In my youth, I shared a house with some communists of the very old-fashioned variety. They believed in industrial production because it inevitably resulted in that finest flower of humanity, the factory worker, who would, ex officio, be a foot soldier of the Revolution. No Leonardo da Vinci or Mozart for them! They believed, rather, in the Soviet Union’s ever-rising production, or at any rate graphs of ever-rising production, of something called pig iron, which at some point would overtake that of the United States and Western Europe combined, to the enormous benefit, of course, of the indigenous people of the Siberian tundra. They couldn’t see a landscape without wanting to garnish it with a factory chimney belching smoke, the blacker the better, as a symbol of what they called Man’s triumph over Nature (early communist propaganda and iconography were full of chimneys belching black smoke). They thought of Nature as an enemy, as a malign obstacle to be wrestled with and overcome, or as an evil conscious force obstructing Mankind’s progress to a glorious and infinitely abundant future. The extinction of animal species was welcome to them, not only if they, the extinct species, were in some way noxious to Man or deleterious to his advance, such as flies and snakes, but as symbolizing his increasing mastery over the surface of the Earth. Knowledge is power, and power is what they cared about.
Theodore Dalrymple, “A Matter of Respect”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-12-31.
December 3, 2024
QotD: Old fashioned communists
December 2, 2024
“I think we’re moving out of the ‘FA’ stage into the ‘FO’ era on that one, friends”
In a rare sighting of a Matt Gurney column from The Line outside the paywall, he shares some of his thoughts after attending this year’s Halifax International Security Forum in Nova Scotia:
For those who don’t know, the “Forum”, or HISF, is an annual gathering of military leaders, defence and intelligence experts, and others whose work relates to defence and security issues, from across NATO and the Western alliance broadly. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, it is something of a jewel in Canada’s defence crown, a chance to bring some very powerful and influential people to a gorgeous Canadian city to wine and dine them, in hopes that they don’t realize our military is a disaster that is largely incapable of contributing to our collective defence. The agenda is always divided into a mix of free time for social networking, off-the-record chats (which are generally the most interesting) and also a series of on-the-record events that can be quoted from, and which are broadcast live online.
[…]
In our latest episode of The Line Podcast, we discussed this at length, in the context of the ICC issuing arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his now-former defence minister. I quipped on the pod that the “rules-based international order” is a lot like the “sanctity of marriage”. It’s something we talk about as if it exists, and we’d all like it to exist, but it really doesn’t. It just doesn’t. It’s an ideal worth striving for, but not actually a thing that exists and can be counted on. The Line had also previously written about our belief that there is no rules-based international order in a prior dispatch, and then ran a counterpoint to that perspective by a reader who disagreed. It was a good counterpoint! It didn’t change my mind.
Shearer tackled the question directly, and so perfectly that I think his answer has changed my view of the situation. It hasn’t changed my opinion, but it has changed how I’m going to describe it. Here’s what Shearer said (I’ve tidied up the quote a tiny bit for clarity, but you can watch the whole thing around the 39-minute mark of this video). For context, the panel was about the so-called “CRINKS” — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and the challenge they are posing to the Western alliance. I’ll include Coomarasamy’s question, and then show you what Shearer said that made me go “Huh”.
Coomarasamy: Are we in a world now where we can’t really talk about a rules-based international order, but two separate, competing ones?
Shearer: That’s a big question. I think the rules-based order, frankly, turns out to have been, in hindsight, a power-based order. It was unchallenged U.S. military power that made possible the liberal order of the last 50 years. With all its benefits for so many countries. Was the U.S. always a perfect hegemon within that system? Occasionally not. It would shift its weight around, and there were consequences from that. But overall, it worked because the United States was a relatively benign hegemon.
That’s it. That’s exactly it. That’s exactly what I have intuitively felt in the last few years, and haven’t done a good enough job explaining. I grasped it in a big-picture intellectual sense, but I hadn’t been able to shrink it down into a single sentence like that. When Shearer said that the rules-based order was, actually, a U.S. military power-based order, it clicked in my brain. That’s the way to articulate it.
For the last few decades, we thought we were living in a rules-based-international order, and planned our lives around that. But what we were actually living in was a global order led by a relatively benign global superpower and preserved by its astonishing military power.
And that world is ending.
