Quotulatiousness

December 23, 2024

Trump’s second term – “The counterrevolution begins now”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A few weeks back in City Journal, Christopher Rufo provided a blueprint for President-elect Donald Trump’s second term with emphasis on “dewokification” of the executive branch:

The second election of Donald Trump, along with Republican victories in both houses of Congress, sets the stage in the United States for a confrontation between democracy, which depends on representative institutions to form a government, and the rule of unelected elites, which relies on claims of expertise to control the state.

Already, internal opposition to Trump is organizing within the federal agencies. CNN reports that Pentagon officials are discussing disobeying official policy. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has declared that he would refuse if Trump asked for his resignation. Some would like to see a reprise of the orchestrated counteractions against Trump, from the Russia collusion hoax to the Hunter Biden laptop censorship to the political prosecutions that led to his arrest and felony convictions.

The coming political confrontation is unusual because the specific antagonist is hard to identify. Trump is not contending against Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, or even the Democratic minority in Congress. Instead, the president-elect’s post-electoral opposition comes from inside the executive branch itself, in defiance of Article II of the Constitution, which opens with the unqualified statement: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”.

In recent years, phrases like “the deep state” have arisen in American political discourse to describe this phenomenon, in which administrators, bureaucrats, and unelected officials seem to wield a kind of power that we still lack appropriate language to describe. Part of the motivation is self-interest — bureaucrats want to protect their positions — but another is ideological: the federal government is steeped in left-wing race and gender ideology, and its adherents see Trump as an existential threat.

By rights, he should be. The incoming president has, under the Constitution, every right to bend the administration to his vision, which is contrary to the tenets of left-wing racialism. But those ideologies, which the Biden administration has entrenched through its “whole-of-government” diversity agenda, have long ruled the agencies that control the details of federal policymaking. Hence, the conflict: the president, who has formal authority, versus the ideological bureaucracy, which has real power.

At the end of his first term, Trump attempted to correct this problem through actions such as an executive order banning critical race theory in the federal government. The second Trump administration must go further and dedicate itself to a process that Vice President–elect J. D. Vance has described as “dewokeification”. This is the most urgent policy problem facing the administration, because without representative institutions and a restoration of constitutional authority, it is not possible to govern America.

The Trump administration has a unique opportunity to take decisive action on Day One, through executive orders that can serve as the opening salvo in a counterrevolution. The basic premise: the U.S. should strip left-wing racialism from the federal government and recommit the country to the principle of color-blind equality. Through an aggressive campaign, Trump and his cabinet can put an end to forms of discrimination disguised under the name of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and make government work again.

The process of ideological capture has taken decades. But the counterrevolution can, and must, quickly retake those institutions in the name of the people and reorient them toward the enduring principles of liberty and equality. Bureaucrats abusing the public trust to advance their own ideologies should be put on notice: they will be shut down, their departments abolished, and their employment terminated. The administration will work to rid America of this ideological corruption before it further rots our institutions, demoralizes our citizens, and renders the government totally incompetent.

The counterrevolution begins now.

December 20, 2024

QotD: A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

so how does even a little DEI lead to full incompetence contagion? i would like to posit a very simple emergent algorithm rooted in a simple and longstanding organizational idea:

A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. (and you seriously do not want to meet the people C’s hire)

that’s it. that’s all we need to extrapolate and plot it.

this pattern emerges in response to two simple drives affecting all those who lack ability to compete […]

the essence of this is simple: the highly competent (A’s) wish to be surrounded by other highly competent people. an organization of mostly A’s (or at least A’s in management) thrives and gets lots done. it innovates. it rewards achievement and ability. it’s a meritocracy. because that’s what A’s want.

and B’s hate this. they cannot get ahead and they live in fear of A’s beneath them coming for their jobs and hatred of A’s above them who prevent advancement and who make demands for performance.

they do not want their jobs taken, so they respond to this by hiring only those less competent than themselves to work under them (C’s). this is how they hold position and avoid challenge and threat.

ideally, they’d also like to clear any A’s above them out of the way so they can generate some upward mobility. they cannot do this on a meritocratic axis, so they seek another one to supplant it.

they seek to move hiring and promotion to some other quality than ability then reinforce it with doctrine.

the pretext itself is incidental to this process. it does not really matter what it is.

it just has to be “something other than competence” and you land in this self-referential recursive trap.

el gato malo, “the mediocrity downspiral”, bad cattitude, 2024-09-10.

December 10, 2024

Countering the “Managerial Revolution”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall discusses the rise of the managerial class — described in 1941’s Managerial Revolution by James Burnham — and how detrimental to individual enterprises and the wider economy managerialism has been:

This, rather joyously, explains a lot about the modern world. We could go back to the mid-1980s and the bloke who ran the ‘baccy company written up in Barbarians at the Gates. In which he, as CEO, had a fleet of private planes, the company paid for his 11 country club memberships and so on. His salary was decent, sure, but the corporation rented him all the trappings of a Gatsbyesque — and successful — capitalist. Until the actual capitalists — the barbarians — turned up at those gates and started demanding shareholder returns.

