Quotulatiousness

September 26, 2021

“… is there a single area of public policy where Canada has its shit together?”

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

In The Line‘s weekly round-up, they point out a little-noticed Globe and Mail article that illustrates something that should really concern Canadians:

Sometimes the big lessons are in the small things. While everyone was busy jawboning about the federal election returns earlier this week, we were also struck by a barely noticed story in the Globe and Mail reporting that the federal government had awarded a contract to begin replacing the disastrous Phoenix payroll system. Phoenix, you’ll recall, was an IT project designed to harmonize the payroll for the entire federal public service. The 2016 rollout was a disaster, resulting in thousands of employees being paid too much, too little, or not at all. Fixing it has cost billions and has not entirely succeeded, and now it is being replaced entirely.

We were still pondering this news when Alex Usher idly wondered: “Genuine question: is there a single area of public policy where Canada has its shit together?”

Alex isn’t some rando Twitter troll. By day he runs Canada’s premier higher education consultancy. But he’s also one of the country’s most perceptive policy analysts, writes a daily blog about just about anything policy related, and is probably one of the three or four smartest Canadians still on Twitter.

Which is why his question was met with more thoughtful responses than the usual schoolyard heckling that is typical of the platform. Fiscal policy between 1993 and 2015, offered Ken Boessenkool. Andrew Coyne half-heartedly suggested monetary policy. Rachel Curran proposed immigration, prisons, and the coast guard, but was quickly set right by people who knew what they were talking about.

So when Usher followed his question with a long Twitter thread showing just how broken Canada is, with a sophisticated and nuanced take on why that’s the case, there really wasn’t anyone left making a serious argument against him. Everyone knows it is true.

Everyone, that is, except two of the most politically polarized groups in the country, who disagree about everything except the capacities of the government.

On the one hand there are the Build Back Better people, mostly housed in the increasingly unpopular Liberal Party of Canada. These people persist in believing that the federal government is poised to make big decisions, to take big actions, on big issues such as climate change, pandemic preparedness, and dealing with the rise of China. They are prepared to talk big talk, and spend big money, in pursuit of their policy objectives.

On the other, there are the paranoid conspiracists who believe that the government is using the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic to implement all manner of social controls. These include suspicions that the government would use a contact tracing app to engage in mass surveillance, that they are putting a 5G payload into the vaccines, or that this is all part of a big Liberal internationalist plan to set up a world government.

While these seem to be diametrically opposed worldviews, what they share is the deep conviction that the government can actually do something. Indeed, what is charming about the conspiratorial worldview is how much faith it actually has in the authorities.

Confront China? Please. We can’t buy ships, planes or even handguns for our military. Pandemic preparedness? You’re kidding, right? We can’t even hire enough nurses for the health-care system. Set up a world government? Lol who would we hire to work for this government? We can’t even figure out how to pay the public servants we already have on staff.

As usual, the correct counter to conspiracy-minded thinking is not to have faith in government, it’s to be realistic about it. Similarly, the correct response to the build back better crew is not enthusiasm, but realism. And ultimately, the right approach to everything the government proposes is deep, deep, deep cynicism.

One of the major reasons I’ve long favoured smaller government — the smaller the better — is that the bigger any organization gets and the more things it tries to do, the less effective it is at all of them. Governments in the western world generally have gotten so big that they’re incapable of doing almost anything in an effective, competent, and repeatable manner. A hypothetical world government would be even worse (just look at the existing United Nations to see how billions of dollars not only get nothing useful done, but often exacerbate existing problems).

August 21, 2021

QotD: Why do government workers need unions?

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

So, umm, why does a worker for the state need a countervailing power to protect her from the state?

Sure, we can understand this if she’s working for the bastard capitalists. They merely want to maximise their profit and screw the workers while doing so – as we all know. But government is omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent. It cannot be true that someone working for government is in need of protection from government. Because all those fine folks that make up government simply could not allow it to be that state workers don’t gain adequate wages.

Seriously, come on, this is the Progressive insistence. That getting government to do things saves us from the ravages we endure if the capitalists do them.

But now survey the actual American workplace. Unions in the private sector pretty much don’t exist any more. It is the government workforces that are unionised, making up the vast majority of union members in the country. From that pattern of union existence we have to conclude that government screws the workers rather more than the capitalists do. Otherwise why would people desire let alone need the protection of unions when working for government?

