers crossed. Canada should have submarines. They are a useful part of a modern navy’s arsenal, and Canada has an enormous coastline. Although the subs have had an uneven history, to say the very least, they finally seem to be getting to a state where they’ll be useful to us. There had been speculation before last month’s federal budget that they’d be scrapped, but at this late point, that would be wasteful. It’s cost a lot to get these incredibly complicated machines as operational as they are (again, fingers crossed).
[. . .]
Purchased second-hand from the British for the rock-bottom price of $750-million in 1998, they’ve fallen well short of expectations. They only entered Canadian service in 2003, and have proven glitchy and outright dangerous — HMCS Chicoutimi caught fire during its maiden voyage in 2004. Lt. Chris Saunders was killed fighting the blaze, and the sub has been out of service undergoing repairs ever since. It, too, is hoped to be back in service next year. All told, the subs have been at sea, collectively, only 900 days since 2003, and have cost billions of dollars to bring up to spec — money the cash-strapped navy didn’t really have. Costly, under-performing, sucking up needed resources … sound familiar?
April 10, 2012
In praise of Britain’s National Trust
When we used to travel more frequently to the UK, we were members of the National Trust. It was a great investment for anyone interested in historic properties, and quite a bargain at the time. We let our membership lapse because we were no longer able to visit on a regular basis. Kelvin Browne discusses the great things the National Trust is doing and wonders why there’s no Canadian equivalent:
The Trust has lofty ambitions, but it’s not elitist: They know that without wide enthusiasm for the organization, it won’t survive.
Founded in 1895 to save Britain’s architectural heritage and open spaces, the organization’s initial purpose hasn’t changed much. In fact, many of its goals relate to today’s pressing issues, including stewardship of the environment and concern for the preservation of small communities.
The Trust protects and opens to the public more than 350 historic houses, gardens and ancient monuments. They also look after forests, woods, fens, beaches, farmland, downs, moorland, islands, archaeological remains, castles, nature reserves and villages “for ever, for everyone.”
Its operating model addresses many of our own concerns related to preserving pieces of Canadian history. However, unlike our system, Britain’s is completely independent of government. the Trust relies on income from membership fees, donations and legacies and revenue raised from its commercial ventures such as cafés, event rentals, the sale of produce from its gardens and farm properties and from leasing a number of its smaller properties to individual tenants.
In other words, no additional taxes are raised to save heritage properties and no meddling bureaucrats inefficiently telling the Brits about their history.
As he points out, the reasons for Canada not having a direct equivalent are two-fold: we are a far younger country and therefore have far fewer truly historical buildings, and we default to expecting the government to take care of preservation of what little we have.
Jack Granatstein calls for the heads of the deputy and associate deputy minister of defence
Jack Granatstein is very well respected as a military historian and analyst. His interpretation of the F-35 situation leads him to — in effect — call for the dismissal of people whose names are not generally being bandied about in the media:
Then let us look at the decision-making process in the Department of National Defence. Almost all the commentary in the media and Parliament has pointed fingers at the CDS, Gen. Natynzcyk. But he is only the military leader of the department, not the sole ruler. Co-equal to him — and, in fact, in most knowledgeable observers’ judgment substantially more than that — is the deputy minister, Robert Fonberg, in his post since 2007. The associate deputy minister materiel, responsible for all procurement projects, reports to Mr. Fonberg, and the deputy determines what his minister, Peter MacKay, and eventually the cabinet sees. The public messaging in the department is handled by the assistant deputy minister (public affairs), who also reports to Mr. Fonberg. The civilian defence bureaucrats truly wield the power.
The point is this: The uniformed officers of the department provide the best military advice they can. Sometimes they are incorrect; most times they pray they are right because they know their decisions will affect their comrades’ lives. But the estimates of costs, and the spin that has so exercised the Auditor-General, the media and the Opposition, are shaped and massaged by the deputy minister, in effect DND’s chief financial officer, who advises the minister of national defence.
