Quotulatiousness

September 13, 2018

The Canadian Forces are suffering from obesity … in leadership and staff

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

Ted Campbell responds to requests to explain what he feels the Canadian Forces should do about our far-too-large military headquarters buttprint:

… let’s consider the command and control (C²) superstructure. I’m going to continue to argue that it is beyond “fat,” it is, now, morbidly obese and that condition actually poses a danger to our national defence. Too many cooks do spoil the broth and Canada has too many admirals and generals […] without enough real ‘work’ to keep them all productively busy; so they send each other e-mails and fabricate crises for their own HQ to solve and, generally, just make a nuisance of themselves. Fewer admiral and generals (and Navy captains and Army and RCAF colonels) will be busier and more productive and less dangerous.

I have a couple of concrete suggestions:

Start by reducing the rank of the Chief of the Defence Staff from four stars (admiral or general) to three stars, vice admiral or lieutenant general. We only have something like 65,000 regular force military members and 25,000 reserve force members. In about 1960 the Canadian Army, alone, had nearly 50,000 regular force members and something like 30,000 in the militia (reserve army) and it was commanded by one lieutenant general. Now, some will argue that times have changed and increased complexity means that higher ranks are needed. I call bullsh!t! The Israeli Defence Forces, today, has over 175,000 full time members and over 400,000 in reserve. Gadi Eizenkot, the Chief of Staff of the IDF holds the rank of Rav Aluf ~ lieutenant general, and he is the only Israeli officer to hold that high a rank. Now, let’s play a little mind game … suppose you are (four star) General Joseph Dunford of the United States Marine Corps, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most senior officer in the world’s most powerful military; now suppose, also, that your phone is ringing off the hook for some reason and your aide calls in on the intercom and says, “I have (four star) General Vance of Canada on line 1 and (three star) Rav Aluf Eizenkotof Israel on line 2, sir.” Which line does General Dunford pick up? Of course he isn’t impressed by Canadian General Jonathan Vance’s four stars; but he is mightily impressed by the size and power of the force that answers to three star Lieutenant General Eizenkot.

The argument that we need a four star CDS just because everyone else has one is specious … it’s rubbish. The Americans have several four star admirals and generals, they also have over 1¼ million active duty military personnel and 10 aircraft carriers and over 4,000 nuclear weapons. India has has a few four star officers, the Indian Army, with over 1 million regular, professional troops and with almost 1 million reserve soldiers, has one, only one, four star general. Canada does not need any four star officers on a regular basis … our lieutenant generals, vice admirals, rear admirals and so on, including Navy captains and Army colonels may all need generous pay raises but they do not need more gold on their shoulders and sleeves. Canada got its first four star officer back during World War II, when we had over 1 million men and women under arms. The rank returned in 1951, after our main allies, America (in 1947) and Britain (in 1939) established unified Chiefs of Staff committees to coordinate joint operations, when General Charles Foulkes was appointed to the post, which he would hold for almost a decade. Lowering the rank to three stars (vice admiral or lieutenant general) and raising the pay, would set a good example for the rest of the military and, indeed for all of government, in setting senior executive compensation, including perquisites, and status at reasonable levels.

Another thing, which I have mentioned before, is that back in the 1960s, when Defence Minister Paul Hellyer was upsetting every apple cart he and his team decided that the best way to set ranks and pay was to “benchmark” some military jobs with civil service equivalents. Now, in the civil service the appointment of “director” is, usually, the lowest level of executive ~ it is the point where technical expertise meets up with broader government wide responsibility and accountability, ‘ranks’ below that are specialists, ranks above it are, increasingly generalists. Now, anyone who knows much of anything about the military will agree that the first executive level in the Canadian Armed Forces is the captain of a major warship (a frigate, say) or the commanding officer of an Army regiment or battalion or of an Air Force squadron. Those ships and units are commanded by officers in the rank of commander or lieutenant colonel but for some reason, in the mid 1960s, the Hellyer team decided, probably just an error made in haste, that Navy captain and Army colonel and RCAF group captain were the appropriate ranks for directors and some very serious rank inflation was embedded inside the Canadian Armed Forces’ command and control (C²) superstructure … it’s an easy enough problem to fix although it will cause some short term disruption, and it means that the officers’ pay scales probably need to be reformed all the way down to the very bottom.