Tim Worstall, “The Public Union Proof That The Progressive State Doesn’t Work”, Expunct, 2021-05-11.

March 23, 2021

QotD: Marx was right … but not about the proletariat

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

Karl Marx, damn his rotten soul, was right. Or, more accurately, his followers made him right. The Proletariat never achieved class consciousness on their own. Nor did they do it with the assistance of the Vanguard Party, like Lenin thought. In fact, they only did it — incompletely; they’re in the process of doing it now — with the assistance of a bunch of drooling idiots who can’t even spell “Karl Marx.” I’m speaking, of course, of the Apparat, the managerial class, the iron rice bowl perma-bureaucracy that runs the Imperial Capital.

Those fuckheads achieved class consciousness here in the last 30 years, and now they’re doing what Marx said the Proletariat would – making Revolution, overturning the system, causing the State to wither away as they pursue their own interests against tradition, religion, all enemies foreign and domestic. Theirs is a “Marxism” boiled down to its essence: Nihilistic, suicidal envy.

[…]

Once they achieve class consciousness, the Revolution is inevitable – Marx was right about that, too. There are only so many places in the Apparat, after all, and the number of talented, ambitious people in the Empire — even now, after a century’s worth of mandatory “education” — far exceeds the number of make-work jobs the Apparat, any Apparat, can support. Provided we survive it, it will be some cold comfort, watching the bewilderment in their faces as they’re lined up against the wall. Ever read Darkness at Noon?

Severian, “Skynet Becomes Self-Aware”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-11.

February 2, 2021

When the self-defined elites achieved class consciousness

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Rotten Chestnuts Severian adds to his ongoing series of posts identifying areas where Marx was right:

“Jay Gould’s Private Bowling Alley.” Financier and stock speculator Jay Gould is depicted on Wall Street, using bowling balls titled “trickery,” “false reports,” “private press” and “general unscrupulousness” to knock down bowling pins labeled as “operator,” “broker,” “banker,” “inexperienced investor,” etc. A slate shows Gould’s controlling holdings in various corporations, including Western Union, Missouri Pacific Railroad, and the Wabash Railroad.
From the cover of Puck magazine Vol. XI, No 264 via Wikimedia Commons.

… I liken Karl Marx to one of those bird-masked medieval Plague doctors — he sees the pathology clearly, indeed far faster and better than anyone else, but his proposed “cure” is far likelier to kill you than the actual disease. Worse, what makes Marx’s cure especially lethal is what ends up making his diagnosis essentially right: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The proletariat is achieving class consciousness, all right — look no further than the GameStop “short squeeze” for proof. But the only reason the proles are achieving class consciousness is because the “capitalists” forced them to, just like Marx said they would. The Elite and the Bureaucracy (usually, but not always, a distinction without a difference) finally achieved class consciousness through the combination of NAFTA and the Louvre Accords. Starting around 1990, then, the Elite self-consciously embraced their role as rootless, stateless, jet-setting parasites (with the wannabe-Elites in the Media, academia, and the bureaucracies signing up for tours of duty as fart-catchers, both to bask in reflected glory and in hopes of being promoted).
In short, our “Capitalists” — really, “financial-ists” or “spreadsheet gangsters,” since they don’t actually make anything, they just bust out existing firms via debt manipulation — behave exactly as Marx described factory owners behaving all the way back in the First Industrial Revolution.

In my naivete, I used to think Marx’s ranting was hyperbole. I cited the example of Andrew Carnegie — a real bastard in his youth, who went on to be one of the world’s great philanthropists. That’s human behavior, I said, as opposed to the bloodthirsty caricature of Marx’s fantasies … but I was wrong, comrades. Carnegie happily would’ve sold his fellow Americans down the river, just as Bezos, Gates, and the rest of the pirates-in-neckties are happily selling us down the river now. Only two things prevented it back then: one structural, one cultural.

The structural one is simply technology, and therefore uninteresting. Britain’s “free traders” — you know, the Jardine-Matheson types who started the Opium Wars for fun and profit — would’ve happily outsourced Britain’s entire industrial base to China if they hadn’t been hampered by wind speed. By the time this was technically feasible — which is about 1860, if you’re keeping score — simple inertia had taken over. They didn’t retool until they had to, at which point instant communications and modern ships … well, you know the rest. Like I said, it’s vital, but boring.

