Washington has slowly sunk into an ocean of law, rules, and processes, most created in the past forty years--over 100 million words of binding federal statutes and rules, with more added every year and almost none ever taken away. You may like the idea of tight legal controls over bureaucrats--no official can do anything without swimming through years of legal processes. But inertia in government is costly. It's hard to change priorities, or fix what doesn't work. The legal detail perpetuates failure while also insulating Washington from democratic accountability . . .The mania for rules is hardly unique to the public sector, but companies that become too encrusted eventually succumb to competition from nimbler firms. The feedback to discipline government is much slower and clumsier. Moreover, we aren't really trying to restrain the barnacle-like overgrowth. Most actors in the political process want these detailed rules to hamstring their enemies--they focus not on the cost and inertia, or even the counterproductive activity, but of getting control of the rule-making process, hoping to lock-in their preferences beyond alteration by the whim of the public. But as Howard documents, the result is a system that is fabulously wasteful, and often does things that no one wants, because those are the rules. FEMA couldn't send all the trailers it purchased for Katrina victims to the gulf because of rules about deploying mobile homes on floodplains, and it couldn't deploy them to help tornado victims in Arkansas because the affected area wasn't big enough to be an official emergency disaster zone. So instead the trailers rotted in storage.
People in Washington like the culture of rules. All the law is a barrier to entry to outsiders. Rules appeal to teh risk-averse side of human nature. Rules provide almost foolproof cover--who can blame you if you're following the rule? Rules relieve people of the need to think. . . [t]hey can relax in the caverns of rules instead of worrying about results. People are "mightily addicted to rules", the Scottish philosopher David Hume noted.
Periodic efforts to control government with more laws just make the problem worse. Trying to control bureaucracy usually creates more bureaucracy. Professor Paul Light calculated that there are now as many as thirty-two layers of federal officials between the person doing the job and the person on top. (The rule of thumb for well-run companies, by contrast, is five layers.() Laws designed to prevent corruption have the effect of thickening the cover of bureaucracy in which corruption can thrive. . . The problem is in the premise--that law should tell people how to do things. Making detailed laws is like pointing a car in one direction and leaving the passengers in it without the power to turn the wheel when they hit a curve. Sooner or later the car drives off a cliff. . .
For decades we have been working feverishly to create a legal regime that minimizes official flexibility--detailed rules, and then rules to explain the rules; open-ended rights, and then litigation to keep expanding the scope of the rights.
I'm not advocating a return to the spoils system. But has all this minute rule-making really made us better of than the days when we simply elected officials, had them appoint agency heads, and fired them when they seemed to be doing a bad job?
Keep this in mind as we create more rules to deal with the blowback from the SubPrime crisis, Madoff, et. al. The answer to any problem is usually that there needs to be more rules in place so it won't happen again.
There oughta be a law:
That all laws expire after 10 years.
Howard needs to have his typing tidied up...
Another reason for all the rules is to remove as much responsibility as possible from the functionary, thereby helping in CYA mode.
"...just following standard procedure, ma'am..."
And it goes without saying, I hope, that there are knock-on effects for private industry. A lot of private enterprise - the railroads, for instance - is heavily regulated by Federal agencies that have effectively been delegated rulemaking powers by the Congress. Open-ended legislation leaves a requirement for someone to interpret the rules - and that interpretation is effectively rulemaking.
When I was in the Navy, I learned that there are the official rules and then there are the real rules. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes not. Everybody broke some of the official rules, but nobody got in trouble until they broke the real rules. When that happened, the authorities would find an official rule that was broken and selectively enforce it.
This system is as corrupt as it is ubiquitous. I blew the whistle on some massive cheating and cookbooking and then got busted out for unauthorized swimming. This system is coming to your town soon, if it's not there already.
Don't forget that a lot of the rules aren't there to box in the government agencies themselves, but to make private industry do something. Like only sell stocks in companies that actually exist. Or actually pay their taxes, rather than creating a tax-exempt entity that for some reason seems to earn all the income. Or not put nasty chemicals in the drinking water. Everybody argues about this stuff all the time, and rules get changed (not just expanded) all the time.
Also, what's with the 32 layers? I've never seen more than 7, five of civil service and two of political appointees. 5 or 6 has come up more often, and I've never seen more than 5 in permanent civil service staff.
Don't forget that a lot of the rules aren't there to box in the government agencies themselves, but to make private industry do something. Like only sell stocks in companies that actually exist. Or actually pay their taxes, rather than creating a tax-exempt entity that for some reason seems to earn all the income. Or not put nasty chemicals in the drinking water.
You don't need special rules for any of that. Fraud is illegal, and has been since before there WAS a US government. Putting nasty chemicals in the water is grounds for a lawsuit, and has been since before there was a US government. Tax evasion is illegal, yadda yadda yadda.
I'm not advocating rules for rules' sake, but I think society at large and the average American are both demonstrably better off than they were in those days. Whether the rules culture helps or hinders the progress of increased standards of living is certainly open to debate, but living standards have clearly increased.
As for society at large, I'd say they've definitely been a net benefit. For instance, it's been quite a while since I've heard about a US river catching fire. Also, bad as the Katrina mess was, I'm pretty thankful that huge snarl of rules was there the last 8 years.
The thought of Bush apointees merrily carrying out whatever insane policy notions caught their fancies with nothing but Bush's judgement or the courage of congress's convictions to restrain them is enough to give any liberal, libertarian, or paleocon the screaming willies.
What's to prevent the government from using it's rule-making power to change the rules that limit it's power? The supreme court? What a joke. That just compounds the problem with judicial activism. Justices and judges are government employees with an inherent conflict of interest toward limited government.
"companies that become too encrusted eventually succumb to competition from nimbler firms"
It is more the case that such companies succumb to competition from some of the nimbler firms. The rest of the 'nimble firms' fail; because they can't compete with the 'encrusted' firm's capital, or expertise, or lobbying power, or whatever. And the rules that encrust the old fogey firm exist to manage these features.
Most 'nimble' firms fail to compete despite their nimbleness because they aren't good at managing assets, or planning, or they chase the latest and greatest fad b/c they can, b/c they are nimble. So rules within an organization (corporate or political) serve a purpose - they can grow to overwhelm that purpose for sure, and making sure they don't is a task for leaders - but they don't exist solely to suffocate bright-minded entrepreneurs. No one reads Weber anymore.