Or we can think of the bureaucratic classes in the UK in more recent decades. Moving effortlessly between this NGO, that quasi-governmental body and a little light sitting on the right government inquiry. All at £1500 a day and a damn good pension to follow.

Or, you know, adapt the base idea to taste. There really is a bureaucratic and managerial class that gains the incomes and power of the capitalists of the past without having to do anything quite so grubby as either risk their own money or, actually, do anything. They, umm, administer, and the entire class is wholly and absolutely convinced that everything must be administered and they’re the right people to be doing that.

You know, basically David Cameron. Met him once, when he was just down from uni. At a political meeting – drinkies for the Tory activists in a particular council ward, possibly a little wider than that. Hated him on sight which I agree has saved me much time over the decades. And I was right too. There is nothing to Cameroonism other than that the right sort of people should be administering — the managerial revolution.

Sure, sure, we used to have the aristocracy which assumed the same thing but we did used to insist that they could chop someone’s head off first — show they had the capability. Also, they didn’t complain nor demand a pension when we did that to them if they lost office.

But the bit that really strikes me. France — and thereby the European Union — seems to me to be where this Managerial Revolution has gone furthest. Get through the right training (the “enarques“) and you’re the right guy to be a Minister, run a political party, manage the oil company, sort out the railways etc. You don’t have to succeed or fail at any of them, you’re one of the gilded class that runs the place. Because, you know, everything needs to be run and one of this class should do so.

The divergence or even active conflict of interests between the owners and the non-owning managers is part of the larger Principal-Agent Problem.

December 7, 2024

The FBI’s future – fix it or abolish it? Decisions, decisions …

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Racket News, Matt Taibbi provides some background information on FBI failures leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks:

On August 13, 2001, 33-year-old French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui paid $6,800 in $100 bills to train on a 747 simulator at the Pan-Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. A retired Northwest Airlines pilot named Clarence “Clancy” Prevost thought Moussaoui’s behavior was odd for someone with no pilot’s license and told his bosses as much. When they said Moussaoui had paid and they didn’t care, Prevost said, “We’ll care when there’s a hijacking and the lawsuits come in”.

The company went to the FBI and on August 16, in what should have been one of the biggest arrests in the history of federal law enforcement, Moussaoui was picked up on an immigration violation. Agents on the case wanted permission to search Moussaoui’s belongings, with one asking superiors as many as 70 times for help in obtaining a warrant. The situation grew more urgent when the French Intelligence Service sent information that Moussaoui was connected to Islamic radicals with ties both to Osama bin Laden and the Chechen warlord Khattab, and that even within this crowd, Moussaoui was nicknamed “the dangerous one”.

Coleen Rowley, the Chief Division Counsel for the Minneapolis Field Office, absorbed agents’ concerns quickly and was aggressive in asking superiors to seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to investigate further. One of the goals was a look at Moussaoui’s computer, as agents believed he’d signaled he had “something to hide” in there. But unlike the former Northwest pilot Prevost, whose superiors trusted his judgment and escalated his concerns, Rowley and the Minneapolis field office were denied by senior lawyers at FBI Headquarters. The Bureau was sitting on the means to stop 9/11 when the planes hit the towers.

This story is actually worse than described, as Rowley made clear in what became a famous letter she wrote to then-Director Robert Mueller the following May. “Even after the attacks had begun,” she wrote, “the [Supervisory Special Agent] in question was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Misseapolis’ prior suspicions about Moussaoui.”

While the Bureau blamed 9/11 on a lack of investigatory authority, the actions of the Minnesota office showed otherwise. Rowley’s decision to confront Mueller with a laundry list of unnecessary bureaucratic failures made her perhaps the FBI’s most famous whistleblower. Her letter excoriated the Bureau’s Washington officeholders for failing to appreciate agents in the field, and for implicitly immunizing themselves against culpability.

December 6, 2024

QotD: Herbert Hoover in the Harding and Coolidge years

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Herbert] Hoover wants to be president. It fits his self-image as a benevolent engineer-king destined to save the populace from the vagaries of politics. The people want Hoover to be president; he’s a super-double-war-hero during a time when most other leaders have embarrassed themselves. Even politicians are up for Hoover being president; Woodrow Wilson has just died, leaving both Democrats and Republicans leaderless. The situation seems perfect.

Hoover bungles it. He plays hard-to-get by pretending he doesn’t want the Presidency, but potential supporters interpret this as him just literally not wanting the Presidency. He refuses to identify as either a Democrat or Republican, intending to make a gesture of above-the-fray non-partisanship, but this prevents either party from rallying around him. Also, he might be the worst public speaker in the history of politics.