The cultural one is much more interesting. You might be tempted to say, as I did, that Jardine and Matheson were always on the lookout for #1, of course, but were sincere British patriots for all that, just as Carnegie for all his faults was an authentic American. I doubt it, comrades. I sincerely doubt it. What kept these guys in check wasn’t patriotism, or even culture. Rather, it was fear.

November 16, 2020

QotD: India’s civil service

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

The process was started in October last year. Here we are at the end of August 10 months later. And we’ve still managed to get no closer at all to hiring any accountants.

Now, one good thing about the Indian civil service is that it carries on the old British practice of entry being by competitive examination. This at least loosens the possibility of influence and bribery determining who gets hired. But now think of the incompetence with which the process is being carried out. We’ve at least 7 months here just to mark the exam papers!

And that is really what ails India. The snail’s pace of the bureaucracy. It would actually be far better if the place had near no government rather than the one it has. Anarchy is indeed preferable to a system which allows near nothing to happen officially. Because what happens when a bureaucracy is so slow that it strangles the ability to do anything legally is that it is all done in illegal anarchy anyway. Some 85% of the Indian economy is over in the unregistered, untaxed and informal sector. Precisely and exactly because the official sector is run by that bureaucracy that cannot even hire the occasional accountant. A bonfire of the babus would improve the place immeasurably.

Tim Worstall, “What’s Wrong In India – All 8,000 Fail Goa’s Exam To Be Government Accountants”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-08-23.

September 22, 2020

QotD: City dwellers and the state

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

If one wants to understand why city dwellers have a peculiarly statist politics, spend time in a big city subway system. For the people in the city, government services are essential for living. They depend on the subway, the trash collection and the police department. The city depends upon this organic relationship between the state and the citizens. That does not exist in the suburbs or the country. There’s a comfort that comes from the daily interaction with the state. Anyone who questions that relationship is suspect.

The Z Man, “Never Newark Nights”, The Z Blog, 2018-06-06.

July 30, 2020

“Muzzling” scientists only ever happens under Conservative governments…

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

… so even though the circumstances might look remarkably similar to the layman’s eyes, Justin Trudeau can’t possibly be accused of doing the same thing as that evil, anti-science Stephen Harper:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking at the Annual Meeting 2012 of the World Economic Forum at the congress centre in Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2012.
World Economic Forum photo via Wikimedia Commons.

In fact, Grant Robertson reports, the Trudeau regime effectively shuttered a small, cheap (less than $3 Million dollars ~ petty cash in Canada’s government) research and early warning team called the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) which

    was among Canada’s contributions to the World Health Organization, and it operated as a kind of medical Amber Alert system. Its job was to gather intelligence and spot pandemics early, before they began, giving the government and other countries a head start to respond and – hopefully – prevent a catastrophe. And the results often spoke for themselves.

Unfortunately, by the time the COVID-19 pandemic was getting started, just when the GPHIN should have provided “early warning,” it had been told, by the Trudeau regime, to focus on domestic issues. But global pandemics don’t often start in Canada, do they? The GPHIN sifted through data from around the world, often from places like China, Iran and Russia which hide or manipulate medical information, conducting something akin to military reconnaissance so that Canadian (and global (WHO)) officials could “see” what might be headed our way.

Did Justin Trudeau give the order to “muzzle” the GPHIN scientists? No, of course not … no more than Stephen Harper gave the order to “muzzle” scientists in Environment Canada. The decision to “refocus” the GPHIN on useless, domestic busywork was likely made by an Assistant Deputy Minister who was acting on yet another demand from the Treasury Board Secretariat to justify every programme dollar … again.

You should be glad that the Treasury Board Secretariat casts a sceptical eye on every single government programme and is a constant thorn in the side of operational people (like I was when I was serving and like the GPHIN folks were, too). They, skilled, hard-working civil servants, are just trying to ensure that your tax dollars are not being wasted. They are good people doing good work. But sometimes the wheat gets tossed away with the chaff. That appears to have been the case with the GPHIN. In retrospect, it seems almost criminally stupid to have deprived Canada of a valuable medical reconnaissance agency just because there had not been an “attack” recently. But that appears to have been the bureaucratic justification ~ it’s like me saying that since my house hasn’t burned down recently we should disband the fire department.

Did Justin Trudeau muzzle scientists? No.