On an unrelated note, Dan says "You don't need special rules for any of that. Fraud is illegal, and has been since before there WAS a US government. Putting nasty chemicals in the water is grounds for a lawsuit, and has been since before there was a US government. Tax evasion is illegal, yadda yadda yadda." But the rules are enforced by exactly the mechanisms you describe. And so you are envisioning a world with enforcement, but no rules, which makes no sense. Even lawsuits for damages extend from an allocation of property rights, which is in some sense, a set of rules.
Wehn we limited the total # of congressmen in the early 20th century we spawned this.
One of the arguments in favor of the Cosntitution was that the House of representatives would be so large that it could not be corrupted; it would be too hard to get that many actors to work for a corrupt purpose. Therefore, the only laws that would pass would be those that benefited everyone, i.e., good laws.
And the relatively small original multiplier (1/30,000) meant that if an official were corrupt or bad, he could easily be defeated bya grass-roots middle classer going door-to-door. Small city mayorships (i.e. of 30,000 people) are won in such fashion, as I grew up in such a town and saw it happen.
When we limited, someone realized that government was too small to handle the massive population growth, so the massive bureacratic beast was created. Leaving aside the huge matter of whether our administrative state is unconsitutional as it now stands, the layers upon layers insure some form of inertia, except that if (in many cases) you can purge a department when a new administration comes in, then, while corruption may not trickle down, certainly the politics will, sicne you're hiring cronies.
That's bad, because you're essentially changing an agency/department's actions and confusing the market. Now people are forced to game a system every 4 years.
The inertia is gone, and the guys at the top are corrupt.
Our love of rules is only the by product of our trying to control the upheaval in goals and political decisions happeneing eveyr 4 years, as well as making us think we have a non-corrupt government. Or at least allowing us to be shocked *shocked* at corruption.
Rules are our moral crutch.
The point of rules is to allow he who applies them to have power without responsibility. In a massive regulatory structure, a bureaucrat can choose the rule that most suits his personal liking, apply it, and then claim no responsibility for his actions should he so choose.
FEMA couldn't send all the trailers it purchased for Katrina victims
A good agency head would create a temporary waiver to the rule for a situation like this.
"But inertia in government is costly."
Really? The "stimulus" package didn't have much intertia, and it was pretty costly......and we still don't know what's in it!!! Maybe it has a solution or two to all of these problems.....hey, stop laughing.....I'm serious......
OK, I'm kidding.........
The answer to any problem is usually that there needs to be more rules in place
No, that's the response. The actual answer is more likely to be that there need to be better rules in place.
This is not an argument against any or all new rules -- though it would be a good idea to see if an existing rule can be tweaked to cover a new situation, rather than devising a whole new rule. Rather, it's the good-government version of the physician's maxim: First, Do No Harm.
The Law of Unintended Consequences (and its infinite corrolaries) dictate that nearly all new rules will have effects not anticipated by their promulgators. These effects are usually deleterious, so it behooves us to have the rule-makers act cautiously and incrementally, which is obviously not the same as not acting at all.
I guess we are discussing both regulations and federal laws. So I am reminded that while it is common sense that certain activities are illegal, in an advanced legal system, everything needs to be spelled-out. Hence laws such as the Hatch Act (1939 - the prohibition of partisan campaigning activities in federal, non-congressional offices).
And I am reminded of the difficulty the US had in building a new Iraqi federal government once all former Baathists had been barred from the new government. In the documentary No End In Sight (2007), Ambassador Barbara Bodine described the loss of the rulesmakers, or the 'technocrats' as a key factor to the delay of a stable post-Hussein Iraq.
"Putting nasty chemicals in the water is grounds for a lawsuit, and has been since before there was a US government."
Only if it contravenes some existing rule. Otherwise you can wave your stunted baby in the judge's face all day long and see how far that gets you.
"But has all this minute rule-making really made us better of than the days when we simply elected officials, had them appoint agency heads, and fired them when they seemed to be doing a bad job? "
No. Without all the rules and laws to prosecute them on, they just got more and more and more entrnched in ofice behind the machines that put them inot power. When did we ever, ever simply elect officials and then bounce them when we decided they were doing a bad job? Was that back when the Southern Pacific ran California like a wholy-owned subsidiary?
How it works in a negative way I think is well outlined in Phil Gramm's article on the development of the credit crisis which Mankiw linked to in the WSJ.
"Only if it contravenes some existing rule. Otherwise you can wave your stunted baby in the judge's face all day long and see how far that gets you."
Said judge likely hear of tort law and thus has tools to address the matter, even if there is no specific law regarding chemicals and stunted babies.
In the documentary No End In Sight (2007), Ambassador Barbara Bodine described the loss of the rulesmakers, or the 'technocrats' as a key factor to the delay of a stable post-Hussein Iraq.
Oh, the head bureaucrat attributes problems to the lack of bureaucrats? Fancy that.
I worked in government contracting for a few years. It was amazing how inventive people could be when they wanted to apply rules to avoid working. There were civil servants we worked with that hadn't done a day's work in years.
There does need to be a certain amount of rulemaking. But in government I think the problem is compounded by the fact you can't fire anyone for stupidity or incompetence. So you make regulations to govern every move they make, and if they're incapable of following the rules then you can fire them.
Personally, I think we should go back to the spoils system - it would make the bureaucracy much more responsive to the voters, for one thing. We would also avoid situations where people who have risen through the civil service ranks under one party use their position to undermine elected officials in the other party.
My first career was in Hollywood. My second career was for a major Wall Street investment bank. My third (and current) career is for a federal financial regulator.
Regardless of what any rules of thumb or textbooks or whatever say about the layers between the person doing the job and the top person, I have seeen no difference in the bureaucracies in any of these industries I've worked in. Also, I can say definitively that in my current job at a federal financial regulator, there is only four layers of review between me (and I'm low person on the totem pole) and the person making the decision (and sometimes it's only two layers).
Also, what's the basis for saying "companies that become too encrusted eventually succumb to competition from nimbler firms"? That's a conclusion, not an argument based on facts, evidence, or logic. I'm not saying it's false, but it seems to me that plenty of slow, aging dinosaurs last generations despite the competition from nimbler firms, e.g., GM (50 years to be taken down), IBM (it took almost 20 years to be reformed once Apple, Sun, Dell, etc appeared on the scene), and AT&T (still largest market cap in its peer group).
"I have seeen no difference in the bureaucracies in any of these industries I've worked in."
Janice,
This isn't too surprising. Your first career was in a highly-unionized industry, your second in a highly-regulated industry, and your third in agency that regulates the highly-regulated industry.