It has always seemed to me that the hallmark of a great army, of a great defence staff, especially, is a culture of excellence. The ranks of the staff don’t matter much, the staff act of behalf and in the name of the commander they serve. In fact, in a really good staff system the chain of command is always crystal clear because the senior staff are always, without fail, lower in rank (occasionally equal to) than the subordinate commanders. Thus, in an army corps (three or four divisions, perhaps 100,000 soldiers) the corps commander is a lieutenant general (three stars) and the subordinate commanders of divisions and of the corps artillery, are major generals (two star officers); in a proper corps the chiefs of staff of the operations and logistics branches, who control operations on behalf of the corps commander, are one star officers ~ brigadier generals. Ditto in the division (20,000+ soldiers) where the major general is the division commander and brigadier generals are the brigade commanders, the two chiefs of staff (operations, which includes intelligence, and logistics, which includes administration and personnel) are colonels … in each case the subordinate commanders outrank the senior staff officers. But the senior staff are listened to with great regard because they are excellent at their job and because they speak for the superior commander.

September 4, 2018

Grad school mafia

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrea Long Chu recounts her experience as a teaching assistant to Professor Avital Ronell, and the disturbing psychological world inhabited by grad students at New York University:

Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it. When scholars defend Avital — or “complicate the narrative,” as we like to say — in part this is because we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep. Intelligence is a hungry god.

In this way, Avital’s case has become a strange referendum on literary study. Generations of scholars have been suckled at the teat of interpretation: We spend our days parsing commas and decoding metaphors. We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means.

My department has been largely silent since the news broke. Faculty members have said nothing to us. Upset and ashamed, my fellow graduate students and I speak with one another cautiously. We heal, or don’t, alone. People I know are afraid to make any public comment, even on Facebook, where they are friends with older, richer scholars who might one day control their fates. Even I, who have by extraordinary luck options outside of academia, fear what being vocal will bring.

A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones. They’ve watched as their professors play favorites, as their colleagues get punished for citing an adviser’s rival, as funding, jobs, and prestige are doled out to the most obedient and obsequious. The American university knows only the language of extortion. “Tell,” it purrs, curling its fingers around your IV drip, “and we’ll eat you alive.”

Avital conducts herself as if someone somewhere is always persecuting her. She learned this, I imagine, in graduate school. No woman escapes the relentless misogyny of the academy. The humanities are sadistic for most people, especially when you aren’t a white man. This is understood to be normal. When students in my department asked for more advising, we were told we were being needy. “Graduate school should destroy you,” one professor laughed.

The irony is that those who survive this destruction often do so at the cost of inflicting the same trauma on their own students. Avital, now a grande dame of literary studies, who Reitman alleges bragged to him of a “mafia”-like ability to make or break the careers of others, still feels persecuted. She makes it the job of those around her to protect her from that persecution: to fawn, appease, coddle. The lawsuit against her reads as a portrait, not of a macho predator type, but of a desperately lonely person with the power to coerce others, on pain of professional and psychic obliteration, into being her friends, or worse.

August 30, 2018

“This is simply drivel. And it’s the standard Green Party phantasm written out again”

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

Tim Worstall is not impressed with a new study out of Finland which recommends that the United Nations become much more involved in organizing and directing the lives of everyone on the planet … for our own good, of course:

We’ve another of those pieces of environmental drivel on offer to us. Here it’s the considered opinions of some Finnish knownothings on what is necessary to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The basis of which is that we should all prepare to be rather poorer. No, not because the Earth is running out of stuff to make us richer but because our Finnish knownothings are recommending that the UN take charge of things and forcibly make us poorer.

This is perhaps not the correct manner of running the global economy.

[…]

That’s all entirely drivel, of course. Capitalism doesn’t depend upon cheap fossil fuels nor even cheap energy. It’s just an economic system in which we have private property. Including the value added belonging to the people who own the property which adds the value. That’s really all it is too. Profit belongs to the people providing the capital – this is definitional by the way. For that’s what we define profit as, that part of the returns from an activity which go to those who provide the capital.