Did Justin Trudeau’s government disable a valuable (and cheap) “early warning” system just to make its own wild spending look a little less careless? Yes, that’s what the Globe and Mail‘s investigation says ~ and we have paid a horrendous price in lives for that decision.

This story, it seems to me, is very much like the “Harper muzzles scientists” stories from a few years ago … but minus the massive media attention. It appears very evident, from Mr Robertson’s investigations that bureaucrats, acting on their own, internal priorities, emasculated the GPHIN just when we needed it most. That, bureaucratic action, was I believe what was, mainly, behind the “Harper muzzles scientists” stories, too. But in the 2010s much of the mainstream media was in a sort of undeclared war against Stephen Harper and so the claims of climate activists became “news” and opinions were treated as facts.

June 30, 2020

“It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless”

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Most Canadians, reading that headline, will assume that Sean Gabb is talking about the Conservative Party of Canada (and he’d be 100% correct in that case), but he’s actually talking about Britain’s equally useless equivalent under Boris Johnson:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson at his first Cabinet meeting in Downing Street, 25 July 2019.
Official photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

According to The Daily Mail, Madeline Odent is the Curator of the Royston Museum in Hertfordshire. This museum is funded by Royston Council. In the past few days, Mrs Odent has taken to Twitter, giving expert advice on how to use household chemicals to cause irreparable harm to statues she dislikes.

It is, she says, “extremely difficult” to remove the chemicals once they have been applied. She adds that “it can be done, but the chemical needed is super carcinogenic, so it rarely is.” Again, she says: “We haven’t found a way to restore artefacts that this happens to.” Her last reported tweet features a picture of Winton Churchill’s defaced statue in Parliament Square, and says: “Stay tuned for our next edition, where we’ll be talking about marble memorials of racists.”

The newspaper and various people are calling for the woman to be sacked. It is, I allow, surprising for someone to hold a job that involves conserving the past, and then to advise an insurrectionary mob on how to destroy the past. This being said, and assuming the story is substantially true, Mrs Odent is less to be blamed for giving her advice than those who employed her as an expert on conservation and its opposite.

We have had a Conservative Government since 2010. We have had a Conservative Government with a working majority since 2015. For the past six months, we have had a Conservative Government with a crushing majority. It all counts for nothing, because the Conservatives themselves are useless.

Political power is not purely, nor mainly, a matter of being able to make laws. It is far more a matter of choosing reliable servants. Before 1997, we could suppose, within reason, that these servants were politically neutral. They often had their own agenda. They could use their status as experts to influence, and sometimes to frustrate, laws and policies with which they disagreed. But there were not self-consciously an order of people devoted to a transformative revolution. The Blair Government broke with convention by stuffing the public sector with its own creatures, loyal only to itself. This is to be deplored. On the other hand, the Blair Government did have a mandate for sweeping change, and it is reasonable that it should have given preference to employing those who could be trusted to further both the letter and spirit of this mandate. The Conservatives have had enough time to make the public sector into at least an obedient servant of those the people keep electing. Instead of this, they have spent this time employing and promoting people whom Tony Blair would have sacked on the spot as malicious lunatics.

March 4, 2020

Sir Philip Rutnam, former civil servant and new hero of the resistance

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

Brendan O’Neill on the unlikely new hero of the British bien pensant classes:

The liberal-left and even some on the supposedly radical left have a new hero: Sir Philip Rutnam. Yes, they’re now worshipping functionaries. They’re now falling at the feet of starched, bureaucratic civil servants. Worse, they seem to have completely forgotten about the Windrush scandal and the hostile environment policy – both of which were overseen by Sir Philip in his role as permanent secretary at the Home Office – in the rush to make him the hero of the hour. Why? Because Rutnam has crossed swords with Priti Patel, and the EU-pining, Boris-hating, populism-fearing left loathes nobody more than Priti Patel. Genghis Khan could have a pop at Priti and they’d be calling him a legend, such is the depth of their dislike for that “nasty woman”.

Official portrait of the Right Honourable Priti Patel, MP.
Photo by Richard Townshend.