Dan how was there any of that stuff before there WAS a US government? Were these just basic laws and rules that the colonials or erstwhile territoriliast obeyed in good faith?
k1
ryanculver.blogspot.com
Megan,
You should read Freedom and the Law by Bruno Leoni. It's a must read for any libertarian. The solution is not a return the spoil systems, but a return to common law.
From these comments, you'd think the was titled "Life Without Lawmakers".
This is my idea for a modest reform:
Freeze the federal register at it's current size. Allow no new law to be enacted without repealing an equal amount of old legislation. If we need more laws than we already have, then we should just start over.
Which brings me to a more radical idea:
repeal the constitution and reinstate the Articles of Confederation. They were good enough to defeat England with. (how do I rewrite that last sentence without ending with a preposition?)
Drunk by 3:29 pm? Jesus, couldn't you have waited until at least 5?
There are so many laws now, that--intentionally or not--we all have broken at least one. But we have not all been convicted, which means that the laws are selectively enforced. Sometimes the selection is arbitrary and sometimes not.
When selective enforcement is not arbitrary, it means that we have a shadow system. Real rules under which we must live that are different from the official rules. Political correctness. Most of us are second class citizens under this shadow system.
Bush and Obama can take drugs with no future consequence, but millions have had their lives ruined for simple possession. Al Gore can fly in private jets to his mansion with the heated swimming pool after his global warming speech, but we must ride the bus.
Most actors in the political process want these detailed rules to hamstring their enemies--they focus not on the cost and inertia, or even the counterproductive activity, but of getting control of the rule-making process, hoping to lock-in their preferences beyond alteration by the whim of the public
You're attributing way too much bad faith here.
And you of all people with your IT and MBA accounting background should appreciate the importance of a consistent set of rules over a structure guided by personal capricious whim.
In a completely different arena, it is the absence of rules and process that is the primary problem with Gitmo - no structure to resolve who's the bad guy and what ulimately to do about him. Rather than making 'the tough decisions', the previous administration punted and just allowed a legal netherworld to envelope dozens of people; some of which are no doubt bad guys, but we have used no independent - and yes imperfect and bureaucratic - process that we normally use to verify this sort of thing.
Didn't Robert Reich point this out like a decade ago?
Also, we have a choice on a continuium two extremes. We can have everything going through tort on the one extreme (clearly unworkable), and "rule of law" style government (think eastern europe - where everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden). I think our system is pretty good at doing this.
Also, anyone who thinks the financial industry is highly regulated is wrong. Most of the regulation in the financial industry is reporting related, and not prohibitive.
Professor Paul Light calculated that there are now as many as thirty-two layers of federal officials between the person doing the job and the person on top.
I'd like to know what example he used for this. In any of the military boot camp you're required to memorize and recite your chain of command from your inductee class leader to the President of the US. This is about 15 people, and the DoD is the most bureaucratic organization that has ever existed on planet earth. Right now, I count twelve people in the current chain I'm in from bottom to top, and I'm neck deep in a staff command.
Paul Graham has a good essay called "The Other Half of Artists Ship" on the subject of rules in the private sector, although one could easily extend it to laws in the public (and private) sectors. The blockquote below is somewhat long but I think necessary to convey the the essential meaning of his argument:
It's my impression that government bodies, including the judiciary system, are even worse at this than private organizations.
"And you of all people with your IT and MBA accounting background should appreciate the importance of a consistent set of rules over a structure guided by personal capricious whim."
Our bipartisan overlords do not want consistency because they benefit from the current system at our expense. These are the establishment elite that both Kolohe and Megan serve. The left/right division is subterfuge.
Consistent rules would mean that Al gore couldn't preach sacrifice for the environment while driving around in a stretch Lincoln Navigator. Consistent rules would mean that Bush couldn't dodge the draft and then send thousands off to die in Iraq.
Consistent rules would mean that Obama couldn't play the race card after twenty years at Trinity United Church of Christ. Consistent rules would mean that Geithner couldn't cheat on his taxes and then become Secretary of the Treasury.
I could go on and on.
We are tax livestock. We are slaves. The system is corrupt because our overlords like it that way.
The solution to the rule swamp is, as it is with most complex problems, technology. Right now you have to pay an army of lawyers to navigate through the swamp if you plan to do anything substantial. In the future, you'll have expert systems that cost one one thousandth of the price of the herd of lawyers. Navigation will be much cheaper and vastly less labor-intensive.
Of course, the rules really are there as a barrier to entry most of the time, so the answer to technology will be more rules, or rules that are harder to understand, or rules that are deliberately ambiguous. Now you've got yourself a classic arms race between those erecting competitive barriers and those attempting to get through them. Ties, unfortunately, go to the defender.
Any computer geek knows that garbage collection is boring, tedious--and absolutely essential. Government apparently hasn't figured this out, but they will when some complexity-induced catastrophe befalls it. (Just ask derivatives traders what happens when you can't understand the systems you've created...)
I think you may be seeing the leading edge of this: How many of Obama's cabinet nominees had unresolved tax problems? And how many ethics problems do we have under investigation (or at least requiring active, ongoing damage control) in Congress? One can only hope for poetic justice.
Because our Founding Fathers decided we would be a nation of laws, not men.
"The solution to the rule swamp is, as it is with most complex problems, technology. "
There are two problems there. One for us and one for the lawyers.
for us: How do we minimize transaction costs and regulatory overhead?
for them: How do we maximize and keep our power?
Obviously the solutions are mutually exclusive.
Limited government is impossible because the State uses it's rule-making power to change the rules that limit it's power. Lawyers are part of the State.
Screw the Lawyers.
We need a stateless society based on property rights and the Non-Aggression principle.
"Because our Founding Fathers decided we would be a nation of laws, not men."
The people who interpret the laws effectively rule.
Can anyone argue that the tenth amendment is in force today? The republic is dead. The American experiment is a failure. The Constitution is void where prohibited by law.
The American experiment is a failure based on what? It didn't produce the perfect society? As for layers of complexity, someone should have mentioned Joseph Tainter. Complex societies need complex "make stuff happen" structures. People love to imagine going back to some romanticized past or to posit some perfect future. This present society is outrageously complex and took a lot of trial and error to get to this point and there are feedback loops upon feedback loops that it makes sense to be careful about tinkering with. This isn't to say we shouldn't tinker, but it's a bit trivial to just throw your hands in the air and rant about obvious things like "people like rules" and "things are getting more complex".