No one comes out of the F-35 affair smelling like a rose. Mr. MacKay undoubtedly made mistakes in overselling the aircraft, and Gen. Natynzcyk likely did as well. But it would be a miscarriage of justice if these two lost their heads to the vengeful axe demanded by an aroused media, and the deputy minister and his civilian bureaucrats escaped unscathed.
Mark Steyn: Derbyshire should not have been fired
On the National Review Online‘s “The Corner” blog, Mark Steyn expresses the unpopular-even-among-Republians thought that John Derbyshire’s sins did not amount to a firing offence:
… for what it’s worth, I regret the loss of John Derbyshire to National Review. Short version: Didn’t like the piece, but don’t think NR should have hustled him into the drive-thru guillotine on the basis of 24 hours of hysteria from the Internet’s sans-culottes.
[. . .]
On the career-detonating column, I don’t have anything terribly useful to add. But Derb’s wife is Chinese and his children are biracial. And I can see why, in a world in which a four-time mayor of America’s capital city can disparage your own family’s race (“these Asians coming in . . . those dirty shops . . . they ought to go”) and pay no price, a chap might come to resent the way polite society’s indulgence of racism is so highly selective.
[. . .]
The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities. He knew that mentioning the Great Unmentionables would sooner or later do him in, and, in an age when shrieking “That’s totally racist!” is totally gay, he at least has the rare satisfaction of having earned his colors. Yet what are we to make of wee, inoffensive Dave Weigel over at Slate? The water still churning with blood, the sharks are circling poor old Dave for the sin of insufficiently denouncing the racist Derbyshire. Weigel must go for not enthusiastically bellowing, “Derbyshire must go!” Come to think of it, I should probably go for querying whether Weigel should go.
The easy days of piracy are fading rapidly
Strategy Page has an update on the anti-piracy efforts off the Somalian coastline:
After two years of immense prosperity, the last year has been a disaster for the Somali pirates. For example, in the last eight months, only six ships have been captured, compared to 36 ships in the same eight month period a year ago. Pirate income is down 80 percent and expenses are up. Pirates have to spend more time at sea looking for a potential target, and when they find one, they either fail in their boarding efforts (because of armed guards, or better defense and more alert crews) or find anti-piracy patrol warships and armed helicopters showing up. Unlike in the past, the patrol now takes away the pirates weapons and equipment, sinks their mother ships and dumps the pirates back on a beach. The pirates claim that some members of the anti-piracy patrol simply kill pirates they encounter on the high seas (some nations have admitted doing this, at least once, in the past). But no one does this as official policy, and the rules are still basically “catch and release.” The big change is that the patrol has become much better at detecting pirates, on captured fishing ships, and shutting these pirates down. Often the pirates bring along the crew of the fishing ships, to help with the deception. But the patrol knows which fishing ships have “disappeared” and quickly identify those missing ships they encounter, and usually find pirates in charge. The anti-piracy patrol also has maritime reconnaissance aircraft that seek to spot mother ships as they leave pirate bases on the north Somali coast, and direct a warship to intercept and shut down those pirates. The pirates have been losing a lot of equipment, and time, and money needed to pay for it.
[. . .]
Pirates have responded by finding new targets (ships anchored off ports waiting for a berth) and using new tactics (using half a dozen or more speedboats for an attack.) The pirates still have a powerful incentive to take ships. In 2010, for example, pirates got paid over $200 million in ransom. The year before that it was $150 million. Most of that was taken by the pirate gang leaders, local warlords and the Persian Gulf negotiators who deal with the shipping companies. But for the pirates who took the ship, then helped guard it for months until the money was paid, the take was still huge. Pirates who actually boarded the ship tend to receive at least $150,000 each, which is ten times what the average Somali man makes over his entire lifetime. Even the lowest ranking member of the pirate gang gets a few thousand dollars per ransom. The general rule is that half the ransom goes to the financiers, the gang leaders and ransom negotiators. About a quarter of the money goes to the crew that took the ship, with a bonus for whoever got on board first. The pirates who guard the ship and look after the crew gets ten percent, and about ten percent goes to local clans and warlords, as protection money (or bribes).
[. . .]