The speed and obsequiousness with which leftish people canonised Rutnam following his resignation on Saturday was alarming. Most of them probably hadn’t heard of him prior to his flounce, but suddenly he was a cross between Mother Teresa and Winston Churchill, the bestest civil servant of our time, the steady, wise, clever counter to the rabid ideologism of the Boris mob. A breathless Guardian editorial likened Boris Johnson’s government to the Jacobin terror, with its use of “studied recklessness” to “disrupt [and] demoralise” representatives of “the ancien regime“, like Sir Philip, the People’s Civil Servant, the Bureaucrat of our Hearts. Steady on, Guardianistas: Rutnam has only lost his job, not his head.

The rash, highly political beatification of Sir Philip hasn’t only airbrushed out of view the various screw-ups he has overseen, from fairly mundane screw-ups (while he was in transport) to truly immoral ones (like the Windrush scandal while he was at the Home Office). No, it also turns a blind eye to the unusualness and the cynicism of his extravagant resignation. Civil servants have been falling out with governments for as long as both have existed. But normally the civil servant in question would take it on the chin, slink off into obscurity (or maybe the Lords), and live out a plush retirement. Not Rutnam. He made his resignation into a political weapon. He seems to be out to undermine the elected government. That is more scandalous than Priti Patel allegedly asking civil servants why they are all so “fucking useless”.

The Patel / Rutnam clash is more than a personality problem. It’s about politics, and democracy. According to reports – and we must wait to see how true all this is – Rutnam “obstructed” Patel. He reportedly thought she wasn’t up to the job of home secretary and allegedly tried to hinder some of her priorities. If this is true, it looks like the unelected wing of government – the machinery of the civil service – seeking to block the wishes and programme of the elected wing of government. And now Rutnam is threatening to sue the government for constructive dismissal, which would further weaken Patel’s position, potentially hamper her Home Office work, and posit the bureaucracy against elected ministers.

March 3, 2020

QotD: Public service and competitive private enterprise

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

Anyone who deals with the general UK public (coercive) sector regularly, knows it is a cesspit of laziness, incompetence, arrogance and corruption, riddled with civil servants that are neither civil nor servants.

And I’m not suggesting that the levels of corruption and incompetence are comparable to those found in third world hellholes. A local official in your county council is very unlikely to demand a bribe and then have your daughter raped by his buddies if you decline. He’s especially unlikely to get away with it, and then douse your family in petrol and burn them alive if you complain – those are the levels of corruption found elsewhere in the world, so we need to retain some perspective here.

But those countries have not benefited from a thousand years of sacrifice to earn us a culture that has learned through bitter experience how to run a country. Our civil servants should be performing at the highest standard and be the best in the world, because what they inherited was a culture that conquered that world, and brought civilisation and progress (often at great cost) to every corner of it.

That they have fallen from these heights and now occupy such low places should be a matter for great national shame. And yet they continue to lord it over those they pretend to serve – try calling your local planning department if you want instruction in how supercilious a local functionary feels able to be when speaking to those he claims to serve. If you just want them to do their job, you better be prepared to beg.

Whereas on the flip side, we might agree that the private (voluntary) sector is largely filled with honest and hardworking people and entrepreneurs, but there are crony capitalists out there too.

Your local butcher and baker (those that have survived the regulatory avalanches under which the crony capitalists have begged their pet politicians to bury them) remain staunch servants of their customers (through regard to their own interests), whereas oligoplists (supermarkets, telcos, insurance companies, banks, energy suppliers or transport companies) deliver to us just what the monopolists of government do – an icy contempt that would soon turn to withering small arms fire if the laws allowed it.

Alex Noble, “Corruption In The Coercive And Voluntary Sectors: Rotten Apples? Or The Tips of Icebergs?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-12-02.

February 20, 2020

QotD: Preventing bureaucratic mission creep

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

The mission creep that is the effect of those not slumbering in meetings and thus adding another bright idea to the tasks the organization attempts is not restricted to the public sector.

Private companies are just as vulnerable. However in that private sector we have a mechanism by which the seemingly inevitable bureaucratization is dealt with. Once it happens, the organization goes bankrupt and is removed from the scene. What we need is a similar system to deal with this process in the public sphere.

I don’t, given the above, find it at all remarkable that the WTO is regarded as succumbing to these forces, nor the UN, Amnesty, the European Union or even our own domestic governments (just how did the interstate commerce clause become a justification for Congress to restrict something that is not interstate and is not commerce?). I think it inevitable.