Megan wrote:
"I'm not advocating a return to the spoils system. But has all this minute rule-making really made us better off than the days when we simply elected officials, had them appoint agency heads, and fired them when they seemed to be doing a bad job?"
Fair enough, then cite at least one example in history where the arrangement of which you speak led to an outcome you consider to be preferable. Need I point out the obvious fact that you have yet to claim one single instance where your argument is backed up by events of history?
Please offer such a proposition. Otherwise, you have proposed nothing, Megan.
Megan wrote:
"I'm not advocating a return to the spoils system. But has all this minute rule-making really made us better off than the days when we simply elected officials, had them appoint agency heads, and fired them when they seemed to be doing a bad job?"
Fair enough, then cite at least one example in history where the arrangement of which you speak led to an outcome you consider to be preferable. Need I point out the obvious fact that you have yet to claim one single instance where your argument is backed up by events of history?
Please offer such a proposition. Otherwise, you have proposed nothing, Megan.
What does he mean by 'layers'. I would have thought that meant the number of people up the chain of command that you needed to go through to get to the top. But even if each manager was managing 2 people below them you could manage billions of people with 32 layers so I assume it means something different. Also if it means what I would have thought it meant the numbers of layers for a business should not be a constant but should grow logarithmically with the size of the company.
Also buying trailers for Katrina victoms was I think widely seen at the time as a hair brained scheme brought to us by the epic failure that was the Bush administration. I think progressives had better ideas, but were not listened to.
The process bureaucratization, as Megan notes, is not unique to government. However, the process of rectification is not unique to the private sector either. When the system become sclerotic and corrupt enough, it will collapse under the weight of its ineptitude, and a competitor government, or governments, will take its place.
The US government is presently on the path of self-immolation. The sclerosis of it operations, and the sheer magnitude of it present and its soon-to-arrive liabilities are going to crush it. I used to think that we would eventually come to our senses and reform ourselves, but then we see the events of the last six months, and the responses by both parties, and it is dawning on me that reform just may not be possible any longer- if it ever was. Seriously, are there any examples of governments that underwent major reforms and improvements that did not involve the destruction and a clearing away of the old order?
Is this one of those n=1 situations, where we are not allowed to infer any causation, like what caused the recovery from the Great Depression? Or are there examples of societies that have done so much better over the last 40 years by not implementing new rules? If so, please name them.
Didn't this topic just roll around a month or so ago? There are, broadly speaking two different philosophies on how to apply and enforce the rule of law. In one system, you let officials broadly interpret the laws, what they mean(the 'spirit' if you will), and when to make the obvious exceptions. In the other system, this latitude for judgment calls is sacrificed for a much narrower interpretation of the law, the strict letter of the law as opposed to the spirit. The latter is what is practiced in the U.S., the former in Great Britain (or so I am told.)
Each side has it's advantages and concomitant disadvantages, which I won't describe here. What I will note is a certain amount of, shall we say (whadda surprise) dishonesty. It seems that there is a huge overlap of people who rail against 'activist judges' who 'take the law into their own hands', and of people who rail against 'burdensome regulation', who are outraged, outraged I tell you at the sheer volume of law concerned with minute details, that, for example, LD50 stickers must by Federal fiat be affixed to containers of water in certain industrial settings, or that mattress tags cannot be removed under penalty of law.
One or the other folks. Don't switch rhetorical nags in midstream just because it suits your purposes.
"The American experiment is a failure based on what? "
It's a failure if you believe that a constitutional republish could produce a stable limited government and secure a free society.
You don't have to have a standard of perfection to see that the Government completely ignores its constitutional mandate to only exercise enumerated powers. Not only does the government fail to protect us from threats to life and liberty, it has become the biggest threat itself.
There's a logical fallacy called special pleading that goes something like this:
people shouldn't drive too fast...unless they are running late.
Special pleading is used for the State constantly.
People shouldn't initiate violence or threaten violence to get what they want...unless the government does it, because no one would pay their taxes otherwise.
People are allowed to use violence to defend against violence...unless you are defending against state violence. When that happens, your only recourse is to argue in front of a State judge in a State Court that the State has abused it's state-sanctioned power.
You can't break the speed limit...unless you're a government employee.
It's wrong to take people's property without their consent...unless it's eminent domain.
etc, etc, etc.
Most of the complexity is the result of attempting to hide the fact that there are different standards of behavior for different classes of people in our supposedly classless, egalitarian society.
Having reported on government rule-making for a number of years, I'd say the biggest problem is a cumbersome process designed to include citizen participation that typically results only in lobbyist participation.
Sitting in on those hearings is very time consuming. But since the devil's in the details, and the details of laws are defined in the rule making, thats were the evils of government ferment.
And Bearded Spock, it doesn't matter if you drive too fast or drive the speed limit; if it's a public road, you ought to help pay for it since you're benefiting from it. It takes you (and all the supplies you need or produce) to your work, your doctor, and your grocery store. The problem of government you lay out is a problem of you not being there for the rule making, so government is not of the people; it's government by whomever pays the lobbyist.
"And Bearded Spock, it doesn't matter if you drive too fast or drive the speed limit; if it's a public road, you ought to help pay for it since you're benefiting from it."
I have no problem paying tolls on private roads, but
am I obligated to finance public assets that I benefit from, but have effectively no control over creating? If so, am I not also entitled to compensation for public liabilities that I had effectively no control over incurring and do not benefit from?
The double standard would be obvious if it wasn't for the intentionally complex and convoluted rules that disguise it.
Bearded Spock, Yes, you are obligated. So am I.
Because of your obligation, I would recommend attention to and involvement in government. That's how it gets to the "we the people" part.
But you don't seem to hesitate to post on this blog, enabled, in part, by public spending investment in higher education and satellite communications. So I don't really take your argument seriously; you like the benefits of society, and you're don't-pick-my-pocket diatribes are typically poorly thought out; they don't take account of the public benefits that make your life (ahd your whining) possible; from medical advancements to communication to transportation, and on and on.
It's rather like the plastics commercial where things made of plastic disappear: you life without the public expenses you constantly complain about would also disappear.
"Because of your obligation, I would recommend attention to and involvement in government. That's how it gets to the 'we the people' part."
I just explained why I don't have an obligation.
If I am trying to court a woman and a rival suitor gets murdered, that is an action that I benefit from even if I had nothing to do with it. Should I pay for the crime? Should she? Even partially? No. Should I abandon my romantic aspirations? That would compound the injustice because then the lady in question would have lost two potential suitors in stead of one. I should continue my pursuit even though I would have preferred to out-compete my rival rather than have the competition eliminated.
