Quotulatiousness

March 30, 2026

Canada’s official bilingualism benefits only one of the two “founding” peoples

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

Canada has been officially a bilingual country for decades, but it hasn’t made most Canadians capable of effective use of both official languages, especially in the western half of the country. Instead, with the imposition of mandatory bilingualism for most federal civil service roles, it’s functioned as a strong bias in favour of bilingual Quebeckers and against Canadians from majority anglophone provinces. Given that government jobs have been growing at a far faster rate than private-sector jobs, this injustice is fuelling anger and support for separatism in the west:

This is why French Immersion schools function as “private schools for the middle class” … it provides access to lucrative and secure government jobs for the children of the bourgeoisie, excluding most working class kids.

It’s a uniquely ridiculous Canadian story.

Two Canadian pilots were killed in a freak accident at LaGuardia airport and yet Canadian news coverage has been dominated by outrage over the fact that the CEO of the pilots’ airline, Michael Rousseau of Air Canada, released a condolence video that had French captions but no spoken French!

Though one of the two dead pilots was French Canadian, near as I can tell, none of the anger at Rousseau’s video is coming from anyone associated with the victims themselves, but rather the Canadian political class and punditocracy. Prime Minister Carney denounced the video for lacking “judgment” and “compassion,” and a bunch of other politicians have said similar things, particularly in Quebec, where the legislature passed a unanimous motion demanding Rousseau’s resignation. There have been a ton of angry anti-Rousseau editorials in all the leading Canadian papers.

It is obviously a highly performative, almost ritualistic, almost religious outrage occurring mostly so members of the Canadian establishment can collectively affirm one of their shibboleths: the country’s elite should be bilingual.

On social media, however, the reaction has been quite different, with ordinary Canadians expressing frustration and annoyance at the distasteful nature of it all. Two men are dead and this is what our betters are yapping about? An old debate — long stigmatized, but never successfully suppressed — has resurfaced: why are we doing this bilingualism thing at all?

I’ve been arguing against the Canadian elite’s cult of official bilingualism for a very long time. To the extent I have a controversial reputation in Canada and don’t get invited on things very much, it’s in large part because I’m very outspoken on this issue, which is often treated as the one line you’re not allowed to cross. Hating trans people or saying October 7 wasn’t so bad … those are edgy opinions that can be forgiven. Questioning bilingualism is a much more unforgivably toxic take, because it’s seen as offending Quebeckers, and a lot of elite Canada wants to be on Quebec’s good side.

But I also feel this is one issue where I’m very, very obviously in the right, and where I have the least self-doubt. There aren’t many issues where I feel I could hold my own in some Jubilee-style “Surrounded” debate bro type thing, but this is one.

So, with that being said, let me attempt to engage with some of the arguments you see made in favor of not just official bilingualism, but the idea of Canada requiring a bilingual ruling class in particular.

Canada is a bilingual country, so it makes sense for the Canadian government, and other Canadian national institutions, to provide nationwide services in both French and English.

Canada is a bilingual country by law, but not by fact. Canada is in fact an overwhelmingly English-speaking country. According to the 2021 census, 87% of Canadians can speak English while 11% can speak only French and about 2% can speak neither. Of this four million Canadians who can only speak French, 96% are located in the province of Quebec. Excluding Quebec, the rate of Canadians who can speak English rises to 97.8%.

It’s sensible for things in Quebec to function mostly in the French language, given about 94% of people in the province can speak it. It’s sensible for things outside of Quebec to operate mostly in English for the same reason. In both Quebec and the rest of Canada there is a very small minority of people, mostly in urban centers, who cannot speak the dominant language of where they live, so it’s reasonable for accommodations to be made for their needs on a case-by-case, community-by-community basis.

What is decidedly not reasonable, however, is to blindly organize all public (and in some cases, private) operations in this country as if there exists some substantial unilingual French-speaking minority everywhere from Newfoundland to Nunavut that is helpless without services specifically tailored to them — a minority in need of French-speaking receptionists and clerks and cops and teachers and librarians and journalists and guides and managers and lawyers and judges and HR departments and all the rest, all accessible at all times, anywhere in Canada.

For Canada’s service sector to go above and beyond in seeking to accommodate the needs of a unilingual French population in provinces and territories outside of Quebec that either barely exists or is substantially overshadowed by other linguistic minorities is to engage in a preposterous misallocation of resources simply to pay tribute to a bilingual fantasy version of Canada that’s never actually existed.

March 19, 2026

Government creates a problem – yet the solution is always “more government!”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison explains the vast drawbacks of asking governments to solve problems:

Government bureaucracy is like a snow machine that keeps blasting, then hires more people to shovel the mess it just made.

We’re told it exists to help. To protect. To serve. Nice story. But in practice, it behaves more like a self-preserving organism. It doesn’t solve problems cleanly. It multiplies them, then offers to manage the mess it helped create.

Here’s the part most people miss. Bureaucracies don’t grow because problems get bigger. They grow because complexity gets rewarded. The more tangled the system, the more valuable the people who run it. That’s not a bug. That’s the incentive structure.

William Niskanen called this decades ago. Bureaucrats maximize budgets, not results. Bigger department, bigger influence. If a problem gets solved too efficiently, the machine loses a reason to exist. So problems don’t disappear. They get “managed”.

Then comes the language game.

Confusion gets dressed up as compassion.
A program no one understands becomes “comprehensive”.
A policy that creates dependency becomes “support”.
Failure becomes “underfunding”.