Various solutions appear to be available, the French one might be an example. Put up with it for 50 years then have a revolution and start again. Perhaps the answer is never to allow the public bodies to have much power in the first place, a solution that hasn’t really been tried anywhere. The Italian one? Let the system carry on adding ever more layers but ignore it? Stalin’s? Every 15 years or so shoot the bureaucrats?

All such methods have their attractions and their faults but a solution we do need to find. For one of the lessons I take from the history of the 20th century is that we don’t actually want to be ruled by those who stay awake in committee meetings.

Tim Worstall, “‘Any Organization Will, In the End, Be Run By Those Who Stay Awake in Committee'”, Ideas in Action, 2005-06-23.

November 27, 2019

The Deep State versus the President

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

David P. Goldman reviews a new book by Andrew McCarthy on the ongoing conflict between the elected President of the United States and the permanent bureaucracy:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

America’s Central Intelligence Agency in concert with foreign intelligence services manufactured the myth of Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia, argues Andrew McCarthy, a distinguished federal prosecutor turned public intellectual.

A contributor to Fox News and a prolific writer for The National Review and other conservative media, McCarthy well knows how to build a case and argue it before a jury. His latest book Ball of Collusion should be read carefully by everyone with an interest in American politics. It is exhaustively documented and brilliantly argued, and brings a wealth of evidence to bear on behalf of his thesis that an insular, self-perpetuating Establishment conspired to sandbag an outsider who threatened its perspectives and perquisites.

From my vantage point as an American, the constitutional issue is paramount: The American people elected Donald Trump, and it is horrifying to consider the possibility that a cabal of unelected civil servants supported by the mainstream media might nullify a presidential election. That is why I support the president unequivocally and without hesitation against his detractors.

But this sordid business has deep implications for America’s allies as well as her rivals. Trump is not a popular president overseas, except in Poland, Hungary, and Israel. In the eyes of polite opinion, McCarthy writes, “Donald Trump was anathema: a know-nothing narcissist – as uncouth as Queens – riding a populist-nationalist wave of fellow yahoos that threatened their tidy, multilateral post-World War II order.” China (and not only China) views Trump as a bully who presses American advantage at the risk of disruption to the global economy.

Donald Trump has one quality for which the rest of the world should be grateful: He really does not care how China, Russia, or any other country manages its affairs. By “America First,” he simply means that he cares about what happens in America, and is incurious about what happens outside America unless it affects his country directly. That stands in sharp contrast to view of all the wings of America’s political Establishment – progressive, “realist” and neoconservative – who believe that America should bring about the millenarian End of History by bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, by expanding NATO into a giant social-engineering project, by pressing China to transform itself into a Western-style democracy, and so forth.

McCarthy reports in persuasive detail how the spooks set up the president. There is more to be said, though, about why they did it. I will summarize McCarthy’s findings, and afterward discuss the motivation.

November 23, 2019

Sir Charles Trevelyan, head of the Irish relief efforts during the potato famine, and creator of the modern civil service

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

By happenstance, after posting the OSP video on the history of Ireland, a post at Samizdata covered one of the questions I had from OSP’s summary, specifically that the famine was worsened by British “laissez-faire mercantilism”. Mercantilism is rather different from any kind of laissez-faire system, so it was puzzling to hear Blue link them together as though they were the same thing. Of course, I live in a province currently governed by the Progressive Conservative party, so it’s not like I’m unable to process oxymorons as they go by…

Anyway, this post by Paul Marks looks at the man in charge of the relief efforts:

Part of the story of Sir Charles Trevelyan is fairly well known and accurately told. Charles Trevelyan was head of the relief efforts in Ireland under Russell’s government in the late 1840s – on his watch about a million Irish people died and millions more fled the country. But rather than being punished, or even dismissed in disgrace, Trevelyan was granted honours, made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) and later made a Baronet, not bad for the son of the Cornishman clergyman. He went on to the create the modern British Civil Service – which dominates modern life in in the United Kingdom.

Charles Edward Trevelyan (contemporary lithograph). This appeared in one of the volumes of “The drawing-room portrait gallery of eminent personages principally from photographs by Mayall, many in Her Majesty’s private collection, and from the studios of the most celebrated photographers in the Kingdom / engraved on steel, under the direction of D.J. Pound; with memoirs by the most able authors”. Many libraries own copies.
Public domain, via Wikimedia.