Warren D. Harding, a nondescript Senator from Ohio, wins the Republican nomination and the Presidency. Hoover follows his usual strategy of playing hard-to-get by proclaiming he doesn’t want any Cabinet positions. This time it works, but not well: Harding offers him Secretary of Commerce, widely considered a powerless “dud” position. Hoover accepts.

Harding is famous for promising “return to normalcy”, in particular a winding down of the massive expansion of government that marked WWI and the Wilson Administration. Hoover had a better idea – use the newly-muscular government to centralize and rationalize American In his first few years in Commerce – hitherto a meaningless portfolio for people who wanted to say vaguely pro-prosperity things and then go off and play golf – Hoover instituted/invented housing standards, traffic safety standards, industrial standards, zoning standards, standardized electrical sockets, standardized screws, standardized bricks, standardized boards, and standardized hundreds of other things. He founded the FAA to standardize air traffic, and the FCC to standardize communications. In order to learn how his standards were affecting the economy, he founded the NBER to standardize government statistics.

But that isn’t enough! He mediates a conflict between states over water rights to the Colorado River, even though that would normally be a Department of the Interior job. He solves railroad strikes, over the protests of the Department of Labor. “Much to the annoyance of the State Department, Hoover fielded his own foreign service.” He proposes to transfer 16 agencies from other Cabinet departments to the Department of Commerce, and when other Secretaries shot him down, he does all their jobs anyway. The press dub him “Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary Of Everything Else”.

Hoover’s greatest political test comes when the market crashes in the Panic of 1921. The federal government has previously ignored these financial panics. Pre-Wilson, it was small and limited to its constitutional duties – plus nobody knows how to solve a financial panic anyway. Hoover jumps into action, calling a conference of top economists and moving forward large spending projects. More important, he is one of the first government officials to realize that financial panics have a psychological aspect, so he immediately puts out lots of press releases saying that economists agree everything is fine and the panic is definitely over. He takes the opportunity to write letters saying that Herbert Hoover has solved the financial panic and is a great guy, then sign President Harding’s name to them. Whether or not Hoover deserves credit, the panic is short and mild, and his reputation grows.

While everyone else obsesses over his recession-busting, Hoover’s own pet project is saving the Soviet Union. Several years of civil war, communism, and crop failure have produced mass famine. Most of the world refuses to help, angry that the USSR is refusing to pay Czarist Russia’s debts and also pretty peeved over the whole Communism thing. Hoover finds $20 million to spend on food aid for Russia, over everyone else’s objection […]

So passed the early 1920s. Warren Harding died of a stroke, and was succeeded by Vice-President “Silent Cal” Coolidge, a man famous for having no opinions and never talking. Coolidge won re-election easily in 1924. Hoover continued shepherding the economy (average incomes will rise 30% over his eight years in Commerce), but also works on promoting Hooverism, his political philosophy. It has grown from just “benevolent engineers oversee everything” to something kind of like a precursor modern neoliberalism:

    Hoover’s plan amounted to a complete refit of America’s single gigantic plant, and a radical shift in Washington’s economic priorities. Newsmen were fascinated by is talk of a “third alternative” between “the unrestrained capitalism of Adam Smith” and the new strain of socialism rooting in Europe. Laissez-faire was finished, Hoover declared, pointing to antitrust laws and the growth of public utilities as evidence. Socialism, on the other hand, was a dead end, providing no stimulus to individual initiative, the engine of progress. The new Commerce Department was seeking what one reporter summarized as a balance between fairly intelligent business and intelligently fair government. If that were achieved, said Hoover, “we should have given a priceless gift to the twentieth century.”

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.

December 5, 2024

Ontario’s housing market squeezed by the 35.6% combined tax rate on new builds

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The housing situation in Toronto and the rest of the province has been very tight for years. Lots of would-be buyers chasing the proportionally smaller number of new houses being built. This drives prices higher, but no matter how much of the final price is the builder’s profit margin, the government gets nearly four times as much on every new house sale:

The National Post previously reported that at least a third of a new home’s sticker price in Ontario was comprised of taxes, but an updated report, courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Economic Analysis (CANCEA), now puts the figure at 35.6 per cent.

(It gets even better when it comes to affordable housing — but more on that later.)

The Increasing Tax Burden on New Ontario Homes: 2024, which was commissioned by the Residential Construction Council of Ontario and released by CANCEA on Tuesday, is eye-opening for reasons beyond the fact that a compendium of largely superfluous taxes and production levies has reached 35.1 per cent of the final purchase price of a new home in the city of Toronto. It’s 35.5 per cent in the outlying 905 region, and 34.5 per cent in Ottawa.

The report needed only 16 pages to elucidate how bureaucratic machinations aren’t just gouging prospective homebuyers, but homeowners, too — especially the estimated 1.2 million whose mortgages, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, are due for renewal in 2025.

Read closely enough, CANCEA’s report makes a strong argument that, effectively, Canadians work for the government rather the other way around.

For example, CANCEA’s report demonstrates that 70 per cent of aforesaid taxes on new homes “consist of direct fees on the home, such as DC (development charges) and other fees”.