It’s like hiring a mechanic who loosens parts just to bill you for tightening them later.

Now zoom in on Canada. Then zoom in tighter on Manitoba.

We don’t just have bureaucracy. We have an oversized public sector that’s crowding out the very engine that pays for it. In Manitoba especially, government employment makes up a huge slice of the workforce compared to the private sector that actually generates wealth. More administrators, fewer producers.

And here’s the quiet problem. Public sector growth doesn’t face the same discipline as the private sector. If a business bloats, it dies. If a department bloats, it asks for more funding.

So the balance drifts.

More people administering. Fewer people building, investing, risking.
More rules. Less output.
More spending. Slower growth.

It creates a kind of economic inversion. The part of society that redistributes wealth starts to outweigh the part that creates it. That’s not sustainable. It’s like living off the interest of a bank account you’ve stopped contributing to.

Politicians don’t fix this because growth is easy to sell. Cuts are not. No one gets applause for saying, “We’re going to do less”. So the system expands in one direction only.

Forward. Always forward. Never back.

Meanwhile, taxpayers are handed the bill and told it’s the price of caring.

Here’s the hard reframe. Bureaucracy isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what it’s rewarded to do. Expand. Protect itself. Justify its existence.

If you want a different outcome, you need different incentives.

Measure outcomes, not spending.
Reward efficiency, not headcount.
Shrink what doesn’t work, no matter how “important” it sounds.

Because if you don’t trim the machine, it doesn’t stay the same size.

It learns to eat.

March 15, 2026

QotD: The Roman Empire “worked” for centuries because it was run like the Roman army

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

The Roman Empire is a good example. It worked because they ran it like the Army.

A Roman legion is technically a “manipular phalanx”. A phalanx — that is, a tactical formation — that can detach parts of itself to pursue smaller tactical objectives. As far as I know, the Legion was an administrative unit, not a tactical one — the largest tactical formation was the cohort — but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, the Romans were accustomed to independently-operating tactical units. So long as they maintained formation, the sub-commanders had very broad latitude to do whatever they needed to do. They were expected to be able to command what we’d call “combined arms” (a vexillation). Ancient Auftragstaktik.

They ran their Empire the same way. So long as the sub-commanders (the Governors) “held formation”, they could pursue the agreed-upon tactical objectives (peace, revenue maximization) as they saw fit. They could put together what amounted to an administrative vexillation, using whoever was available at the time. The Emperor basically dealt with personnel problems, like a general — he had his broad policy objectives, but most of the stuff he ruled on boiled down to personnel matters; he’d direct his sub-commanders to fix a problem in whatever way seemed best to them.

We run our polities like bureaucracies — businesses, not armies. The Army’s basic problem is how to keep itself occupied in peacetime — it assumes that it exists, and always will exist, because it’s necessary; should the Army cease to exist, so will the State. Business’s basic problem is to generate enough output to keep itself in existence — a very different proposition, requiring a very different mindset.

A State bureaucracy is the worst of both worlds — it assumes it always will exist, like the Army, so it needs to find a way to keep itself occupied during “peacetime”; but that means it needs to produce enough output to justify itself in “peacetime”, because it’s never not peacetime — the business mentality.

Severian, commenting on “Means and Ends”, Founding Questions, 2025-09-04.

January 29, 2026

Starship Troopers: Service Isn’t The Point

Filed under: Books, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 5 Sept 2025

There’s a long-running argument over whether Heinlein’s book describes military service as the exclusive path to citizenship, or if “federal service” is a much broader basket of enfranchisement. While a close read of the book makes it unquestionably clear which is correct, it misses the greater point. Heinlein was writing about the role of civic virtue in the stability of a republic, his citizenship-through-service framing is the literary conceit for discussing that larger question.

For a more detailed examination of the nature of Federal Service, I recommend James Gifford’s essay on the subject: https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ft…

00:00 Intro
00:45 What is Federal Service?
02:18 An Exploration of Enfranchisement
03:13 Expanded Universe
05:38 But Why?
06:59 Starside R&D
09:07 “Unreasonable Facsimile”
10:54 Filtering Civic Virtue
(more…)

November 22, 2025

Democrats may come to regret their “refuse illegal orders” messaging

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

Many current and former military folks ridiculed the Democrats for their sudden discovery of the right (and obligation) to refuse illegal orders … which has been part of western military doctrine since the end of World War Two. I poked some fun at them as well, but J.D. Tuccille points out that it’s a weird stance for the party that is always fully in favour of government agents’ maximizing their powers:

I favor government employees defying orders and sabotaging the instruments of the state as much as the next libertarian (well, maybe a little more). But I suspect the Democratic lawmakers urging members of the military and the intelligence community to “refuse illegal orders” haven’t entirely thought through their positions. While their advice is commendable so far as it goes, as officials of a political party known for its expansive view of the role of government their words are likely to come back and bite them on their collective asses. It’s hard to imagine them being so enthusiastic about a reboot of this message directed at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and IRS agents under a Democratic administration.

Lawmakers Say: Refuse Illegal Orders

In a video message released this week, Democratic Sens. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mark Kelly of Arizona, and Reps. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, and Jason Crow of Colorado, introduce themselves with emphasis on their past roles in the military and intelligence agencies.

“We want to speak directly to members of the military and the intelligence community,” they say. “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now. Americans trust their military, but that trust is at risk. This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. And right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.”