There is absolutely nothing at all which requires that energy, or any natural resource, be of any particular price nor level of price. All we are saying when we recommend capitalism is that the system seems to work better when those who make a profit get to keep it. Our economic definition of profit being when value of output is greater than the costs of inputs. Who gets those profits is definitional about capitalism. Any and every economic system is trying to produce profits. Because any and every economic system is trying to add value to inputs, trying to create value.

[…]

There’s a remarkable lack of reasoning as to why international trade needs to be limited or regulated. If we’re facing more expensive energy then we should be doing more of it, not less. But then perhaps those doing bio- and physics don’t know that Adam Smith pointed out we’d do better getting the wine from Bourdeaux rather than growing the grapes in Scotland. Or even that David Ricardo launched an entire subset of economics with his observation that trade uses fewer resources than non-trade. I mean, it is possible that they’re just ignorant of the most basic points here, isn’t it?

They’ve also not grasped that good life and economic growth part at all. No one actually producing economic growth – defined, as always, as an increase in the value being produced – does so in order to produce economic growth. They do it in pursuit of their definition of the good life. Economic growth is simply the aggregate of all those people trying to make their own lives better, their pursuit of that good life. The inverse is also true. If we leave people alone to pursue their own versions of the good life then economic growth is what we get. Our bio-p types seem unaware of the laissez faire argument. That we all get richer faster if left alone to our own visions of life?

Now, if this was just a few blokes in the Far North muttering to themselves among the trees of future toilet roll this wouldn’t matter. But this is serious advice to the United Nations? It’s about to become art of how world governance works? Dear God Above, what have any of us one to deserve this?

Try this for example:

    A key problem with carbon pricing has been that states, federations, or unions have not implemented it on a sufficiently high level, fearing industrial leakage to less environmentally-regulated countries. For this reason, many economists and politicians hope for global carbon pricing. But if we return to the four examples above, energy, transport, food, and housing, we can see that it would be highly unlikely that even global carbon pricing would guide economic activity in the right direction – at least with sufficient speed and breadth. As a policy tool, carbon pricing lacks the crucial element of coordinating a diverse set of economic actors toward a common goal. Individual actors would have an incentive to decrease carbon emissions, but they would still compete through their own business logics; there would be nothing to ensure that any one business logic would support the transition to sustainability on a systemic level.

Everyone on the planet economises on their carbon emissions because emissions are now more expensive. This does not work to coordinate everyones’ actions about carbon emissions? These people never have considered the role of the price system in coordinating human activities, have they? Not heard a single beanie about Hayek, the Pretence of Knowledge and all that?

August 8, 2018

Doing military intelligence … backwards

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell on what he sees as a big problem with western military command structures and particularly the way military intelligence is being over-centralized away from the fighting troops and pushed high up the chain of command:

Intelligence is vital in modern combat operations … just as it was when Alexander set about conquering the known world. But, as Alexander knew, real intelligence is gathered by the troops in direct contact with the enemy and is augmented by e.g. spies who read the enemies mail (our modern, very effective SigInt services, for example, and drones and so on). There is a now well established ~ and I think wrong headed ~ system which aims to collect ALL intelligence at the highest possible level and then disseminate it down … that’s exactly backwards! Combat intelligence is gathered, in the main, by troops in contact with the enemy, by privates and troopers and corporals and then it is passed up the chain to be collated with reports from other troops in contact and then a refined picture is passed back down … where it is promptly corrected by the troops in contact. Intelligence staffs in HQs almost never know much of anything of real utility but they have convinced commanders that if there can only be more and more highly ranked intelligence officers with more clerks and more drones and more computers and so on, that they will, somehow, get ahead of the enemy. It’s a siren song that has, already, run more than one combat commander up on to the rocks of operational failure. The only people who have a good feel for what the enemy is up to are the people who have them in their sights. Don’t get me wrong: I am a HUGE fan of SigInt and drones and UWB radio devices that can see through walls and so on … I want the micro drones and the cyber bugs to be in the hands of the corporals in the rifle sections who are making their way house-to-house and floor-by-floor.