So why should I pay for public roads that I drive on when I didn't want them?
"I would recommend attention to and involvement in government. That's how it gets to the 'we the people' part."
That's like arguing that, because I object to the KKK, I should join the group and attempt to change it's policies.
"you like the benefits of society"
Don't confuse society with government. From Thomas Paine:
"SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher."
The State provides no net benefits at all because the actual costs and opportunity costs outweigh them.
Spock, so you don't like Thomas Hobbes?
I'm not a big fan of Hobbes, but I like Calvin. :-)
So you believe in predestination?
What are you getting at, Stan? What does predestination have to do with the legitimacy of the state, or lack thereof?
I think I know: social contract theory.
The social contract is crap. I didn't sign no contract. I didn't authorize anyone to sign said contract.
Valid contracts have to be agreed to by free moral agents. No children. No coercion. Yet children are required to go to government schools which coerce them into consenting to said contract.
Spock, I was funning you about Calvin and predestination. You meant Calvin as in the comic strip, and I pretended it was Calvin the Presbyterian.
Regarding the social contract, I question whether there ever existed a society of the type you say you like. And if you found one, I don't think you'd like it. Wouldn't you live in fear of your neighbors, and wouldn't they live in fear of you? Hobbes was wrong about the cure, but I think he knew what he was talking about when it came to the disease.
The social contract is also invalid because it is implicit, not explicit. Valid contracts are explicit, yet most Americans don't even know what our social contract is.
Implied consent is a bullshit rationalization for date rape, so why would it be a valid justification for the social contract?
Who authorized the Framers of the Constitution to negotiate on by behalf? Certainly not me.
Who authorized the State governments to ratify the constitution on my behalf? Not me.
Can I be bound by a contract that was made before I was born? Not any other contract, so why this one?
No wonder there are truancy laws. It takes a lot of propaganda in government or government licensed schools to swallow this crap.
"Regarding the social contract, I question whether there ever existed a society of the type you say you like. And if you found one, I don't think you'd like it. Wouldn't you live in fear of your neighbors, and wouldn't they live in fear of you?"
If we limit the discussions only to social orders found in history, then we can never improve on them.
We don't live in the past. we live now, with new technology and knowledge that expand the possibilities.
Imagine how much better anarchic societies like pre-Christian Iceland or medieval Ireland would have been with today's technology. Imagine if they had the accumulated wisdom of the last 500 years to build on.
I already live in fear of my neighbors, but mostly just the ones employed by the government. Anyone who's more afraid of people like me than the State has a serious inability to asses risk.
"Spock, I was funning you about Calvin and predestination. You meant Calvin as in the comic strip, and I pretended it was Calvin the Presbyterian."
Sorry. I usually operate on the assumption that I am the biggest nerd in the conversation. Because I usually am. If you knew me, you'd know that's a compliment.
How many Presbyterians does it take to pee on a Chevy?
Spock, if it comes to a choice between Hobbes and Rousseau, I'd like to believe Rousseau but my experience inclines me to Hobbes.
Without laws to protect their property, the Icelanders wouldn't have developed subsistence farming, much less computers. There's a dark side to human nature, and laws protect us against it.
Speaking of the dark side, it's time for dinner and I have to eat cauliflower. Tot ziens.
It's amazing how this discussion descended into 'anarchy' vs 'rule of law'.
I suggest that when there are too many rules, many of them contradicting another, all of which require for common life activities the hiring of a lawyer, that means there is anarchy.
If as someone mentioned there are written rules and the real rules, the written ones used to punish someone you don't like, in what way is that different from hiring someone to beat you, or using influence and bribery to get someone fired?
Too many rules mean no rules at all.
Derek
Guys, you are making false assumptions:
"Without laws to protect their property, the Icelanders wouldn't have developed subsistence farming, much less computers. There's a dark side to human nature, and laws protect us against it."
1. You don't need laws to have order.
2. You don't need violent enforcement of laws to have enforcement of laws.
3. You don't need a monopoly State to have violent enforcement of laws.
"It's amazing how this discussion descended into 'anarchy' vs 'rule of law'."
You mean "Chaos."
"Anarchy" means lake of government, not lack of order."
We need a stateless society based on property rights and the Non-Aggression principle.
Posted by Bearded Spock | February 21, 2009 12:00 AM
Haha! And how would this Non-Aggression principle be enforced? Not very aggressively, I presume.
Bearded Spock, you know your biggest problem is that you are an optimist. You actually believe that anything is going to change for the better. Talking and writing about freedom is a waste of time - there are too many vicious incompetents out there like SOV (by the way I never smelled a rancid violet) and RW (Retarded Weenie?). And almost all of the people who actually waste their time voting for one thieving, sleazeball incompetent or another.
"how would this Non-Aggression principle be enforced? Not very aggressively, I presume."
You are confusing aggression with violence. Force would be used defensively. It's the initiation of force that would be impermissible.
"You actually believe that anything is going to change for the better."
Yes, I do. Galileo was persecuted, but his ideas eventually triumphed because they were congruent with reality. Time is the friend of Truth.
The system we live under is collapsing from its own weight. Eventually it will become more and more obvious that the State is a dead-weight loss on society. It's not a necessary evil because it is not necessary at all.
We need order. We need rules. We need to defend against violent aggression, but we do not need an institution with a geographical monopoly on aggressive force.
This is the kind of argument I see from the left.
Taxes are too high.
Lefty - "You must not want any taxes, therefore you want no roads or hospitals or the Internet and you want children to staaaaarve!"
There are too many rules.
Lefty - "You don't want rules or laws either, you want murder in the streets and poison in the drinking water and children to staaaaaaarve!"
You know, Bearded Spock, there is a society that actually has no laws, no rules, no working government, and where everyone can have as many guns as they want. Its called Somalia. Why don't you live in the libertarian paradise for six months and let us know how that's going?
stonetool's cynical observation: the only thing worse than a society with rules is a society with no rules.
"Its called Somalia. "
We've been over this dozens of times. Somalia is crappy because it started out much crappier. It actually improved under anarchy in infant mortality, life span, and about a dozen other ways.