That’s a nice lead-in. Then we get to the heart of the message: “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

Stirring stuff. And accurate. Referencing a Vietnam War-era atrocity, retired General Philip M. Breedlove, former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told NewsNation regarding the video, “Since My Lai, the way we have interpreted this is, as a combatant, as a military officer, you are not obligated, not obligated, to carry out an illegal or an immoral order. You simply refuse the order.”

[…]

Take Advice to Refuse Illegal Orders Seriously, and Apply It Universally

So, if we’re to take seriously — and I believe we are well-advised to do so — the six Democratic lawmakers’ advice that “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution,” there are interesting implications for our political culture. That’s because much of what the federal government does on a daily basis flouts constitutional protections and offends human decency.

So, how would Slotkin and Kelly, and Deluzio, Goodlander, Houlahan, and Crow, respond to campaign a few years from now under the next Democratic administration urging ATF and IRS agents, federal regulators, and general workers to refuse orders? How would they treat an attempt to recruit more whistleblowers like Manning and Edward Snowden?

Don’t get me wrong, I think the advice the lawmakers offer is praiseworthy. But I look forward to seeing it applied universally and becoming a permanent feature of our dealings with government. I suspect that likelihood hasn’t occurred to those six legislators, but thanks to them for showing the way.

In counterpoint to my original take on the issue, on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Cynical Publius expresses his belief that the Democrats are actually encouraging disobedience to legal orders that they happen to dislike:

I’m not sure I’ve ever been angrier at Democrats than I am right now.

As a career Army officer, I take this latest nefarious chicanery from these filthy Congressional Democrat veterans quite personally,

It is loathsome and disgusting. You know, I know, they know and even their brainwashed acolytes know that what they are REALLY doing is encouraging active duty service members to refuse to follow lawful orders under the guise of pretending the orders are “unlawful”.

What these Democrat filth are doing is encouraging a form of military coup where service members get to decide not to do things they disagree with politically by pretending those otherwise lawful things are “unlawful”.

This is the greatest threat to US internal stability since the last time Democrats started a civil war. A military ruled by politics is no military at all. Instead, it is a group of armed thugs akin to the South American military juntas of the 1970s.

I cannot overstate what an extreme threat this situation is to our nation.

This is a precursor to civil war, initiated and deliberately created by traitorous elected officials hiding behind the honor of the uniform they once wore but now disgraced.

I have never been angrier.🤬

November 2, 2025

QotD: The “Blob”, aka the Deep State

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

The parasitic unholy alliance of Big Corporations, Big Government, Big Bankers and their entire fan club and cheer squad of supporters. Dangerously, this also includes the watchdogs: the Spy Agencies and large parts of the media. The Blob takes money from citizens, pays other parts of the Blob (eg USAID, The UN, The BIS, The World Bank etc), pretends to “help” some token victim group or environmental cause, or even to monitor or audit The Blob, but the outcome benefits The Blob more than the victims. They line their own pockets and increase their own privileges.

The Blob also includes a special category of “useful idiots” who naively assist them in looting Western Civilization. These people are paid in status or an illusory sense of purpose rather than money. They may not realize they are part of the self-serving Blob, and in the long run are not only harming the trees, birds and whales they say they want to save, but are harming their own health, wealth, national security, and worse, that of their children.

Jo Nova, “The Secret Ruling Class – Why the anonymous Blob needs to be invisible”, JoNova, 2025-07-18.

October 19, 2025

QotD: The Indian Civil Service

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s actually a great book called The Ruling Caste. It’s a “collective biography”, for lack of a better term, of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), by Sir David Gilmour. You can of course find biographies of the individual Governors-General (Gilmour wrote one, also excellent, on Lord Curzon), but this is the only study I know of the lower levels — i.e. the guys who really ran the Raj. Gilmour is literally a gentleman amateur, so while he’s also an excellent historian (and The Ruling Caste conforms to all the canons of scholarship), he tells an engaging story, too.

I think about The Ruling Caste often when I think about the turds in the Apparat. Looked at from the outside, the ICS were apparatchiks, too. Indeed, even more so than actual apparatchiks, since “apparatchik” means something like “expert without portfolio” and while the ICS had two broad “tracks” (if I recall correctly), “civil” and “legal”, in practice most every ICS man was supposed to be able to do pretty much everything, including (again IIRC) assume military command of local forces if necessary.

Given that there were never more than 200K Britons in the Raj at any one time, how could it be otherwise?

And the ICS was as fully ideologized as the Soviet (or AINO) Apparat. The French gave us the lovely phrase mission civilisatrice, but that’s what the ICS was doing, too. Lord Macauley was the big mover behind the English Education Act of 1835, which explicitly designed to

    form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

There were two huge differences between the ICS and the Apparat, though, that really come out reading Gilmour’s book. First, and actually least important, was the obvious fact that English education was superior. Macauley really gave “native” literature both barrels — nobody condescends like an Englishman — but he wasn’t wrong. In 1835 you could take the “scientific” literature of every other race on the planet combined and get … the Iron Age? Maybe? 200K Britons could dominate 750 million Indians because

    whatever happens, we have got
    the Maxim gun, and they have not.

Or “steam power” or “replaceable parts” or “calculus” or what have you. Season to taste.

The second — and far, far more important — difference between the ICS and the Apparat, though, was that the ICS was in general composed of decent people. In a very real sense, all imperialism is “cultural imperialism”. Rome became an empire by whomping all its enemies, but it stayed an empire by giving its enemies a great deal. Life was simply better — orders of magnitude better — inside the Empire than outside.