But the bigger threat, by far, is a brigade command post that looks like this …

… than like this:

April 18, 2003, Wainwright, Alberta
Captain Jeremy Small, the Signals Officer with the First Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment (1 RCR)(Petawawa, Ontario), works on the Athene Tactical System (ATS) in the Command Post (CP). The ATS is a new battlefield information system being tested by 2 Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group (2CMBG) Headquarters and the 1 RCR. The digital information can be shared in a more timely fashion than the old method, which needed to be drawn by hand. The 1 RCR are part of the is part of the approximately 4,600 Canadian Forces members who are participating in the first major army training exercise of the 21st Century, from April 7 to May 2, 2003 in Wainwright, Alta. After two years of planning, co-operation, strategic resource management, and with assistance from the Air Force, the Army has created Exercise RESOLUTE WARRIOR. Fourteen combat and support units are training together in a multi-element combat environment in preparation for potential and upcoming high readiness tasks at home and abroad. This exercise is the confirmation of the skills and cohesion of the units involved and will be similar to an actual deployment.
Photo: MCpl Paul MacGregor, Canadian Forces Combat Camera

The urban battle of the future, like those of the past will be fought by rifle sections of eight to 12 soldiers, directed by platoon commanders (young, 20-something, lieutenants) overseen and supports by company and battalion commanders. The lessons that my Regiment learned at Ortona, during the Christmas season of 1943, (and which were drummed into my head by ‘old sweats‘ 20 years later) will still apply. Generals and brigadiers and colonels may plan and guide the battle but it will be fought by captains and corporals and privates … hand-to-hand, house-by-house, street-by-street … whether it is a small city or a giant metropolis. Yes, that young soldier would love to have a little drone to see around the corner before he throws the grenade and he might even be interested in knowing that SigInt says that enemy is running low on ammo and food, but at the moment he, like all combat soldiers, must trust, mainly, in his own judgment of the situation as he, and only he, can see it.

But while the privates and corporals are fighting the battle and gathering the real intelligence about the enemy, the legal officer will be wanting to know exactly what (s)he (the rifle section commander) sees and (s)he, the legal officer, will want to advise the brigade commander (who commands 6,500 soldiers) to interfere directly with the the command decisions of the most junior leaders (section (10 soldiers) and platoon (35 soldiers) commanders) and with the control decisions being made by company (125 soldiers) and battalion (900 soldiers) commanders. Good brigade commanders will resist that pressure and they will, equally, close their ears to the urgent warnings of the Public Affairs officer who will say something like “if this goes wrong the Minister will be embarrassed and that will cost you your next star.”

July 6, 2018

“That’s what governments are for — get in a man’s way”

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

Veronique de Rugy says that the 4th of July is a good time to reflect on the American Founding Fathers fighting to gain independence from a distant tyrannical government … and the rest of the year is devoted to coping with a less-distant but no-less tyrannical government in Washington:

Consider the oil and gas industry. Over the years, the federal government has adopted many regulations meant to hinder the industry. As Nick Loris, an energy policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, reminds me, one such regulation is the Merchant Marine Act, also known as the Jones Act, which makes it more expensive to ship oil and natural gas from coast to coast. Then there are the past administrations’ outright moratoriums on drilling in certain areas of America’s coasts, which massively increases the cost of doing business. As Loris notes, there are many costly bureaucratic delays in issuing leases and processing applications for permits to drill (APDs), which stalls production on federal lands. On average, the federal processing of APDs in the last year of the Obama administration was 257 days, while state processing is typically 30 days or less.

Since Uncle Sam has a lot of regulations in place to make the operations of domestic oil and gas companies more costly, why is the biggest beneficiary of loans from the federal government export credit agency (the U.S. Export-Import Bank) the gigantic Mexico state-owned oil and gas company Pemex? Between 2007 and 2013 (the most complete data set we have), Pemex received over $7 billion in loans backed by American taxpayers to buy U.S. goods. Thanks to Uncle Sam, this discounted borrowing power gives Pemex a leg up on its competition with domestic oil and gas companies.