Fraggle Rock had it exactly right.
http://mises.org/story/2701
from the story:
If the expectation was that Somalia would plunge into an abyss of chaos, what is the reality? A number of recent studies address this question, including one by economist Peter Leeson drawing on statistical data from the United Nations Development Project, World Bank, CIA, and World Health Organization. Comparing the last five years under the central government (1985–1990) with the most recent five years of anarchy (2000–2005), Leeson finds these welfare changes:
* Life expectancy increased from 46 to 48.5 years. This is a poor expectancy as compared with developed countries. But in any measurement of welfare, what is important to observe is not where a population stands at a given time, but what is the trend. Is the trend positive, or is it the reverse?
* Number of one-year-olds fully immunized against measles rose from 30 to 40 percent.
* Number of physicians per 100,000 population rose from 3.4 to 4.
* Number of infants with low birth weight fell from 16 per thousand to 0.3 — almost none.
* Infant mortality per 1,000 births fell from 152 to 114.9.
* Maternal mortality per 100,000 births fell from 1,600 to 1,100.
* Percent of population with access to sanitation rose from 18 to 26.
* Percent of population with access to at least one health facility rose from 28 to 54.8.
* Percent of population in extreme poverty (i.e., less than $1 per day) fell from 60 to 43.2.
* Radios per thousand population rose from 4 to 98.5.
* Telephones per thousand population rose from 1.9 to 14.9.
* TVs per 1,000 population rose from 1.2 to 3.7.
* Fatalities due to measles fell from 8,000 to 5,600.
Quite apart from the rather dicey source (no one believes they have the slightest smidge of credibility unless they are a True Believer), one has to wonder how these improvements came to be. Were they the result of internal agencies . . . or external?
Most people would take a rather dim view of citing increases in vaccination rates as some sort of success if those improvements were due to outside sources such as WHO or Doctors Without Borders.
@Fraggle Rock: Complaints that leftists are misrepresenting your position on spending cuts would be a lot more persuasive if you would state what your position is.
Look, when it comes to spending cuts, I've observed that conservatives/libertarians/rightists/etc. generally fall into two camps:
1. The people who actually don't want (publicly-funded) roads, hospitals, Social Security, Medicare, R&D of the type that created the Internet, etc. These people are very principled, but are way outside of the American political mainstream. They also, in my opinion, generally have a very poor sense of history, tending to lack a desire to understand why this law or that program came into existence.
2. The people who have a greatly distorted sense of how the government spends its money, and so think that they could get huge spending reductions by cutting 1) benefits to illegal immigrants, 2) foreign aid, and 3) "waste, fraud and abuse". This is completely unrealistic, bordering on magical thinking. It's also very popular in California, which is one reason for our budget crisis.
If you want leftists to take you seriously, you have to give us a reason to believe that you don't fall into either camp #1 or camp #2.
I would suggest that Somalia did not replace government with anarchy. They replaced a corrupt central government with a clan based feudal system.
One virtue of a feudal system is that obligations run both ways. The liege lord must take care of his people, or they leave him.
An obvious fault is that the individual lords have difficulty working together for the common good.
What we have in the USA is an increasingly centralized government that is insulated from citizen input.
When I was in college in the late '70s I read that Congresscritters voted as they pleased unless they received significant mail on an issue. Then they tended to vote according to the letters.
Nowadays, with all the screening, snail mail is probably moot by the time they get it. I don't know how how much attention they pay to their eMail. Their sites do try to filter out non-constituents. I have written my Congressman that way. I don't get much feedback.
Layers and loops: As noted by several other commentors above, that "32 layers" simply can't be a straight chain of command. I work in a very large bureaucratic organization, and there are only six steps between me and the top.
These organizations do, however, have lots of checkoff requirements, and they get a lot worse as the organization grows. In a 15-person company, someone making a decision may answer only to his/her boss, or at most might have to check with one other person. An equivalent decision in a large organization might require signoff by HR, Purchasing, Facilities, Public Relations, the committee in charge of allocating office space, the shop steward, etc. and so forth....it can take weeks.
All of these requirements, of course, are in place because someone spent money without checking with Purchasing, or inadvertently opened up the department for an affirmative action lawsuit, or took over space that had already been promised to the new hire, or whatever. So, individually, each is understandable and defensible. It's the sheer weight of them that gets overwhelming.
"These people are very principled, but are way outside of the American political mainstream. They also, in my opinion, generally have a very poor sense of history, tending to lack a desire to understand why this law or that program came into existence."
Quite the contrary. The programs we object to are either not legitimate functions of the State, or came into existence to fix certain problems either created or made worse by earlier government programs. All state policies have unintended consequences. By focusing on immediate problems and not long-term problems, by focusing on benefits and not opportunity costs, by focusing on the impact on certain groups rather than society as a whole, these program designers cause massive harm.
"I would suggest that Somalia did not replace government with anarchy. They replaced a corrupt central government with a clan based feudal system."
I grow weary of repeating myself.
"Anarchy" means lack of a State, not lack of order.
Legal code bloat is the inevitable result of a monopoly state. With no competition, every organization, even governments, become less efficient over time.
@bearded spock
Legal code bloat is the inevitable result of a monopoly state. With no competition, every organization, even governments, become less efficient over time.
----------------------
Competing governments within the same country: isn't that what we will a civil war?
If you think things are really improving in Somalia, well-you have a strange idea of improvement
Your quote sounds like another onefrom Heinlein, the man who said , " Armed society is polite society"-a quote totally refuted by the facts -see Somalia again on that.
"Competing governments within the same country: isn't that what we will a civil war?"
That depends on how they compete. I guess some people would call business competition war, but most people don't. Non-violent competition is possible and there are historical precedents.
"If you think things are really improving in Somalia, well-you have a strange idea of improvement"
I showed some stats. Where are yours? You have to make comparisons that are meaningful.
Another even more comprehensive study published last year by Benjamin Powell of the Independent Institute, concludes: "We find that Somalia's living standards have improved generally … not just in absolute terms, but also relative to other African countries since the collapse of the Somali central government."
@SiliconValleyDave:
I stated that taxes are too high and there are too many rules. I didn't think it was that difficult to comprehend.
1. The people who think it is so great to fund Social Security and Medicare aren't such fans of military spending, which is what led to the creation of the Internet.
2. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
The strange thing about people like you is that you demand we accept ALL spending if we support even a small fraction. I like public roads, therefore I MUST support giving money to illegal aliens. I like the Internet, therefore I MUST support a multi-trillion dollar ponzi scheme. I want laws against murder, therefore I MUST support laws forbidding land-owners from destroying the nest of the horned, spotted flying squirrel when they want to build their own home.