And the reason for this is simple, so simple that you need many years of long and hideously expensive training, by highly skilled and fanatically motivated indoctrinators, to miss it. Macauley, Caesar, Confucius, anyone who wrote anything on barbarian management at any point, anywhere in the world, well into the 20th century, said basically the same thing: Our material culture is the result of our cultural culture.

You can learn to operate our stuff. Obviously so — with only 200K Britons throughout the Subcontinent, the Raj was quite obviously run by Indians. And they did a bang-up job, too, such that India at independence had the real potential to become a first world country (note to folks getting ready to break away from a globe-spanning empire: Never elect a lunatic socialist yoga dude as your first prime minister. He’ll go full retard and set you back 50 years … and he’ll be shooting for 500). You might even learn how to maintain our stuff, maybe even build a few cheap knockoff copies of our stuff.

But it’ll never be more than that — shitty knockoff copies, gruesomely expensive, and available only to the elite — unless you embrace as much of the culture that created the stuff as you can stand. The English themselves are a great example: They were blue-assed savages when Caesar found them, but they got with the program, and look how well that worked out. Ditto the Gauls (“Our ancestors, the Gauls!”) and all the rest.

It’s the culture, stupids. The culture of the ICS was English culture — “play up, play up, and play the game!” sounds like baloney to jaded Postmodern ears, but listen:

    The sand of the desert is sodden red,—
    Red with the wreck of a square that broke; —
    The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
    And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
    The river of death has brimmed his banks,
    And England’s far, and Honour a name,
    But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
    “Play up! play up! and play the game!”

As poetry it’s shit, but if that doesn’t make you want to get up out of your chair and take a swing at somebody, then you, sir, have no hair on your scrotum, and will never know a woman’s touch (trannies don’t count).

They really believed that, those Eton schoolboys out there East of Suez. Or, at least, they behaved as if they did, and everything else flowed from that behavior. Recall that it was a coin flip, going East of Suez — chances are you wouldn’t be coming back, or if you did, it would be as a malarial ruin. But they went anyway, though England’s far and Honour a name, because that’s just what they did. Even at their worst — and their worst was very bad; Gilmour pulls no punches — you can’t help but admire them a little, the arrogant bastards. Their convictions were sometimes awful, but they had the courage of them … and courage is magnificent.

Severian, “Ruling Caste II”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-10.

October 16, 2025

RIFfing the US federal workforce

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

In Reason, J.D. Tuccille considers the impact of the US government shutdown on the federal civil service:

“Lincoln Memorial During Government Shutdown 2013” by Flickr user reivax is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

As promised — or threatened, if you wandered over to Reason by accident — the Trump administration has started using the government sort-of-shutdown as an opportunity to engage in mass layoffs of federal employees. In the game of chicken between Republicans and Democrats over just how much the government should overspend and on what, the losers so far appear to be some of the almost 3 million Americans who thought federal employment would be a comfortable way to collect a paycheck.

Setting thousands of former government workers loose to seek jobs elsewhere — preferably not involving money forcibly extracted from taxpayers — is a step in the right direction.

Shutdowns Are (Mostly) Political Theater

As we all should know by now, government shutdowns are largely political theater. National parks and museums are closed to inconvenience the public into believing something big is happening even as taxes keep getting collected and government enforcers continue twisting arms to make sure people comply with laws and rules that never should have been imposed.

The Brookings Institution’s David Wessel pointed out last week, “the Justice Department said 90% of its employees would be exempted from the furlough” and “the Department of Homeland Security said in its 76-page contingency plan that roughly 95% of its nearly 272,000 employees would remain on the job if a shutdown occurred”. Agencies accomplish this by defining “essential” employees who remain on the job in the broadest way possible.

Paychecks may be delayed during the shutdown. But after it ends, “employees who were required to perform excepted work during the lapse will receive retroactive pay” and “employees who were furloughed as the result of the lapse will receive retroactive pay for those furlough periods” according to the Office of Personnel Management. Basically, all federal employees eventually get paid whether they continue to work or are sent home for the duration of the “shutdown”.

An Opportunity To Reduce the Federal Workforce

At least, that’s how it usually works. This time is a little different because the Trump administration came into office promising to downsize the federal government. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was supposed to accomplish that goal, but the shutdown offers another opportunity. Even before furloughs began, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent out a memo noting:

    With respect to those Federal programs whose funding would lapse and which are otherwise unfunded, such programs are no longer statutorily required to be carried out. Therefore, consistent with applicable law, including the requirements of 5 C.F.R. part 351, agencies are directed to use this opportunity to consider Reduction in Force (RIF) notices for all employees in programs, projects, or activities (PPAs) that satisfy all three of the following conditions: (1) discretionary funding lapses on October 1, 2025; (2) another source of funding, such as H.R. 1 (Public Law 119-21) is not currently available; and (3) the PPA is not consistent with the President’s priorities.

The White House is apparently taking this opportunity seriously. “Around 4,200 employees were laid off in total on Friday,” reports Eric Katz of Government Executive. The biggest cuts were at the Department of the Treasury (1,446 employees) and the Department of Health and Human Services (between 1,100 and 1,200 employees). The Department of Education, which President Trump proposes to totally eliminate, also experienced layoffs (466 or nearly 20 percent of its remaining workforce), as did the Environmental Protection Agency, Homeland Security, and Housing and Urban Development.