The question of our era
At PJ Media, Athena Thorne asks the most pertinent, relevant question of our times:
Is Donald Trump the Long-Awaited Messiah of the Band ‘Rush’ Era?
Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons
Greetings, PJ readers! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are still feeling lazy and slovenly. In that vein, here is a tasty morsel of a column from a friend and fellow reader, Kato the Elder. He makes an excellent argument — one with which I heartily agree — that President-elect Donald Trump is the small-L libertarian hero of our time. Enjoy!
In a particular moment during my precocious, autodidact pre-teen years, I stumbled upon a copy of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged at an estate sale in an old New England barn. There, in a hay-covered stall, I found that dense brick of a book that seemed, in a creepy sort of way, to be waiting for me to pick it up and take it home — consequences be damned. It was like Guy Clark’s song about a haunted guitar, found in a pawn shop, with the name of the next victim to pick it up already written on the case. And, like Guy Clark’s guitar, Atlas Shrugged is one of those cultural objects that once picked up cannot be put down. Who could ever forget, on page 455, where it is asked, “What advice would you give Atlas if he became weary of holding up the world? Shrug.” A libertarian is born. I quickly worked my way through the remainder of Rand’s parables and then the essays.
Rand’s novella “Anthem” led to my discovery of the Canadian rock band Rush, which had adapted “Anthem” as the rock opera entitled 2112. It’s the story of a man who suffers under the autocratic rule of the Priests of the Temple of Syrinx, progressives who use computers to create a scientific, expert-driven utopia that does not recognize the value of the individual or the right to think and create and dissent. In “Anthem”, it is the protagonist’s discovery of an ancient incandescent light bulb that leads to the discovery of an earlier and freer society and puts the hero on a collision course with the collectivists. In the Rush version, the long-lost incandescent light bulb is replaced with a guitar, but of course it would be, because what kind of crazy government would take away someone’s light bulbs?
A very strong Randian libertarianism runs through Rush’s music; the heroes of many Rush songs are those individuals struggling, of course, against a government that is determined to pound the individualism and free thought out of its subjects, whether that individual is Tom Sawyer or teenagers living in subdivisions or the teen boy awaiting the world’s applause or the community suffering from mob violence and witch hunts. But Rush, and Rand, are not rejecting the Eisenhower-era type of corporate conformity, but rather the conformity of counter-culture which has taken power and proven the deficiency of the government-expert-knows-best mindset. The epitome of that strain of Randian libertarianism comes in the song “Red Barchetta”, a power ballad about a boy who, in conspiracy with his uncle, escapes to the countryside to race a classic, gas-powered Ferrari against a bland EV car of some kind that has supplanted the freedom and adrenalin rush of gas-powered freedom. Because what kind of crazy government would take away someone’s choice of car?
I saw Rush in concert at least 12 times, and every concert was full of people who looked like me, dressed like me, and sounded like me. We sang along with Rush at the top of our lungs about the freedom of music and the individualism which is closer to the heart. As we all grew older and grayer and our American society became less tolerant of dissent and more dependent on corporate/government cronyism, we could only wonder whether we would find our Howard Rourke, the nonconformist New York developer and architect of Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, who would lead us to the promised land.
Mars? Yes, Mars.
At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses the pros and cons of colonizing Mars:
… we’re on the good timeline now.
Not everyone appreciates the good timeline. A persistent current of discourse holds that we shouldn’t go to Mars, that it is a misbegotten ambition, unrealistic, unprofitable, and even counterproductive. “Antarctica would be easier”, they say, “We should start there if we start anywhere”. Mars is too difficult; the technology doesn’t exist; it’s fantastically expensive, with no conceivable profit to be derived from a frigid desert littered with dead rocks, where the clouds themselves are made of red dust, where the air is too thin and toxic to breathe, where nothing can possibly grow. Therefore, they pronounce, we shouldn’t go. We shouldn’t even try to go. We should use our limited resources to solve our pressing problems down here on Earth – climate change, poverty, racism, the gender pay gap, the refusal of the chuds to use the correct pronouns.
Leave aside that if Europeans had waited to solve Europe’s problems, they never would have left.