“For homes priced at $450,000,” which aligns with median income, “… the tax burden rises sharply to 45.2 per cent,” says the report, which also notes that economics often force developers to build smaller units that are insufficient for families.

December 1, 2024

QotD: Recording and codifying the land that William conquered

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, China, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I hesitate to recommend academic books to anyone, but I’ll make an exception for James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Subtitled “how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed”, it’s the best long-form exposition I know of, that explains how process and outcome first deform, then negate each other.

[…]

In brief, Scott argues that the process of making a society “legible” to government officials obscures social reality, to the point where the government’s maps and charts and graphs take on a life of their own. It’s recursive, such that those well-intentioned schemes end up first measuring, then manipulating, the wrong thing in the wrong way, to the point that the social “problem” the process was supposed to address drops out entirely — all you have, at the end, is powerpoint girls critiquing spreadsheet boys because their spreadsheets don’t have enough animation, and vice versa.

Scott doesn’t use the Domesday Book as an example (IIRC from a graduate school class 20-odd years ago, anyway), but it’s one we’re probably all familiar with. The first thing William the Conqueror needed to know is: what, exactly, have I conquered? So he sent out the high-medieval version of spreadsheet boys to take a comprehensive survey of the kingdom. Turns out the Duke of Earl’s demense runs from this creek to that rock. He has five underlings, and their domains run from etc.

The point of all this, of course, was so that Billy C. could call the Duke of Earl on the carpet, point to the spreadsheet, and say “You owe me a cow, three chickens, and two months in the saddle as back taxes.” It worked great, except when — as, it seems, is inevitable — the high-medieval equivalent of the spreadsheet boys did the high-medieval version of “ctrl-c”; just copying and pasting the information over. Eventually the tax situation got way out of whack, as it did for most every pre-modern government running a similar system — one of the reasons declining Chinese dynasties had such fiscal problems, for instance, is that the tax surveys only got updated every two centuries or so, such that a major provincial lord was still only paying 20 silver pieces in taxes, when he should’ve been paying 20,000 (and his peasants were all paying 20 when all they could afford was 2).

In other words: unless the spreadsheet boys periodically go out and check that the numbers on their spreadsheets actually correspond in some systematic, more-or-less representative way to some underlying social reality, government policy is being set by make-believe.

Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.

November 30, 2024

It’s not just your imagination, the Canadian government is much bigger and much less efficient now

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Audit, David Clinton shows that the Canadian federal government has gone through significant growth in staff at the same time as just about everything it does is now being done slower and less effectively1 than it was ten or twenty years ago:

Change is normal. The world around us isn’t sitting still and that’s got to have an impact on what’s needed by Canada and Canadians. So we can expect a government’s size and shape to evolve over time, but we’d certainly prefer that the changes were rational.

So let’s take a few minutes to understand how the size, cost, shape, and mandates of our government have been changing over the past few years.

Public service employment

Governments provide a set of services that don’t change dramatically from year to year. Sure, as the population grows they’ll need to process more passport applications and oversee the movement of greater numbers of international travellers across our borders. But task complexity shouldn’t increase faster than the population itself.

Therefore you would expect that the public service should grow in proportion to the overall population. Well, that’s not really true. Due mostly to digital automation, Canada’s private sector labour productivity rose steadily between around 1990 and 2014 and has maintained its peak level ever since. So in fact, since we can now do more with fewer people, you’d really expect public sector employment not to keep pace with rising population levels.

However, the actual proportion of federal employees to Canada’s total population has been growing noticeably over the past six years. Because of the scale I chose for its y-axis, the graph below does exaggerate the changes a bit, but you can see how the federal workforce grew from around 0.72% of the total population in 2017 to 0.9% in 2023. That means about one out of every 59 employed Canadians now works for the federal government.

Which means that – worker-for-worker – Canada’s public service is significantly less productive than it was ten years ago. And the growth in absolute numbers from 257,034 workers in 2015 to 357,247 in 2023 can be accurately characterized as bloat. Unforgivable bloat.

Departmental employment

Since 2011, by my count (and based on Treasury Board data), 11 new federal departments or agencies have come into existence and 18 have been shuffled off to wherever it is old bureaucracies go when they die. In some cases, the change represents nothing more than a technical realignment. The move from the Canadian Polar Commission to Polar Knowledge Canada is probably one such example.

I’m mildly curious to know how much such changes cost, even in terms of simple details like outsourcing designs for a new letterhead and getting IT to set up (and secure) a new website and email domain. I’m sure those don’t come for free.

It’s noteworthy that 11 of those 18 shutdowns took place in 2015 and 2016. That suggests they were the result of the incoming Liberal government’s policy implementations. Nevertheless, those changes don’t explain the scope of civil service employment growth since 2015.

    1. I’m sure you’re all completely sick of me saying it, so I’ve relegated it to a footnote: the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything.