Everything this administration does seems to involve a bit of chaos, and the latest rounds of reductions in force are no different. While hundreds of employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were included in the layoffs, some were fired by accident and immediately rehired.

Chris Bray notes that — stop me if you’ve heard this before — a district court judge has ruled that the President doesn’t have the power to do, well, pretty much anything to do with the federal workforce (what is it with the executive branch thinking they have powers that haven’t been explicitly approved by the judiciary?):

After a just absolutely bizarre hearing in a Northern California federal court, a judge has forbidden the Trump administration from laying off government employees. The hearing may have been held in the Court of the Red Queen: After Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General Elizabeth Hedges argued that she wasn’t going to get into the legal merits of the Trump administration’s layoffs because the court lacked jurisdiction and the plaintiffs hadn’t met the legal standards for filing a lawsuit, Judge Susan Illston warned that, actual quote, “This hatchet is falling on the heads of employees all across the nation and you’re not even prepared to address whether that’s legal?” Getting laid off is a hatchet attack, so we skip the arguments about ripeness and standing. It’s emotionally dire, a thing that feels very bad. Judges talk like this, now. OH GOD COUNSEL THIS IS LIKE A THING WITH A KNIFE THAT WOUNDS ME. Objection, your honor, inadequate trigger warning. […]

Illston declared the existence of a temporary restraining order from the bench, and I’ve been waiting for her written order to land on PACER. It’s here, and it’s … very … Well, okay: It has a lot of feelings. […]

Opening paragraphs, first page:

Note that the first paragraph frames federal RIFs as historically unprecedented, while the second paragraph frames the current federal RIFS as not ordinary: different than the way RIFs are usually conducted. So this is unprecedented, but it has happened before, and the problem with the unprecedented thing is that it’s not being done the way the thing that has never been done before is usually done.

But anyway, a reduction in force of federal personnel during a shutdown is “unprecedented in our country’s history”. Of course, a reduction of force alone is not at all unprecedented, and the Clinton administration reduced the size of the federal bureaucracy by about 400,000 people. Illston doesn’t articulate a reason why reducing the bureaucracy during a shutdown is worse, or a reason why Clinton RIFs were good but Trump RIFs are a violent hatchet attack, but she clearly feels it. Of course, during a shutdown, the agencies being shrunk have no approved funding, so it would seem to make more sense to be careful about personnel costs, but this argument means that I just hurt people with a hatchet.

Above all, note that the argument out of the gate is a normative argument, not a legal argument. This is unprecedented! This is not ordinary! If a judge feels that something is a little off, she can order it stopped.

July 24, 2025

The vicious competition for Indian civil service jobs

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

Once upon a time in most of the Anglosphere, the advantage of civil service jobs was that they were nearly impossible to get fired from and had a relatively good pension at the end of a long career. Private sector jobs were far less permanent, but paid more, had better benefits, and more prestige. Over the last fifty years, little of that is still true — civil servants still have fantastic job security, but they’re also better paid, have better benefits, and for many there are opportunities to retire and get re-hired back into a similar position with even higher pay while collecting a generous pension. The private sector no longer pays better nor offers significantly better benefits, so lots of people look to get into the civil service who once would have shunned positions like that.

It’s apparently much worse in India:

In India, government jobs pay far more than equivalent jobs in the private sector — so much so that the entire labor market and educational system have become grossly distorted by rent-seeking to obtain these jobs. Teachers in the public sector, for example, are paid at least five times more than in the private sector. It’s not just the salary. When accounting for lifetime tenure, generous perks, and potentially remunerative possibilities for corruption, a government job’s total value can be up to 10 times that of an equivalent private sector job. (See also here.)

As a result, it’s not uncommon for thousands of people to apply for every government job — a ratio far higher than in the private sector. In one famous example, 2.3 million people submitted applications for 368 “office boy” positions in Uttar Pradesh.

The consequences of this intense competition for government jobs are severe. First, as Karthik Muralildharan argues, the Indian government can’t afford to pay for all the workers it needs. India has all the laws of, say, the United States, but about one-fifth the number of government workers per capita, leading to low state capacity.

But there is a second problem which may be even more serious. Competition to obtain government jobs wastes tremendous amounts of resources and distorts the labor and educational market.

If jobs were allocated randomly, applications would be like lottery tickets, with few social costs. Government jobs, however, are often allocated by exam performance. Thus, obtaining a government job requires an “investment” in exam preparation. Many young people spend years out of the workforce studying for exams that, for nearly all of them, will yield nothing. In Tamil Nadu alone, between one to two million people apply annually for government jobs, but far fewer than 1% are hired. Despite the long odds, the rewards are so large that applicants leave the workforce to compete. Kunal Mangal estimates that around 80% of the unemployed in Tamil Nadu are studying for government exams.

Classical rent-seeking logic predicts full dissipation: if a prize is worth a certain amount, rational individuals will collectively spend resources up to that amount attempting to win it. When the prize is a government job, the “spending” is not cash, but years of a young person’s productive life. Mangal calculates that the total opportunity cost (time out of the workforce) that job applicants “spend” in Tamil Nadu is worth more than the combined lifetime salaries of the available jobs (recall that jobs are worth more than salaries, so this is consistent with theory). Simply put, for every ₹100 the government spends on salaries, Indian society burns ₹168 in a collective effort of rent-seeking just to decide who gets them.