There IS somewhere in between.
To be blunt, no, you didn't. To 'show some stats' - as opposed to made-up numbers you call stats - you've got to a) find a cite other than mises, and b) establish that these figures are internal to Somalia, and in a way that is for generally positive reasons. You cannot take credit, as I have already mentioned, for measles immunizations if those immunizations a gratis, courtesy of some external organization. Nor can you point to life expectancy increases if they are the result of fewer babies being born, particularly to the most impoverished. That sort of thing.
So, where is this evidence?
SOV,
This is the first, last and only time I will respond to your posts unless you demonstrate an honest and well thought out rebuttal. My better judgment tells me not to engage with because of your past behavior indicates a lack of sincere and intelligent discourse.
Neither Peter Leeson nor Benjamin Powell are affiliated with the Mises Institute. That just happened to be where I gained knowledge of their independent reports.
Benjamin Powell is Research Fellow at The Independent Institute ,assistant professor of economics at Suffolk University and a Senior Economist with the Beacon Hill Institute. Dr. Powell received his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. He has been assistant professor of economics at San Jose State University, a fellow with the Mercatus Center's Global Prosperity Initiative, and a visiting research fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research.
Mises.org cited the souce of the numbers in the article, the WHO. If you don't want to verify them them yourself or challenge the source material, then you are just using an ad hominem dismissal. Reason.com put out a similar article, but I'm sure you'd just dismiss that too.
From reason.com:
in a recent study two World Bank economists found a surprising side to Somali statelessness. Its "private sector experience," Tatiana Nenova and Tim Harford write, "suggests that it may be easier than is commonly thought for basic systems of finance and some infrastructure services to function where government is extremely weak or absent." They report that "Somalia boasts lower rates of extreme poverty and, in some cases, better infrastructure than richer countries in Africa."
Are you going to dismiss the World bank, too?
It's a logical fallacy to challenge the arguer and not the argument. Information isn't automatically wrong because it comes from a source you don't like. It's not automatically right either, but you still need to present some kind of contradictory evidence.
I do not have to show that improvements were not the result of external organizations. The former central government discouraged or prevented help from said organizations and looted the aid that did make it there. The aid now reaching Somalis is the result of the central government not being there anymore.
If you don't want to count improvements that result from external sources, then we can't count the harm done from external sources such as Foreign government meddling either. That meddling and harm is substantial and ongoing.
Spock,
While I may agree with some of what you say, pointing to "the good things in Somalia" as support for your preferred policy, etc. will win you no arguments...
"Spock,
While I may agree with some of what you say, pointing to "the good things in Somalia" as support for your preferred policy, etc. will win you no arguments..."
I appreciate your advice, but I thinks it's more important to be truthful than persuasive. You can lead a horse to water and all that.
Riiight. Let's see what Peter Leeson has to say in his paper:
That's a monster fail. Sorry. The 'Independent' Institute? Who's 'symbol is a lighthouse, chosen because of its symbolism of how services commonly regarded as public goods can be privately owned and operated.[1]'You've gotta be kidding me. Look, there are several organizations that are propaganda mills, and they simply will not be accepted: Cato, AEI, Heritage, etc. These are all well known. How about something like Rand? How about you actually go out and dig up the relevant WHO figures yourself? Since the burden of proof is on you and all? You being a Rational Man know that, of course, right?
Finding an impartial source for your figures shouldn't be that hard. If they're really true. If the only people who are claiming things like this are the sorts of organizations listed above, well, I'd say you've got a problem.
Sorry SOV, You are not tall enough to go on this ride. I regret that I ever gave you the chance.
All future posts from you will be ignored.
Chuckle. This from someone who claims that 'I thinks it's more important to be truthful than persuasive.' Oh, let's look at the 'Independent' Institutes funding, just for kicks:
And BS is just, well, BS-ing. Well, that's BS for you. Can't give an honest argument, can't find honest cites to support his 'facts'.
Well, goodbye to bad BS.
The unfolding economic collapse -- which implicates every significant institution of the evil system that rules us -- could be a providential catastrophe, if it is dealt with correctly. To put the matter simply, for our civilization to recover, the United States of America needs to become a "failed state."
That term conjures images of Somalia in the early 1990s, as tribal wolf-packs headed by small-bore thugs grandly calling themselves "warlords" plundered famine relief deliveries, leaving thousands to starve. But as we'll shortly see, there is more to what we might call the "Somali Model" than warlords and famine victims, and much of it could apply to reconstructing free society following the overdue collapse of the American State.
Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, Somalia was the "beneficiary" of huge loans from the World Bank; by 1987, 37 percent of the country’s GNP was derived directly from such loans. Siad Barre, the Marxist kleptocrat on whom the World Bank bestowed that beneficence, lived in opulent splendor even as the nation’s infrastructure rotted away.
Barre's regime collapsed in 1991, triggering a brief but bloody civil war among rival aspirants to succeed the tyrant. Starving Somalis offered irresistible opportunities for the purveyors of victim pornography, and saturation media coverage of the famine led to a US-led, UN-mandated "humanitarian" intervention in December 1992. That mission was soon redefined as a "nation-building" exercise -- that is, an effort to re-impose a standard-issue centralized regime on a fissiparous tribe-based society.
As it happens, the famine was under control before the military intervention began, and the effort to inflict a government on the Somalis led to a great deal of entirely gratuitous bloodshed. So the UN mission folded its tents and left the Somalis to muddle through without a government. And Somalis did more than merely muddle: After suffering horribly under a World Bank-subsidized central government, they flourished in a state-less society precisely because of the "neglect" of the "international community."
In Somalia, "the very absence of a government may have helped nurture an African oddity — a lean and efficient business sector that does not feed at a public trough controlled by corrupt officials," wrote Peter Maas in the May 2001 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
Without the instruments of state coercion to misdirect investments and suppress initiative, private businesses sprang up like blades of grass suddenly freed from an oppressive overgrowth of weeds. This in turn encouraged the development of telecommunications, transportation, and shipping companies to serve the needs of the newly liberated private sector.
Internet cafes began to sprout in Mogadishu, which just a decade earlier had been the scene of astonishing bloodshed. Rather than re-building a state-controlled, taxpayer-financed police force, Somali businessmen hired private security firms to protect their investments and property.