Then there’s the Trump administration tariffs. These import taxes on foreign goods coming from Europe, China, and other countries have not only raised the cost of doing business but also triggered retaliatory measures from foreign governments. For instance, the farm industry is paying a steep price from the tariffs on steel because they increase the cost of farm machinery, lowering profit margins. Farmers are also hurt by the European, Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese governments that have imposed retaliatory export restrictions on U.S. farm products. Many small farms are calling for help to survive. It’s so bad that the entire Iowa congressional delegation sent a letter to President Trump on June 25 in which it called the tariffs “catastrophic for Iowa’s economy.”

Quote in the headline from Firefly episode “Serenity, Part 1”.

July 1, 2018

QotD: Homework

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

Let’s end homework forever — just end it now — and open up more daylight hours for life’s inexhaustible succession of microlessons. Knowing how to paddle a canoe, or fix a faucet, or work a cash register, or bake a coffeecake, or comfort someone who is unhappy, is much more important than knowing the names of the six kingdoms of living organisms, or the layers of the atmosphere, even if you’re going to become a naturalist or an atmospheric physicist — and paddling and faucet-­fixing and cash-­registering and cake-­baking and the offering of sympathy, like most memorable proficiencies, happen best when they’re voluntary, after school is out.

Nicholson Baker, “Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher”, New York Times Magazine, 2016-09-07.

June 30, 2018

QotD: In government regulations, complexity is a subsidy to existing companies

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

One of the major themes of the book I’m working on should be familiar to longtime readers of this “news”letter. It boils down to a simple insight: Complexity is a subsidy. The more complex you make the rules, the more you reward people with the cognitive, material, or social resources necessary to get around them. Big corporations tend not to object to more burdensome regulations because they can afford to comply with them. Dodd-Frank was great for the “too big to fail” crowd. But it has been murder on community banks that don’t have the resources to comply. As Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, put it:

    It’s very hard for outside entrants to come in and disrupt our business simply because we’re so regulated. We hear people in our industry talk about the regulation, and they talk about it with a sigh about the burdensome of regulation. But in fact in some cases the burdensome regulation acts as a bit of a moat around our business.

But you’ve been hearing this stuff from me for years. Let’s get back to the arrogance thing. It seems to me a big part of the problem with progressive elites these days is that they lack self-awareness. That elites arrange affairs for their own self-interest is an insight that was already ancient when Robert Michels penned his Iron Law of Oligarchy. But ever since the progressives concocted their theories of “disinterestedness,” they’ve convinced themselves that they are not in fact a self-serving elite. Give feudal aristocrats their due: They were a self-dealing crop of rent-seekers and exploiters, but at least they were open about the fact that they believed they had a divine right to sit atop the social pyramid. Today’s progressive aristocracy is largely blind to the fact that their cult of expertise isn’t really about expertise; it’s about organizing society in a way that reinforces their status and power.

Well, most of them are blind to it. Occasionally the mask slips. Jonathan Gruber, one of the chief architects and financial beneficiaries of the health-care “reform,” told audiences that Obamacare was designed “in a tortured way” to hide the fact that “healthy people pay in and sick people get money.” They had to do it this way to get around the inconvenient “stupidity of the American voter.” A feudal lord who talked this way about his serfs wouldn’t get any grief for it. But in America such honesty gets you rendered an un-person.

Jonah Goldberg, “The Consequences of Overpromising on Obamacare”, National Review, 2016-10-08.

June 25, 2018

Differences between the United States and the “idealized” United States of Europe

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall, in the Continental Telegraph:

There are those who think – urge, wish for perhaps – the European Union is or should become the United States of Europe. Lots of central bureaucratic control, the nation states left as just the remnants of once independent countries like the US states are these days. In some ways the two systems are very much the same already. No US state has any control at all over trade across its own border. Nor does any EU one. Trade is an issue solely the competence of the central organisations, respectively Washington DC and Brussels. Equally, both systems use this central control of trade and trade only to expand that central control.

In the US there was a case that Federal control of trade meant that the Feds got to decide who could grow wheat where and when. The usual sort of planning idiocy led to the Feds telling farmers who could grow how much and when. One farmer claimed he was only growing for his own consumption and this shouldn’t be limited. The centre (the Supreme Court) disagreed, the crux being that if he didn’t grow for his own consumption he would buy, this affected inter-state commerce, he had to obey the Feds. The EU takes this a step further. The Single Market rules are nominally about trade. Anything legal to be buying and selling in one place is such in all is a reasonable explanation of the nub of the matter. Sure, exceptions and all that. But this then smuggles into all law that continental (Roman Law really) idea that what is legal to do is something that the legislation defines. Instead of that Common Law idea that legislation, the law even, defines what it is illegal to do all other things being legal.