The winners are happy but the loss to Indian society — of unemployed young, educated workers who do nothing but study for government exams — is in the billions. Indeed, India spends about 3.86% of GDP on state salaries (27% of state revenues times 14.3% of GDP). If we take Mangal’s numbers from Tamil Nadu, a conservative (multiplier of 1 instead of 1.68) back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that India could be wasting on the order of 1.4% of GDP annually on rent-seeking. (Multiply 3.86% of GDP by 15 (30 years at 5% discount) to get lifetime value, and take 0.025 as annual worker turnover.) Take this with a grain of salt, but regardless, the number is large.

July 20, 2025

“[T]he job of a manager [is] to get all C Northcote on bureaucracy”

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

Tim Worstall discusses the recent announcements about the US State Department significantly reducing their staff levels — a “Reduction In Force” or RIF — that is being lamented by the Washington bureaus of all the surviving mainstream media as a world tragedy:

The Guru here, the epitome of the management science, is C Northcote Parkinson. Best remembered for Parkinson’s Law — work expands to fill the time available for its completion. But a deeper thinker than that aphorism.

The essential point being that the output of a bureaucracy is bureaucracy. There is nothing measurable that is being done, no financial value being put upon the work. Sure, sure, it might even be that what is being done is of value — we’ve not got a simple measure of it though.

Therefore a bureaucracy measures itself by the budget and staff count. The success of a bureaucracy — a bureau perhaps — is measured by increases in either or better both. Which really does mean that the output of having a bureaucracy is more bureaucracy.

In the private sector this occurs as well. That’s how the power skirts get to take over large corporations. Of course, at some point in that process the company runs out of money and goes bust — the land is cleared for the next attempt to actually add value.

With government that doesn’t happen. Which leads to one of my favourite little thoughts — every civilisation survives until it is parasitised, eaten from within, by its own bureaucracy. We’d probably prefer that this didn’t happen. Yes, anarchy is all very well in theory but no one does like it when the bins aren’t emptied and there’s no state left to keep the French at bay.

The result of this is that the state bureaucracy needs to be pruned. Always. The actual job of a minister is — should be at least — to muse on what shouldn’t be done any longer and who can we fire? As should be the waking thought of any CEO of course.

My preference — because I’m extremist, obviously — is that we just fire them all. Then hire back the 2% we actually do require in order to have a civilisation. Remember, the Empire ran India with 1,000 men. And, well, it’s not wholly obvious that it’s been run any better than that since then.

That’s therefore the job of a manager. To get all C Northcote on bureaucracy. Always and everywhere. If you prefer your phrasing a little more red blooded the answer to bureaucrats is the Carthaginian Solution. Not that anyone would buy them as slaves, not productive enough, but we can try, right?

What do you call 22,000 fewer civil servants in Washington? A good start:

Update: Fixed missing URL.

July 16, 2025

Matt Gurney’s “Hollywood Thesis”

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

I almost skipped reading this one, as Matt and Jen usually keep their own columns behind the paywall, but this one is free to non-paying cheapskates like me:

… I actually think there is one way that Hollywood — and probably mass entertainment writ large — has kind of warped our society. It’s not that it has promoted degeneracy or loose morals or shameless enjoyment of vice. It’s more insidious. And probably more dangerous.

I think Hollywood has tricked us into thinking that, in an emergency, our governments will prove to be a lot more competent than they will be. And usually are.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve mentioned it to my Line colleagues before, and I call it my Hollywood Thesis. As I see it, the broader public has fairly accurate expectations about the level of service they can expect from their government. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s mostly realistic. We basically know what we’re getting into when we, for example, drag the trash bin to the curb, or turn on a tap in the morning, or go to an emergency room because you need to get stitched up after a minor mishap.

But I’ve observed over the years an interesting exception. When the public is confronted with any kind of new or unexpected threat, people, for some reason, believe their government will have some secret ability or unexpected expertise in dealing with it. Maybe it’s a quirky scientist working in the bowels of some ministry or department. Maybe it’s an elite team of experts. Or some hidden base loaded with commandos and advanced weaponry.

Wrong. And I’ve been thinking about this. Why do we assume the same government that is, for instance, struggling to fill potholes in my city, or hire enough nurses in my province, or fix a federal payroll system, is going to be more competent when presented with something totally out of the blue? This flies in the face of all of our lived experiences with government. It’s a generous assumption of state capacity that is, to put it charitably, unearned.

So why? What explains this?

It’s Hollywood. It has to be.

Lots of smart, competent people have government jobs. One of the great joys of my career has been the opportunity to speak with many. There are shining lights of unusual competency in every department, and at every order of government, really — my colleague Jen Gerson recently told our podcast listeners about how one of these hidden gems helped her cut through a confusing and dysfunctional process so she could get a permit. And I will never get tired of saying good things about the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces — true miracle workers we do not support enough.

But there aren’t hidden capabilities. There aren’t secret teams. The same people trying to prevent Canada Post from going on strike will be the same people handling the next pandemic — or who would be responsible for opening a dialogue if aliens decided to land their mothership in the middle of a Saskatchewan farm.

It’s within the range of possibilities that, presented with a unique challenge, government leaders could rise to meet it … as long as it’s a completely unexpected situation with no pre-existing rules or regulations or bureaucratic processes in place. I admit it’s not the way the smart money would bet, but it’s technically a possibility.

April 30, 2025

After the votes were counted

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

John Carter suggests that votes should be allocated to reflect the costs imposed on the voters by taxation, that is to ensure that those with the most “skin in the game” at least have their votes weighted more than those who pay little or no taxes but can still vote themselves more benefits:

Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs taxeater status?