With Sir Edwin Chadwick (the early 19th century follower of Jeremy Bentham who wrote many reports on local and national problems in Britain – with the recommended solution always being more local or central government officials, spending and regulations), Sir Charles Trevelyan could well be described as one of the key creators of modern government. If, for example, one wonders why General Douglas Haig was not dismissed in disgrace after July 1st 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme when twenty thousand British soldiers were killed and thirty thousand wounded for no real gain (the only officers being sent home in disgrace being those officers who had saved some of them men by ordering them stop attacking – against the orders of General Haig), then the case of Sir Charles Trevelyan is key – the results of his decisions were awful, but his paperwork was always perfect (as was the paperwork of Haig and his staff). The United Kingdom had ceased to be a society that always judged someone on their success or failure in their task – it had become, at least partly, a bureaucratic society where people were judged on their words and their paperwork. A General, in order to be great, did not need to win battles or capture important cities – what they needed to do was write official reports in the correct administrative manner, and a famine relief administrator did not have to actually save the population he was in charge of saving – what he had to do was follow (and, in the case of Sir Charles, actually invent) the correct administrative procedures.

But here is where the story gets strange – every source I have ever seen in my life, has described Sir Charles Trevelyan as a supporter of “Laissez Faire” (French for, basically, “leave alone”) “non-interventionist” “minimal government” and his policies are described in like manner. […]

Which probably explains why Blue used the term in the previous video. Then these “laissez-faire” policies are summarized, which leads to this:

None of the above is anything to do with “laissez faire” it is, basically, the opposite. Reality is being inverted by the claim that a laissez faire policy was followed in Ireland. A possible counter argument to all this would go as follows – “Sir Charles Trevelyan was a supporter of laissez faire – he did not follow laissez faire in the case of Ireland, but because he was so famous for rolling back the state elsewhere (whilst spawning the modern Civil Service) – it was assumed that he must have done so in the case of Ireland“, but does even that argument stand up? I do not believe it does. Certainly Sir Charles Trevelyan could talk in a pro free market way (just as General Haig could talk about military tactics – and sound every inch the “educated soldier”), but what did he actually do when he was NOT in Ireland?

I cannot think of any aspect of government in the bigger island of the then UK (Britain) that Sir Charles Trevelyan rolled back. And in India (no surprise – the man was part of “the Raj”) he is most associated with government road building (although at least the roads went to actual places in India – they were not “from nowhere to nowhere”) and other government “infrastructure”, and also with the spread of government schools in India. Trevelyan was passionately devoted to the spread of government schools in India – this may be a noble aim, but it is not exactly a roll-back-the-state aim. Still less a “radical”, “fanatical” devotion to “laissez faire“.

November 19, 2019

No matter who you vote for the (permanent) government always gets in

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

Arthur Chrenkoff on the differences between the theoretical role of civil servants and what they actually do:

The western front of the United States Capitol. The Neoclassical style building is located in Washington, D.C., on top of Capitol Hill at the east end of the National Mall. The Capitol was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Public servants consider themselves more intelligent and expert in their areas of competence than politicians. In many cases they are right. This only adds to the frustration. Because it’s not the job of public servants to make policy but to give advice to elected officials and to implement their decisions. And it certainly is not their job, if elected officials choose not to accept and act on that advice, to sabotage their efforts or even try to engineer the downfall of their political masters.

If you are a public servants who disagrees with the direction the politicians are taking, you have a simple, binary choice: you can clench your teeth, stay in your job and implement the politicians’ will or you can resign – at which stage you have every right as a concerned citizen to publicly campaign against people and policies you disagree with. There are more legitimate avenues of dissent and opposition outside than inside the system.

The ideal of the public service is a completely apolitical and impartial workforce, which faithfully assists government of the day in implementing its agenda, whatever that agenda might be. The reality is that while many bureaucrats are able to separate their personal beliefs from their professional duty, some can’t and won’t. For the reasons that are both obvious and unnecessary to go into detail here, public sector attracts those on the left, the way private sector attracts those on the right. Thus, left wing governments rarely encounter the problem of bureaucratic dissent, unless they really act out of the traditional left-wing box. The right wing governments, by contrast, face at best dutiful but unenthusiastic and sullen cooperation. There are no vast and organised conspiracies; this is a systemic phenomenon where organisations are required to do things that go against the conventional institutional wisdom and against the individual beliefs of the majority of members who shape the informal internal culture. This is the Shallow State. Bureaucracy will always cheer on the expansion of its numbers and powers and shriek at the prospect of shrinking the state. It will embrace and run with the policies it approves and stumble with the policies it doesn’t.