Once this is accepted then of course the next step is that there must be regulation of all things so as to tell people what it is legal to do. In this manner all sorts of things get smuggled in. Vacuum cleaner motors must be limited to a certain size or power. Because those whose lives are unfortunate enough that they’ve time to spare to be concerned about legislation on such matters note that they can be and thus incorporate their trivialities into legislation. The extent of this reach is larger than you think. The underlying legal, not political, justification for recycling targets is that some countries – Holland, where digging a hole gains nothing but wet boots – don’t have space for landfill. This would put them at a disadvantage if other countries do have the space, therefore all must recycle.

Giving the centre power always, but always, means an extension of the centre’s power. The two systems aren’t so different then.

June 16, 2018

Who will think of the children Australian civil servants???

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

A tale from Catallaxy Files that’s sure to tug on your heartstrings:

In Canberra today, the Australian Greens announced a new tax fairness policy to remedy a design fault in the current system.

According to the Greens, it seems that it is only Australian public servants (local, state and Federal) who have been able to negotiate salary increases. As a consequence, because of their increased salaries, public servants are constantly pushed into higher tax brackets with the result that impost of bracket creep disproportionately falls on them.

Independent economic research has confirmed this phenomena. The Australia Institute economists have models showing that up to 80% of Commonwealth bracket creep tax receipts are paid by Australian public servants.

The Australian Greens believe that just because public servants earn more than private sector workers, they should not be required to pay more tax. Australian Greens’ Treasury spokesperson Adam Bandt said:

    Australian public servants should not be forced to carry the brunt of government spending, including spending on other public sector salaries. This is a role for the private sector. It is manifestly unfair that just because public servants have been able to extract additional salaries that they should be forced into higher tax brackets.

In response, the Australia Greens have announced the Tax Equalisation and Redistribution Designation (TERD). Under the TERD, full-time, part-time and casual public sector workers will be subject to a separate tax schedule with a flat 15% rate for income above $500,000. Public servant income below $500,000 will be tax free.

Of course, it would be even simpler for accounting purposes just to exempt the civil service from paying tax at all — we might expect that to be a Green Party policy plank in a year or two (or even our own NDP, who have a lot of support from our unionized civil service).

Reminder: Catallaxy Files is not a parody site … although this particular story is a parody. Not following Australian politics closely, I only twigged when they got to the acronym for the program…

June 12, 2018

Conformity

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

May 28, 2018

QotD: Correcting mistakes in private and public enterprises

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

… government cannot do just one thing, and some of the repercussions of what it chooses to do will be, as it were, mistakes in the perspective of the public even if the initial action were not. But the public’s dissatisfaction with these adverse outcomes can make itself known only via the politically charged process of complaint to authorities, petition for redress of grievance, lobbying, payoffs to public officials, and all the rest of the endlessly complex apparatus for the operation of the government’s political and bureaucratic setup. One is lucky to get any constructive response at all from the government, whose effective control is apt to be in the hands of entrenched politicians, bureaucrats, and private-sector cronies in the various iron triangles that pervade the state at large. If one does succeed in getting a constructive response, it is likely to come forth only after years of expensive and time-consuming delays.

This lack of an effective feedback-incentive mechanism is among the greatest flaws of all government activities. Markets, in contrast, are certainly not perfect relative to the model criteria economists have devised to evaluate them, but they are undoubtedly superior in the operation of their feedback information and response to mistakes. To remove an activity from the market and place in under government control is to ensure that henceforth mistakes, whether they arise from bad judgement, corruption, or ignorance, will not elicit a proper or timely response. In the government realm, mistakes and the slow, counter-productive responses, like doomed lovers, sink together slowly in the quicksand of bad actions being made ever worse by ill-fated reactions.

Robert Higgs, “Dealing with Mistakes: Government Action versus Private Action”, The Beacon, 2016-08-17.