The mission of DOGE

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of Donald Trump’s more interesting announcements shortly after winning the federal election early in November was that he was going to give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy a formal position to do to the US government’s vast array of bureaucratic organizations what Javier Milei did to Argentina’s bloated national government. Here, scraped from the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, is Devon Eriksen‘s thoughts on how to go about pruning back the “fourth branch” of government:

Since the framers of the Constitution created a federal government with three branches, not four, there are no Constitutional checks on the emergent fourth branch.

Currently, the fourth branch is in many ways the most powerful, and certainly the most destructive, arm of the government.

– It has the privilege of targeting individual citizens on its own initiative, which is forbidden to the three other branches.

– It can interfere their lives in any way it wishes by making a “ruling”.

– The only recourse against a “ruling” is to take the bureaucracy in question to court.

– But the process is the punishment, because this takes months if not years and costs tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

– Until recently, courts have deferred to bureaucrats as a matter of legal precedent. Now they merely do so as a matter of practice.

– But should the bureaucracy lose anyway, the only punishment the court inflicts is that they are told they have to stop doing that specific thing.

– Any fines or legal costs imposed on them punish the taxpayer, not the agent or even the agency.

– And the next, closely related, thing the bureaucracy thinks of to do is once again fair game, until the courts are once again brought in, at further cost, to tell it to stop.

All of this creates a Red Queen Effect.

Citizens must establish their own organizations, and raise donations to engage in constant lawfare, just to retain the rights they haven’t lost yet. And they must win every time to maintain the status quo.

Bureaucrats, on the other hand, can fight endless legal battles using money taken from their victims by the IRS, at no cost to themselves. Any victory they claim, they may keep permanently, while any loss may be refought endlessly simply by a slight variance of the attack.

Obviously, if this system is not changed, all power will accrue to the bureaucracy over time. They will constitute a totalitarian authority over every aspect of the life of every citizen.

This is why the name “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) is a serious mistake.

Look, Elon, I like a joke as much as the next guy, and I do think irreverence is a load-bearing component of checking the bureaucracy, because a false aura of gravitas is one of their defenses against public outrage.

But words mean things.

When you create a check on the bureaucracy and call it the department of government efficiency, you focus the attention, and the correction, on the fact that the bureaucracy is stomping on people’s lives and businesses inefficiently, not on the fact that they are doing so at all.

But the name isn’t my decision. The power of the vote isn’t that granular. I can only elect an administration, not protect it from tactical errors by weighing in on individual policy decisions.

Unless someone with direct power happens to read this.

So, regardless of the name, here’s how an organization might be set up to effectively check federal bureaucracies.

1. DOGE must be responsive, not merely proactive.

Being proactive sounds better in the abstract, but it is much easier for a federal agency to gin up some numbers to fight a periodic overall audit, than it is to fight an investigation of a specific case.

2. DOGE must have direct oversight.

If it must take agencies to court, it is merely a proxy for the citizens whose money is being wasted, and whose rights are being trampled.

Imagine the level of inefficiency, waste, and delay, if your process for addressing bureaucratic abuse simply results in one part of the federal government pursuing an expensive court case against another.

Instead, DOGE must have the power to simply make a ruling, via its own investigation hearing process, which is binding on federal agencies.

Any appeals to the court system must be allowed to trigger their own DOGE investigation (for wasting taxpayer fighting a ruling).

3. DOGE must have the power to punish the agent, not just the agency.

“You have to stop that now” is not a deterrent. Neither is fining the agency, because such fines are paid by the American taxpayer.

DOGE must follow Saul Alinsky’s 11th rule: target individuals, not institutions.

Why?

Because agencies are agencies. They consist of agents.

An agent is someone who acts on behalf of a principal — someone whose interests the agent is supposed to represent.

When the agent is incentivized so that his interests diverge from those of the principal, he will be increasingly likely to act in his own interest, not the principal’s.

This is the Principal-Agent Problem.

An agency is a construct, a theoretical entity. What Vonnegut would call a “granfalloon”.

Agencies do not act, they do not make decisions, they do not have incentives they respond to. Any appearance to the contrary is an emergent property created by the aggregate action of agents.

Every decision, whether we admit it or not, has a name attached to it, not a department. It is that person who responds to incentives.

Agents will favor their own incentives over those of their principal (the American people) unless a counter incentive is present for that specific person.

For this reason, DOGE should, must, have the power to discipline individual employees of the federal agencies it oversees.

This doesn’t just mean insignificant letters of reprimand in a file. It means fines against personal assets, firing, or even filing criminal charges. No qualified immunity.

Yes, you read that right. DOGE must be able to fire other agencies’ staff. I recommend that anyone fired by DOGE be permanently illegible for any federal government job, excluding only elected positions.

4. DOGE investigations must be triggerable by citizen complaints.

This is self-explanatory. It gives DOGE the practical capability to redress individual injustices, and it crowdsources your discovery problem.

Establish a hotline.