So anyhow.

For my American readers, in Canadian elections the Liberal Party is denoted by red, as the Devil and Karl Marx intended.

It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital.

Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote. It’s common for “taxpayers” to be used as a synonym for “the voting public”, but this is a bit of linguistic legerdemain which obscures a core dynamic rotting the heart out of every liberal democracy: most of the population are not, in fact, taxpayers. First there are those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes, such as university students; then there are those receiving direct welfare payments of one form or another; then there are public employees, who although they pay tax on paper, are clearly net recipients of government largess since their paychecks come from taxes in the first place.

The most successful parties in country after country are the parties that mobilize client groups by promising to steal money from productive citizens and transfer that wealth to their non-productive clients. This dynamic is baked into the cake of any universal suffrage democracy, which is why Universal Suffrage is a Suicide Pact. Parties need client groups for electoral support; wealth can only be plundered from the productive; therefore the only available relationship is to cultivate non-productive clients.

The problem, of course, is that over time this destroys the economic productivity of the liberal democracy, because the productive groups will become less productive because what’s the point, or they’ll just look for the exits, while the client groups will swell, becoming simultaneously too expensive to maintain and to electorally heavy to dislodge.

I suspect you could fix all of this by simply tying votes to tax receipts, with only those who are net taxpayers being given the franchise in any given election. At a stroke this would disenfranchise the welfare underclass, government bureaucrats, and university students, all of whom should be prohibited from voting as a matter of principle. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could implement a tax-weighted vote: the more taxes you pay, the more your vote counts.

In addition to the salutary effects of reducing the electoral weight of female voters (since men tend to pay more in taxes), weighting votes by tax receipts would lead to a very interesting incentive structure. On the one hand, everyone hates paying taxes, and wants to minimize the taxes they pay; if only taxpayers were voting, this would place a strong downward pressure on taxes and, hence, on the size of government (thus forcing states to find other ways of funding themselves, via e.g. tariffs or service fees). On the other hand, people like to vote, so there would be a strong incentive not to evade taxes. On the gripping hand, since paying more tax means your vote counts for more, there would be a countervailing incentive to pay as much tax as you can afford. One might imagine a state functioning as a sort of de facto oligarchy, with the billionaires happily paying obscene levels of tax in order to gather as much political power to their class as possible, and enforcing their tyranny by voting to keep taxes on everyone else to the absolute bare minimum. This would be a truly dystopian brier patch to be thrown into.

Alas, we do not inhabit such a political experiment. Returning to the ostensible topic of yesterday’s Canadian election, however, it would probably not be an exaggeration to posit that if we did inhabit such a system, Canada’s Conservative Party would have rolled the Liberals in this and, in all likelihood, almost every other election.

That is not, however, what happened.

The high-level outcome is that, after running the country into the ground for the last decade, the Liberal Party has been elected for the fourth consecutive time, with a mandate to complete the project of crashing the plane of Dominion with no survivors. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to report that I predicted the Liberals would win before the election was even called. The Liberals are four seats short of forming a majority in parliament, meaning they cannot quite form a stable government on their own. This is not a problem for the Liberals, however. Despite the glorious collapse of the New Democratic Party – which plummeted from 25 seats in the last federal election to 7 in the current election, by far their lowest in 30 years – the NDP retains just enough seats for them to form a stable coalition government with the Liberals. In other words, the outcome of this election is that Canada will be in essentially the same situation it was in before the election, with the only meaningful difference being that the Liberals have a few more seats than they did before.

March 21, 2025

Apparently the US Constitution elevates the judiciary over the other branches of government

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

Chris Bray on recent innovative judicial activism to constrain the evil machinations of the Bad Orange Man:

It won’t be news to anyone that the federal judiciary has decided Donald Trump has no authority as President of the United States but to serve and protect the status quo, absolutely without deviation. Change is unconstitutional. Policy is unconstitutional. But even by that standard, today has been very special.

Without digging into all the details about everything, skim your way through a single judicial decision to begin to see what’s happening: the decision from District Court Judge Ana Reyes, ordering the Department of Defense to allow the continued service of transgender military personnel. You can click here to read it, or open the PDF file below.

This is not a judicial decision. I mean, it is a judicial decision, but it doesn’t represent judicial culture or a judicial outlook. At all. It’s a bitchy schoolgirl essay about being fair and not being mean, with healthy doses of platitudinous foot stompery. Screenshot, bottom of page one and top of page two:

“Today, however, our military is stronger and our Nation is safer for the millions of such blanks (and all other persons) who serve.” Because she says so, is why. The old bigoted American military was very weak. I don’t remember: Did the old dumb bigots ever even win any wars or anything?

[…]

Our military is much stronger now than it was when gay and transgender service wasn’t warmly encouraged, the end. (Stomps foot.) It’s a TikTok video formatted to look like a, you know, a judge thing. You can even agree with the judge and see that she hasn’t made an argument. “Today, however, our military is stronger.” Like when we beat the Taliban, or all the other wars we’ve won lately. This is the declarative reality in which a thing becomes true because you type it.

Now, watch this. Watch Judge Ana Reyes roll right over herself without noticing that she’s doing it. You don’t have to read past page two to see this.

On page one, she characterizes the reasoning — the premise the administration advanced to forbid military service by transgender personnel: “Service by transgender persons is ‘inconsistent’ with this mission because they lack the ‘requisite warrior ethos’ to achieve ‘military excellence’.” That’s it, those mean monsters! That’s their whole reason! They said trans people can’t serve because of, I don’t know, some stupid ethos thing. What does that even mean?