Leave aside that “we” aren’t doing anything. Some people will use their resources to try this audacious thing; others will use their resources to do other things. The oft-heard phrasing of “we” presupposes that “our” resources are a collective property, their usage to be decided on the basis of utilitarian calculations carried out, presumably, by panels of self-selected technocratic experts. That collective ownership and central planning has been calamitous every time it has been applied in earnest is no barrier to the appeal of the idea over a great many minds.
Leave aside also the economic case for Martian settlement. That case has been made, and made well, by Devon Eriksen in his essay “The Trillionaires of Mars“.
Briefly, Mars is valuable because its shallow gravity well and proximity to the asteroid belt provides an ideal planetary surface on which to build the industrial infrastructure necessary to refine asteroids into useful metals and finished manufactured products, which can then be sent back to the terrestrial market (or shipped elsewhere in the solar system). As to the comparisons to Antarctica, planetary scientist Peter Hague
has addressed this in detail.As Hague points out, Antarctica’s geography means that it receives a vanishingly small amount of solar radiation (and during the winter, none at all). In contrast, while Mars’ greater distance from the Sun (an average of 1.5 Astronomical Units) means that it only gets about 44% of Earth’s irradiance, this is still a lot more than Antarctica. Growing crops is a lot easier on Mars than it is on Antarctica, where it can only be done hydroponically. Setting up shop on Mars means that we can use this solar energy not only to generate electricity, but also for agriculture. On Mars, in principle, one merely mixes human waste with the regolith (after removing the perchlorates) to turn it into topsoil, puts it in a transparent dome, fills the dome with air, and plants the potatoes.
Mars is certainly the easiest extraterrestrial body in the solar system to settle, occupying a sweet spot with its combination of proximity to the Earth, low gravity, an atmosphere, and abundant local resources. It therefore makes perfect sense that it would be prioritized for colonization. It’s Level 1 in the game of becoming multiplanetary. Other bodies may offer much richer prizes in the long run, but they’re also far more challenging.
Still, pace Devon, it’s unlikely that Mars will be profitable in the short run. Even asteroid mining will, at least initially, be far more useful for in situ space manufacturing than it will be for the terrestrial market. As Eriksen points out, correctly, if you strip-mine a quadrillion-dollar asteroid of nickel, iron, and platinum group metals and ship them back to Earth all at once, you’ll just crash the value of those metals. Supply and demand 101. Then again, as Eriksen also points out, raw materials aren’t just numbers on a commodity exchange: they’re actual, physical stuff that you can use to build things, and when society has more of it, society is wealthier in real terms … something that we often forget in our hypothecated financial economy. This is a point I’ve made myself, in the context of a wider discussion about why we should fix our gaze upon the heavens, and ignore those who demand that we wallow perpetually in the mud.
USS Constitution – “Old Ironsides” – 1950’s newsreel
Charlie Dean Archives
Published Jan 1, 2014USS Constitution is a wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate of the United States Navy. Named by President George Washington after the Constitution of the United States of America, she is the world’s oldest floating commissioned naval vessel. Launched in 1797, Constitution was one of six original frigates authorized for construction by the Naval Act of 1794. Joshua Humphreys designed the frigates to be the young Navy’s capital ships, and so Constitution and her sisters were larger and more heavily armed and built than standard frigates of the period. Built in Boston, Massachusetts at Edmund Hartt’s shipyard, her first duties with the newly formed United States Navy were to provide protection for American merchant shipping during the Quasi-War with France and to defeat the Barbary pirates in the First Barbary War.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cons…
CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
QotD: Intersectionality on campus
Perhaps the most pernicious consequence of intersectionality, however, is its effect on the culture of elite college campuses. Some claims about “campuses-gone-crazy” are surely overblown. For instance, judging from my experience at Columbia, nobody believes there are 63 genders, and hardly anyone loves Soviet-style communism. (That said, the few communists on campus tend to despise intersectionality with an unusual passion.) But one thing is certainly not exaggerated: intersectionality dominates the day-to-day culture. It operates as a master formula by which social status is doled out. Being black and queer is better than just being black or queer, being Muslim and gender non-binary is better than being either one on its own, and so forth. By “better”, I mean that people are more excited to meet you, you’re spoken of more highly behind your back, and your friends enjoy an elevated social status for being associated with you.