5. DOGE must have sufficient power to protect and reward whistleblowers, and punish those who retaliate against them.

6. Bureaucrats must be held responsible for outcomes, not just for following procedure.

Often, procedure is the problem. The precedent must be established, and clearly enforced, that because agents have agency, agents are responsible for using their discretion to ensure efficient, just, and sane outcomes, not just for doing whatever departmental policy allows.

7. DOGE must have an adversarial relationship with the bureaucracies is oversees.

This eliminates the phenomenon of “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing”.

Following the previous recommendation is almost sure to make this happen.

The point is not for DOGE to address every instance of waste or wrongdoing, it is to make bureaucrats act responsibly because they fear an investigation.

In essence, I am imagining DOGE (or some superior name that better reflects the mission) as an entity with a license to treat bureaucrats the way bureaucrats currently treat citizens.

November 29, 2024

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya nominated as Director of the US National Institutes of Health

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From the point of view of the establishment, the barbarians are well and truly inside the gates, as President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as the next director of the National Institutes of Health:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Donald Trump’s nominee as Director of the National Health Institutes.
Photo by Taleed Brown, 2020, via Wikimedia Commons.

Four years ago, Jay Bhattacharya was ostracized by his colleagues at Stanford and censored on social media platforms thanks to a campaign against him by the public-health establishment. The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, sent an email to another NIH official, Anthony Fauci, urging a “quick and devastating published takedown” of Bhattacharya and his fellow “fringe epidemiologists”.

Bhattacharya is far from the fringe today. Donald Trump nominated him this week for Collins’s old job, director of the NIH. Assuming the Senate confirms him, it will be a major victory for science and academic freedom — and a serious threat to the universities that suppressed scientific debate and promoted disastrous policies during the pandemic, causing public trust in science to plummet. Academic researchers and administrators have mostly refused to acknowledge their mistakes, much less make amends, but Bhattacharya promised yesterday to “reform American scientific institutions so that they are worthy of trust again”.

As NIH director, he would wield a potent tool to induce reform: money. Stanford and more than a dozen other universities each get more than $500 million annually in grants from the NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The NIH grants support not only researchers but also their universities’ bureaucracies, which collect a hefty surcharge to cover supposed overhead costs. The federal largesse has helped finance the administrative bloat at universities, including the expansion of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies under the Biden administration, which took into account a university’s commitment to DEI principles when deciding whether to award grants from the NIH and other agencies.

Those priorities are about to change. Trump has vowed to rescind immediately Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to promote DEI. During his first term, Trump threatened to issue an executive order barring universities from receiving federal funds if they suppressed free speech. He didn’t issue that order, but whether or not he does so in his next term, the NIH director will already have the power to consider a university’s commitment to academic freedom in deciding whether or not to award funds.

“For science to thrive and progress, we must be open-minded and allow vigorous and passionate debate,” says Martin Kulldorff, a former professor of medicine at Harvard. “Why should taxpayers subsidize universities that don’t allow that?” Kulldorff, an eminent epidemiologist, lost his job at Harvard after he became an early and outspoken critic of pandemic policies. In 2020, he joined with Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford, to write the Great Barrington Declaration, a critique of lockdowns that was signed by tens of thousands of scientists and physicians.

Bhattacharya, who has a Ph.D. in economics as well as an M.D. from Stanford, hung on to his job as professor of health policy at the latter’s medical school, but his views were taboo on campus. After he and colleagues did a field study at the start of the pandemic showing that the Covid fatality rate was much lower than the doomsday number used to justify lockdowns, they were vilified by academics and journalists, and Stanford subjected them to a two-month inquiry by an outside legal firm. (They were vindicated by the inquiry and also by subsequent research confirming their findings.)

QotD: Why nothing gets done in the Current Year

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… we do gain a lovely illustration of why nothing ever really gets done in this modern world. Sure, the politicians have demanded more [advanced logic] chips in a country that doesn’t have any spare chip technicians — TSMC has had to import their own from Taiwan — and so on and so on. But there’s also this:

    Having pumped billions of dollars into building the next generation of computer chip factories in the US, the Biden administration is facing new pressure over the health and safety risks those facilities could pose. Environmental reviews for the new projects need to be more thorough, advocates say. They lack transparency around what kinds of toxic substances factory workers might handle, and plans to keep hazardous waste like forever chemicals from leaching into the environment have been vague.

    A coalition of influential labor unions and environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, have since submitted comments to the Department of Commerce on draft environmental assessments, saying that the assessments fall short. The coalition’s comments flag lists of potential issues at several projects in Arizona and Idaho, including how opaque the safety measures that manufacturers will take to protect both workers and nearby residents are.

This is not a serious complaint. This is actually the national association of environmental studies writers spotting a gravy train passing by and desiring to dip their ladle in. And that’s all it is too. But it’s also that excellent example of why fuck all ever gets built. We’ve an entire — and politically powerful — class that makes their living producing the hundred tonne reports that accompany building anything. And they’re not going to allow anything to be built unless they get paid for writing hundred tonne reports. And, to complete the circle, if every activity requires a hundred tonne report then fuck all will ever get done.