March 13, 2025

This explains a lot … IRS employees aren’t issued personal computers (in 2025!)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

You sometimes read a small item and the information in it is so unexpected, it’s like being suddenly dumped into icy cold water, like this little item from Reason‘s “Morning Roundup” email:

Everything’s computer! But not at the IRS.

“The upheaval at the IRS is already having real impacts,” reports The Washington Post, referring to plans (already underway) to reduce the workforce by half. “Sources familiar with the agency report that its level of phone service is falling, in part because employees are spending their time waiting to use shared computers to respond to [the Department of Government Efficiency’s] requests for weekly emails detailing their work. (Not all IRS employees are issued their own computers.) And they report that taxpayer behavior is already adjusting to the reality of a diminished IRS workforce: IRS receipts — taxes paid already and taxes the agency is scheduled to receive from those who have already filed — are significantly lower than they were at this point last filing season.”

Wait, back up. They don’t have their own computers? And they’re sitting in a queue like schoolchildren in the library, waiting to use a single shared computer to respond to Musk’s five-things-you-did-last-week emails? How long does it take to write those emails? And why don’t they have computers?

Look, I’m worried by the slapdash approach Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken. But the continued federal employee freakout over being asked to justify their jobs by detailing what they’ve done at work makes no sense to me.

I know a girl from college who is a “Work-Life Specialist and Mindfulness Facilitator” at the U.S. Department of Transportation. She leads yoga sessions and “meditation made simple” workshops for federal employees, per her LinkedIn. This is a job I don’t want my taxpayer dollars funding. For Musk to apply scrutiny to this type of thing is a huge win for the American people.

There are lots of legitimate criticisms to make about whether cuts in staffing will actually lead to a better IRS. Taxpayer services will surely suffer if there are fewer people available to answer phone calls and emails; refunds might be delayed, which comes at a real cost to people. Worse tax collection means less revenue for the government, and it’s not like spending is under control — expect the fiscal hole we’re in to get worse if this continues. But “we just can’t figure out how to ration computer use in the year 2025 to craft a bullet-pointed email” is an absurd line that elicits no sympathy, and just leaves me confused about what the hell they’ve been doing all this time. Everything’s not, in fact, computer in the federal government.

February 26, 2025

The more DOGE uncovers, the more we see that western governments are really vast graft machines

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

Elizabeth Nickson discusses the ramifications of all the wasted money uncovered by DOGE in the first month of investigations and what it almost certainly confirms about the actual value taxpayers are getting for their money:

So essentially the entire town of Washington, D.C. has been stealing. The anomalies are those who are not stealing. $4.7 trillion, almost impossible to trace, represents two-thirds of the annual U.S. budget. And if it’s happening in the U.S., it is happening everywhere: France, Canada, the U.K., Germany, where budgetary processes are probably even more opaque than those of the U.S.

How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?

I used to think of people who worked for the government with a kind of veiled contempt or, in a more benign mood, compassion. I thought of them as pity jobs for those without initiative, as jobs paying off lefty campaigners, as a warehouse for the barely competent. In my own dealings with them, I found them punitive and extractive, papering me with demands to spend more and more money to hire more and more of their pet contractors, to get approval. In my working life, looking at the results of their involvement in America’s rural areas, I hated them for the hell they visited on people unable to fight back. They forced bad science on good people, and refused to see reason. They ruined forests, water courses, fisheries, and township after township turned to dustbowl status. The misery in rural sitting rooms in every state in the U.S. was palpable, long lasting; the green Blob ruined families for generations.

But I did not think of them as being embroiled in a theft so large as to be unparalleled in world history.

The level of the theft has now to be dawning on everyone not living off the public purse which is, what, 60%, 70% of us? The anger setting in is soul-deep, and very very powerful. People who live straightened lives, the poorly pensioned, those living off the laughable social security stipend, those waiting for health care, those whose children can’t even dream of an education, of college, of a six-figure salary which is now subsistence in the ruined cities. Those facing cancer treatment because of the vaccine, and don’t have excess funds. Their families, despairing, hurting, broke.

This isn’t going to go away. It affects everyone. Not addressed down to its deepest level, you are looking at a tax revolt, a national strike. A revolution. A real one, not a papered paid-for color revolution, which is what they have been doing to us.

Those living on social security should have five times the pension they do.

Can you count how many of those there are? Can you?

And meanwhile this:

Is this true? To this date, unknown; the digging continues. Look at this ghastly creature. She apparently has an account in the Cayman Islands. Look at her all compassionate and condescending. She started a war that killed 1.5 million people so far. And apparently got rich from it. A mass murderer celebrated at Upper East Side dinner parties.

Memes like this rocket around, and every one is now suspect. At this point who cares if it’s true, it’s truthy, it makes sense that she made out like a bandit, that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have millions hidden somewhere. Ocasio can say “I only have $500,000!” all she wants, but we don’t believe her. If the Wall St Journal says it is false, we don’t believe them. Do you actually think they’d have the money sitting in their savings account? No, it would be buried off-shore. The media is not only complicit, it is the principal actor in this scam. It built the fantasy world we live in, where people read The Guardian, the Times and the Globe and Mail and think they’re informed.

No, they are being propagandized. And as a result, no one sane believes anything any legacy newspaper or television or media says anymore. They hid the theft. They did not report on it. No one trusts a thing they say.

Update: Fixed broken link.

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