May 26, 2018

Remy: The Longest Time (TSA Version)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 25 May 2018

Remy prepares summer travelers for groping season.

“The Longest Time” parody written and performed by Remy. Background vocals and Mastering by Ben Karlstrom. Video produced and edited by Austin Bragg.
—–
LYRICS:
Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time
If you book a ticket for a flight
Stow your baggage and some of your rights
Travel, you’re hoping
But first you’ll get a groping
And you’ll be waiting for the longest time

My last job? I guess it paid the bills
This pays more for using the same skills
At first we hound you
Then we put our arms around you
And you’ll be waiting for the longest time

Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time

Supervisors try to sneak bombs by
Of 100, 80 make it by
I like those chances
I forgot how nice your pants is
I haven’t touched them for the longest time

I had other jobs at the start
I said to myself “just follow your heart”
Now I know the woman that you are
I’ll swab your Magic cards
And you’ll miss your connection…

Who could guess what consequence this brings
We have issues keeping nicer things
Our record’s so bad I think you ought to know this summer
you’ll be waiting for the longest time

Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time

May 21, 2018

QotD: The key difference between private and public enterprise is effective feedback

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

State bureaucracies are notoriously inept in reacting constructively to their own mistakes. For example, they continuously seek to increase their budgets, staffs, and authority, even when their projects have proven counter-productive or disastrous. It’s almost as if they promote their institutional objectives best by fouling up their programs, then coming back to their funding sources to explain that they cannot succeed unless they receive more resources to do so. Thus do public agencies pour money and effort down the rat hole for years on end, wasting the public’s money every step of the way. The feedback system in this case is obviously perverse so far as serving the public interest is concerned.

Such perversity is practically guaranteed in government operations because government operates outside the realm of private property rights, the price system, and the profit-and-loss accounting that constitute a feedback system in the market realm. In the market, money-losing projects do not persist indefinitely. Their owners and managers eventually decide against throwing good money after bad and close the unprofitable operations. Owners who refuse to read and respond correctly to the clear message transmitted by profits and losses suffer reductions of their own wealth, which serves as a powerful incentive to act correctly and to rectify the mistakes they have made before even more wealth goes down the drain.

Robert Higgs, “Dealing with Mistakes: Government Action versus Private Action”, The Beacon, 2016-08-17.

May 20, 2018

QotD: Robert Conquest’s Laws of Politics

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

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

May 10, 2018

QotD: Langue de bois

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

The attendees [of a medical leadership conference] would learn about something called “lean management,” one feebly-attempted definition of which is as follows:

    If someone tells you that “lean management is this” and not something else, if someone puts it in a box and ties a bow around it and presents it in a neat package with four walls around it, then that someone knows not of what they speak. Why? Because it is in motion and not a framed picture hanging on the wall. It is a melody, a rhythm, and not a single note.

This is the mysticism of apparatchiks, the romanticism of bureaucrats, the poetry of clerks. From my limited observations of management in public hospitals and other parts of the public health care system, it seeks to be not lean, in the commonly used sense of the word, but fat, indeed as fat as possible; nor are large private institutions very much different.

It seems, then, that we have entered, gradually and without any central direction or decree, a golden age of langue de bois or even of Newspeak. Langue de bois is the pompous, vague, and abstract words that have some kind of connotation but no real denotation used by those who have to hide their real motives and activities by a smokescreen of scientific- or benevolent-sounding verbiage. Newspeak is the language in Nineteen Eighty-Four whose object is to limit human minds to a few simple politically permissible thoughts, excluding all others, and making doublethink — the frictionless assent to incompatible propositions — part of everyday mentation.

Langue de bois and Newspeak are no longer languages into which normal thought must be translated; rather they have become the languages in which thought itself, or rather cerebral activity, takes place, at least in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy that rules us. If you ask someone who speaks either of them to translate what he has said or written into normal language, it is more than likely he will be unable to do so: His translation will be indistinguishable from the words translated. It is therefore clear that, where culture is concerned, the Soviet Union scored a decisive and probably irreversible victory in the Cold War.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Life de Bois”, Taki’s Magazine, 2016-09-10.

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