Forgetting the rank and file of the public service, which is unmovable and unchangeable, the reason why new governments enjoy the power of key appointments, including diplomatic ones, is not simply the patronage of rewarding supporters and the faithful but more importantly ensuring that the key administrative positions in bureaucracy are occupied by people who share their vision and can therefore be counted on to enthusiastically pursue the government’s agenda within the particular organisation. This, of course, only kicks the basic problem down the line, in that the top government appointees then have to struggle with the “permanent” employees on the levels below. The lower ranks might still succeed in frustrating their superiors, or worse, in “capturing” the political appointees by converting them to the institutional consensus. But for the government, having its own people in top positions is better than having no support at all. In an ideal world, of course, none of this would be necessary and happening because the impartial public service would be working well with whoever is in power. This is not an ideal world; certainly not for right wing governments. The Shallow State is always the reality. The Deep State is nothing more and nothing less than the Shallow State going well beyond the usual sullen uncooperativeness and taking a particularly strong stance against the government they disagree with. It’s a difference between passive resistance and active resistance.

It is not the job of bureaucracy to resist the government. Hence the current vogue for insubordination and sabotage is necessitating a rather radical redefinition of public service. Recently, we seem to have finally crossed the threshold from years of obfuscation (“The Deep State is a right wing conspiracy theory”) to acknowledging the reality (“The Deep State are patriots trying to protect America and the American people from the president”). But for all the talk about the supposed collusion, treason, crimes and corruption of the Trump administration, which could thus justify the resistance, the only thing that the endless agitation and investigation has succeeded in showing over the past three years is policy differences. Quite simply, the public service is vehemently opposed to the president’s views on a whole range of matters, and they are outraged that he has not followed their conventional wisdom.

November 15, 2019

“In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington”

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

Mark Steyn on the foggiest of Foggy Bottom diplomatic bafflegab on the first day of the :

Yesterday I caught a bit of the impeachment theatre en route to a lunchtime speaking engagement. To be honest, if they’d come round and performed it live in my hotel room, I’d still have fled. If universally respected eminent lifelong career foreign-service bigshots Bill Taylor and George Kent are Adam Schiff’s star witnesses, their chief purpose seems to be to get Democrats pining for the charisma of Bill de Blasio and the self-effacement of John Kerry.

In a functioning system, the head of the government sets foreign policy and the diplomats enact it. So naturally there’s not a chance of that in Washington. When Taylor and Kent whine that there seemed to be a “shadow foreign policy”, the shadow is theirs; they spent a day testifying that everything had been going ticketty-boo for decades just as they’d always done things – and then Trump came along and took a different view. Oh, my! Anyone would think that, as Barack Obama once proposed, “elections have consequences”.

First up was George Kent, the “Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Europe and the Caucasus”. He warmed up the crowd with some extensive biographical material about the “nearly sixty years” of George Kents (I believe he’s George III or some such) who have “chosen” to endow America with the blessings of their “public service”. It didn’t help that he wore a bow tie. Eventually he stopped talking about himself and started talking about Ukraine:

    Our strategic aim for the entirety of my foreign service career is not possible without a Ukraine whole, free, and at peace, including Crimea and Donbas, territories currently occupied by Russia.

Crimea is, of course, familiar to anyone who’s read “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:

    Theirs not to reason why
    Theirs but to do or die…

Or, in the case of low-level diplomats who’ve never had a single conversation with the President, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or tender their resignations after first ensuring that their pensions won’t be affected. Instead:

    Into the valley of the SCIF
    Rode the six hundred hearsay witnesses…

As I said, any Tom, Dick or Harry can bandy Crimea, but it takes a career striped-pants Foggy Bottom public servant to toss in “Donbas” with gay abandon. It would have been interesting to see whether Adam Schiff or anyone else in the room could have found Donbas on a map. The odds of pinning the tail on the Donbas blindfolded are better. It’s bordered to the north, east and south-east by Russia, so it’s akin to the Russian foreign ministry regarding northern Mexico as a vital national-security interest of Moscow’s.

In fact, northern Mexico is a vital national-security interest of America’s, but, under the mass wankerization of public policy, Perma-Beltway cares more about the borders of Ukraine than it does about the borders of the United States.

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