There was, back a time, a law passed about blood minerals. The law said anyone who might use them must write to all suppliers to ask if they do. Then those said anyones must tell consumers whether they do. This cost $4 billion just in the first year. From what I’ve heard — and might take the trouble to prove one day — the bloke who led the campaign for the law requiring the letters now runs a very profitable consultancy advising large corporates on how to write the letters. $4 billion spent by society so that one bloke can gain a minor summer place in the Hamptons. This doesn’t make us richer as a whole, it’s pissing the wealth of the nation up the wall.

Carthage, it’s the only solution. The biggest problem who is who the hell would buy our nice new stock of enslaved environmental bureaucrats? Razing, salt, ploughs, these are easy but who’s mad enough to offer a positive price for the last part of the process?

Tim Worstall, “Why Fuck All Ever Gets Done In This Modern World”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2024-08-28.

November 28, 2024

How is Argentina doing after a year under Javier Milei?

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I don’t normally follow South American news all that closely, as despite being in the same hemisphere, little that happens there has much importance to us here in Canada or the United States. The election of Argentinian President Javier Milei, however, has made Argentina a much more interesting place to watch as Milei valiantly attempts to turn the economy around from its near-century-long decline. Here, Dan Mitchell provides his assessment of Milei’s efforts so far:

… let’s focus today on Milei’s goal of maximizing economic liberty.

The bad news is that if he wants Argentina to become the new Hong Kong, Milei has a long journey. According to Economic Freedom of the World, Argentina ranked a lowly #159 out of 165 nations in 2022.

As you can see from the EFW rankings, Milei’s country gets especially bad scores for Sound Money, Trade and Regulation (dead last for Sound Money and in the bottom-10 percent of the world for the other two categories!).

The good news is that you don’t have to be libertarian Nirvana (or even Liberland) to make a big jump in the rankings.

You don’t even need to be Hong Kong (which used to be very good with scores above 9 but has now declined to 8.58 thanks to Beijing’s intervention).

Heck, almost every country in the western world has experienced a significant decline in economic liberty this century.

Milei actually could put Argentina in first place today merely by achieving the same level of economic liberty (8.67) that the United States had in 2004.

For what it’s worth, I think it would take several years of good reforms to climb that high.

That being said, dramatic improvements are nonetheless possible in a very short period. Here’s my back-of-the-envelope estimate of where Argentina could be by the end of next year.

November 27, 2024

Scolianormativity

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Health, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At FEE, Michael Strong defines the neologism and provides evidence that it has been a long-term harm to children forced into the Prussian-originated school regimentation regime:

Scolianormative (adj.): The assumption that behaviors defined by institutionalized schooling are “normal”. An assumption that became pervasive in industrialized societies in which institutionalized schooling became the norm that resulted in marginalizing and harming millions of children. Once society began to question scolianormativity, gradually people began to realize that the norms set by institutionalized schooling were perfectly arbitrary. It turned out that it was not necessary to harm children. The institutions that led to such widespread harms were dismantled, and humanity transcended the terrible century of institutionalized schooling.

The conventional educational model, government-enforced and subsidized, is based on 13 years of schooling consisting of state-defined curriculum standards and exams leading to a high school diploma.

Young human beings are judged as either “normal” or not based on the extent to which they are “on track” with respect to grade level exams and test scores. Students who are not making the expected progress may be diagnosed with learning differences (formerly known as disabilities). Students who can’t sit still adequately may be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Students who find the experience soul-killing may be diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Students who can’t stand to be told what to do all day may be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). Students who score higher on certain tests are labeled “gifted”.

Massive amounts of research and institutional authority have been invested in these and other diagnoses. When a child is not progressing appropriately in the system, the child is often sent to specialists who then perform the diagnosis. When appropriate, then the child is given some combination of medication, accommodations, and/or sent to a special program for children with “special needs”.

Many well-intentioned people regard this system as life-saving for the children who might otherwise have “not had their needs met” in the absence of such a diagnosis and intervention. And this is no doubt often true, but our fixation on scolianormativity blinds us to the fact that an entirely different perspective might actually result in better lives for more children.

How could one possibly deny mountains of evidence on behalf of such a life-saving system?

Scolianormativity

The Prussian school model, a state-led model devoted to nationalism, is only about two hundred years old. For much of its first century it was limited to a few hours per day, for a few months per year, for a few years of schooling. It has only gradually grown to encompass most of a child’s waking hours for nine months a year from ages 5 to 18. Indeed, in the U.S., it was only in the 1950s that a majority of children graduated from high school (though laws requiring compulsory attendance through age 16 had been passed in the late 19th and early 20th century). In addition, for most of its first century, it was far more flexible than it has become in its second. The increasing standardization and bureaucratization of childhood is a remarkably recent phenomenon in historical terms.