In this way, intersectionality creates a perverse social incentive structure. If you’re cis, straight, and white, you start at the bottom of the social hierarchy — especially if you’re a man, but also if you’re a woman. For such students, there is a strong incentive to create an identity that will help them attain a modicum of status. Some do this by becoming gender non-binary; others do it by experimenting with their sexuality under the catch-all label “queer”. In part, this is healthy college-aged exploration — finding oneself, as it were. But much of it amounts to needless confusion and pain imposed on hapless young people by the bizarre tenets of a new faith.
Coleman Hughes, “Reflections on Intersectionality”, Quillette, 2020-01-13.
December 1, 2024
“Huntziger must be shot!” – WW2 Commentary 1939-1940
World War Two
Published 30 Nov 2024Today Indy and Spartacus sit down to answer all kinds of questions about the first year of WW2. How phony was the Phony War? How do you go around the Maginot Line? And much more! Also, Indy sings a song about Charles Huntziger.
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“Fellow Canadians, forget your dire financial plight … it’s only a ‘vibecession'”
Tristin Hopper imagines what Chrystia Freeland might be confiding to her diary after she blithely assured struggling Canadians that no, really, everything’s just fine and dandy and you’re being deceived by “bad vibes”:
Screencap from a CPAC video of Chrystia Freeland speaking.
Monday
As a former journalist, I am fully aware of the awesome power of the press to distort and pervert reality. Here we all are in 2024 Canada. There is food. There is shelter. There is breathable air. The vast majority of us will go through the rest of the fiscal year without being stabbed on public transit.
And yet, to hear the misinformation and disinformation trafficked by the media, you would think we live in some kind of violent, economically depressed hellscape.
Well, this kind of mendacity has consequences: A nationwide hysteria of bad feelings and negative energy. A fanatical devotion to bad vibes in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I don’t purport to know how to cure such irrational malaise, but I will be very surprised if $250 each and some tax-free liquor and Christmas shopping doesn’t do it.
Tuesday
Donald Trump’s threat of 25 per cent tariffs is easily the most serious challenge I have faced as Canadian finance minister. The United States is our largest trading partner, and the suspension of free trade across our shared border would invite economic ruin the likes of which we’ve never seen.
Worse, Trump is immune to our usual strategies. We suggested sending his tariff threat to committee, or having it reviewed by a Crown inquiry, but neither offer was accepted. Rather, they want us to stem the tide of illegal migrants using Canada as a base to enter the United States. They are under the impression — let’s call it “bad vibes” — that this is a problem.
But let nobody say that the integrity of our trade flows are not my department’s top priority. As such, we are immediately introducing a one-time bursary of between $150 and $240 paid to any resident of Canada who can prove they have not attempted illegal entry of the United States within the past 12 months.
Retrofitting Aluminium Clamps | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published Jul 26, 2024Aluminium clamps are lightweight and ideal for 99% of woodworking.
I have tried almost all of them and been disappointed because they can look the same on the outside, but it’s the thickness of the walls of the box section that counts. This is how I retrofit all of my ‘U’ shaped rectangular bar sash clamps.
It takes only a few minutes to do each one, but what a difference it makes when you do. Lightweight but with great strength; once done, my clamps are up there with the best of the best.
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QotD: Recording and codifying the land that William conquered
[…]
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
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.
Forgotten War Ep 5 – Chindits 2 – The Empire Strikes
HardThrasher
Published 29 Nov 202402:00 – Here We Go Again
06:36 – Perfect Planning
13:16 – Death of a Prophet
14:51 – The Fly In
18:56 – Dazed and Confused (in the Monsoon)
20:40 – Can’t Fly in This
31:54 – Survivor’s ClubPlease consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
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The mission of DOGE
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.
$7 BILLION – Is Ajax Worth It? | Tank Chats #177
The Tank Museum
Published Aug 2, 2024This is how the UK’s newest armoured fighting vehicle, Ajax, has been described time and time again by the British media. With repeated delays and continual bad press, the Ajax programme has been subject to much scrutiny over the course of its procurement and development. Public opinion of this vehicle is, in a word, poor.
But is this perception wholly accurate, or is there more to the Ajax story?
In this video, David Willey guides us through the problematic history of the Ajax family, discusses its reconnaissance capabilities on the modern battlefield and hears from members of the British Army who have had a chance to put this vehicle to the test.
QotD: Unrealized promises of a “Great Society”
Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History, 2020.