For the last four years, Somali pirates have been operating as far east as the Seychelles, which are a group of 115 islands 1,500 kilometers from the African coast. The islands have a total population of 85,000 and no military power to speak of. They are defenseless against pirates. So are many of the ships moving north and south off the East Coast of Africa. While ships making the Gulf of Aden run know they must take measures to deal with pirate attacks (posting lookouts 24/7, training the crew to use fire hoses and other measures to repel boarders, hanging barbed wire on the railings and over the side to deter boarders), this is not so common for ships operating a thousand kilometers or more off the east coast of Africa. Ships in this area were warned last year that they were at risk. Now, the pirates are out in force, demonstrating that the risk is real.
The 7 rules of bureaucracy
A long post by Loyd S. Pettegrew and Carol A. Vance at the LvMI blog explains the seven rules (and many sub-rules) of modern bureaucracy:
In order to understand the foundation of America’s morass, we must examine bureaucracy. At the root of this growing evil is the very nature of bureaucracy, especially political bureaucracy. French economist Frédéric Bastiat offered an early warning in 1850 that laws, institutions, and acts — the stuff of political bureaucracy — produce economic effects that can be seen immediately, but that other, unforeseen effects happen much later. He claimed that bad economists look only at the immediate, seeable effects and ignore effects that come later, while good economists are able to look at the immediate effects and foresee effects, both good and bad, that come later.
Both the seen and the unseen have become a necessary condition of modern bureaucracy. Max Weber, considered the father of modern bureaucracy largely in response to the Industrial Revolution, is credited with formalizing the elements of bureaucracy as a fundamental principle of organization. He was also painfully aware of the arbitrariness of bureaucratic decision processes.
[. . .]
One of the truisms of bureaucracies, be they government or private sector, is that if left to their own devices, they will grow bigger, bolder, and less manageable over time. Teasley has seen this happen over and over again and put his considerable intellect to how its apparatus works. John Baden has offered us one of the most promising, yet ignored, solutions to the bureaucratic leviathan. Baden (1993) puts the problem at the feet of politicians concentrating benefits and dispersing costs and believes “predatory bureaucracies” would allow bureaucracies to feed on themselves with the most effective and efficient bureaucracy taking money and responsibility away from those that are less efficient and effective. While a provocative theory, the problem lies in the very rules that underpin bureaucracies. Despite the concept being nearly 20 years old, it has not been attempted, let alone enacted in any meaningful or widespread way.
[. . .]
Rule #1: Maintain the problem at all costs! The problem is the basis of power, perks, privileges, and security. [. . .]
Rule #2: Use crisis and perceived crisis to increase your power and control. [. . .]
Rule 2a: Force 11th-hour decisions, threaten the loss of options and opportunities, and limit the opposition’s opportunity to review and critique. [. . .]
Rule #3: If there are not enough crises, manufacture them, even from nature, where none exist.
Bureaucracies are always on the lookout for a new crisis. In his “Guiding Principles of Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Bureaucracies,” Harry Teasley points to three examples:
- The Gulf of Tonkin incident, where an alleged attack took place on two US naval destroyers by a North Vietnamese torpedo boat, allowing President Johnson to deploy conventional military forces to Vietnam without congressional approval.
- The attribution of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to Saddam Hussein permitted President George Bush to invade Iraq (again, without the need of congressional approval), after which no WMDs were found.
- Man-made global warming. The first two resulted in loss of life and a terrible toll of people maimed and injured. We are still in the throes of discovering the effects of the third crisis.
[. . .]
Rule #4: Control the flow and release of information while feigning openness. [. . .]
Rule 4a: Deny, delay, obfuscate, spin, and lie. [. . .]
Rule #5: Maximize public-relations exposure by creating a cover story that appeals to the universal need to help people. [. . .]
Rule #6: Create vested support groups by distributing concentrated benefits and/or entitlements to these special interests, while distributing the costs broadly to one’s political opponents. [. . .]
Rule #7: Demonize the truth tellers who have the temerity to say, “The emperor has no clothes.” [. . .]
Rule 7a: Accuse the truth teller of one’s own defects, deficiencies, crimes, and misdemeanors. [. . .]