In his book Seeing Like a State, the political scientist James C. Scott documents how governments work to create societies that are “legible”, that can be perceived and managed by the state to suit the needs of the state’s bureaucrats and political leaders. Public schools are one of the most pervasive of all state institutions. The structure of public schooling has grown to suit the needs of the state bureaucrats who monitor it.

November 26, 2024

Crony Capitalist Canada – “Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre … has vowed to protect Big Dairy just like every other party leader”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Chris Selley discusses the latest attempt to further protect the outrageous profits our dairy companies make by overcharging Canadians for milk, butter, cheese, and other dairy products:

That unelected senators should not overrule the will of the House of Commons has always struck me as a rule most Canadians could agree on, whatever they think ought to happen with Canada’s upper chamber. Senators can propose amendments to bad bills, rake ministers over the coals at committee, call witnesses the House wasn’t interested in for whatever reason, raise red flags that haven’t yet been raised, all to the good. But gutting a bill, as the Senate has done with proposed legislation that would protect supply management in Canadian dairy, poultry and eggs even more than it’s already protected, is not kosher.

Not all violations of this policy are equally appalling, however. When the House of Commons is clearly not operating for the benefit of Canadians, when its focus demonstrably isn’t the public good but rather coddling and currying favour with special interests, it behooves the Senate to intervene as strenuously as possible while still at the end of the day respecting the lower chamber’s democratic legitimacy.

Coddling and currying favour is exactly what C-282, a private member’s bill from Bloc Québécois Luc Thériault, does: It proposes to make it illegal for a future government to lower the tariff rate for foreign products in supply-managed industries. You could call it the “no to cheaper groceries act.” Some senators wish to neuter it, such that it wouldn’t apply to any existing trade deals or deals already in negotiation. Bloc Leader Yves-François Blanchet had originally demanded the bill passed as one condition of keeping the Liberals afloat (although his deadline to do so has passed).

Fifty-one MPs of 338 opposed the pricey-groceries act at third reading. I would have said “only 51” except that’s a shocking number: 49 Conservatives and two Liberals, Nathaniel Erskine-Smith and Chandra Arya. It’s almost reason for hope … except of course that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre voted for it, and has vowed to protect Big Dairy just like every other party leader. It goes without saying that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau not only supported it, but has come out against the Senate’s amendments.

“We will not accept any bill that minimizes or eliminates the House’s obligation to protect supply management in any future trade agreement,” Trudeau reassured Blanchet in the House on Wednesday. ” No matter what the Senate does, the will of the House is clear.”

I mean, what elected politician in Ottawa gives a shit about Canadians being gouged on grocery staples every week? They’d rather get the support of the milk, poultry and egg crony capitalists than help ordinary Canadians, and they’re terrified of being portrayed as anti-Quebec in an election year. Spineless cowards, the lot of them.

November 8, 2024

“The Science™, that thing we’re supposed to believe in and obey – is distinctly and increasingly political”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

President-elect Donald Trump has a vast array of options to tackle in the traditional first hundred days of his administration. Chris Bray says that one of the very first of these should be the depoliticization of the federal science agencies:

Donald Trump has spoken very clearly about his day-one determination to end the mutilation of children in the service of gender ideology, but let’s look for the roots of that poison tree. Via Billboard Chris, here’s a sample descriptive section from a National Institutes of Health grant given to a pediatric gender physician in Los Angeles, and read this carefully to find the most important sentence:

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy has worked to push gender hormone treatment down to eight year-olds, with research funding from the federal government. Now, big finish: the dates on the NIH grant that Billboard Chris highlighted:

This is a project — gender hormones for eight year-olds — that operated with federal funding during the first Trump administration. Policy expressed in words meets policy expressed in cash. This is what matters, year after year, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike (click to enlarge):

The money, the money, and the money. What you fund is what you’re doing. It may not seem like a big target, but the politicization of federal science funding is a root cause of institutional decay and pathological narrative-making, and cutting the money pipeline to politicized science is the policy action that will matter for decades. Remaking the funding pipeline for federal science grants is a day one priority, because the money will shape policy far more than any declaration of intent.

The problem is everywhere: the NIH, the NSF, NASA, NOAA, and so on. SpaceX is catching rockets; NASA is funding this: “21-EEJ21-0020 ASSESSMENT OF THE GULF COAST ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE LANDSCAPE FOR EQUITY.”

And this: “EXPLORING SYNERGISTIC OPPORTUNITIES BETWEEN CHARLOTTE-AREA ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES AND NASA EARTH SCIENCE INFORMATION.”

Pick a federal science grant website and spend some time exploring it. Here’s the National Science Foundation’s funding opportunities page. Sample grant program: “Growing Research Compliance Support and Service Infrastructure for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity”.

Today’s funded program for transformative science equity and environmental justice is tomorrow’s new policy measures. This is the pipeline to programs. What you fund today is what you’re going to do in five years.

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