"Mogadishu has the closest thing to an Ayn Rand-style economy that the world has ever seen -- no bureaucracy or regulation at all," wrote Maass in astonishment. "The city has had no government since 1991.... Somali investors are making things happen, not waiting for them to happen." In the stateless Somali economy, everything "is based on trust, and so far it has worked, owing to Somalia's tightly woven clan networks: everyone knows everyone else, so it's less likely that an unknown con man will pull off a scam."
"If the business community succeeds in returning Mogadishu to something resembling normalcy," concluded Maass, "it will have shown that a failed state, or at least its capital city, can get back on its feet without much help from the outside world."
Maass understates the case: Somalia's transformation would illustrate the ability of a stateless society to overcome the pernicious legacy left by decades of "help" from the so-called international community.
A World Bank study grudgingly admitted: "Somalia boasts lower rates of extreme poverty and, in some cases, better infrastructure than richer countries in Africa." This is almost certainly because it was not cursed with a World Bank-subsidized central government to poach the wealth created by Somalia's productive class.
Now, you just knew that the architects of international order simply couldn't allow that state of affairs to continue.
And sure enough, under the all-exculpating rationale provided by the "War on Terror," the Regime ruling us from Washington arranged for Somalia to be invaded by the vile government ruling the neighboring country, Ethiophia.
This crime was carried out in the name of "stabilizing " Somalia, with invading foreign troops deployed "in support of Somalia's fledgling transitional government," slaughtering thousands of civilians at a throw and driving the business community into exile.
New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman, who apparently fills that paper's Walter Duranty Chair for Collectivist Apologetics, did his considerable best in a seminal April 2007 report to depict Washington's surrogate aggression in Somalia as a necessary measure to beat down "raw antigovernment defiance."
As if that were, in some sense, a bad thing.
"They do not pay taxes, their businesses are totally unregulated, and they have skills that are not necessarily geared toward a peaceful society," wrote Gettleman in an all-but-audible tone of alarmed disapproval. His prose is drenched in scorn when describing Somalis seeking to profit in the private sector, but maintains his composure when describing how the transitional government arbitrarily closed and confiscated profitable businesses and hiked some taxes by as much as 300 percent. Gettleman uncritically quoted Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the puppet ruler grandly calling himself Somalia's "transitional president," who described his political critics as "the guys bringing in expired medicine, selling arms, [and] harboring terrorists."
Gettleman buttressed that self-serving accusation with supposedly authoritative assessments from conveniently anonymous "Western security officials" -- you know, the kind people who arranged for Somalia to descend, once again, into murderous chaos, rather than permitting it to enjoy the benefits of state-less, spontaneous order.
By late 2007, thanks to the attention of Washington and its allies, Somalia's fledgling market economy was gone, and the country was once again on the brink of famine This is typical of the misery inflicted on much of the world by the Regime that rules us from Washington, and it is a small but potent illustration of why that Regime must die.
I seldom agree with ScentOfViolets, but he or she has a point in an earlier post about whether to leave things to the discretion of officials or whether to regulate them closely and specifically.
There is a third option, which is to do nothing at all, and that is often the correct choice. But suppose there really is a problem -- that somebody, somewhere is doing something that inflicts harm on others. Suppose this is recognized broadly, and that a large portion of society wants to hire the government to do something about it. What are the options?
1) Hash all the details out in court -- Good for unique cases, but not terribly efficient for problems that will come up many, many times. May result in incompatible rules in different places. Also can be hard to handle specialized technical information in a generalist court system.
2) Have the legislature tackle it directly -- Just fine constitutionally, if it is something the government is allowed to do at all, but have you seen how those guys work? We'd be waiting for decades for anything of even moderate complexity, or else they'd ram through monstrous programs without giving anyone time to read them. Hardly an improvement. Also, how many members of Congress are qualified to evaluate the safety of pharmaceuticals or nuclear power plants at the level of detail required?*
3) Have the legislature deligate authority to an agency with the proper technical expertise, and then let that agency do whatever it wants. We've seen the results of that, and it's bad. There has to be some form of democratic accountablity, and some level of review, or else the agency will run wild.
4) A hybrid -- what we've got. The legislature delegates authority to an agency, which is then supposed to assemble the right technical staff to get the job done. But it isn't allowed to do any old thing it wants. It has to put its rules down on paper, so that they are subject to challenge in court if they are stupid or if the agency exceeds its authority. The courts don't get bogged down every dispute, though, which is good. There's a reason we don't have the regular court system conduct a full jury trial for every dispute over a Social Security disability claim.
Everybody hates the hybrid. We all have our pet issues that we think would be better addressed by giving all the authority to some outfit that we believe would represent our interests. But our worst enemies think the same thing, and we certainly don't want those people getting their way.
The hybrid is a compromise, and I think it's better (and harder for someone with a nefarious scheme to run away with) than any of the pure models. It can be messy, but checks and balances always are.
Not to say I don't have specific regulations that I would like to see changed. But wanting to change the details of the rules is not the same as wanting to switch to a whole different structure.
* Congress could hire staff to do the review, of course, but eventually they'd just end up recreating agencies. Agencies with hundreds of bosses, not just one (the President). If you think we have chaos now...
"But suppose there really is a problem -- that somebody, somewhere is doing something that inflicts harm on others. "
That someone is a government employee. Fire him. Problem solved.
@SOV
Hey, If Bearded Spock and others want to hold out Somalia as a example of libertarian success, let them. As Napoleon says, "when an enemy is trying to defeat themselves, don't interrupt them":-).
I guess all that piracy the Somalis engage in are an example of that libertarian spirit at work. " Laws, we don't need no steenking laws".
“Once upon a time a famous pirate prisoner was brought in front of Alexander the Great. Alexander asked him:’Why do you infest the seas with so much audacity and freedom?’. The pirate answered:’ For the same reason because you infest the earth; but becasue i do it with a little ship, I’m called pirate; because you do it with a big fleet you’re called emperor’”.
De Civitate Dei, Augustine of Hippo
Somali pirates cause considerably less harm than the U.S. Navy. I know that because I was a Navy sailor myself.
"Hey, If Bearded Spock and others want to hold out Somalia as a example of libertarian success, let them."
Somalia is not an example of libertarian success. It is an example of State failure.
re: Somalia
I doubt that Somalia under the warlords (once territories stabilized) was a paradise. I can readily believe that it was an improvement over the earlier kleptocratic central government. Look at Zimbabwe. A central government can most definitely be toxic.
M.C.:
Unfortunately, we still need an effective way to prune the bureacracy. Just a couple of examples:
Do you prepare your own taxes? Do you pay someone else to prepare them? How much do you spend on tax preparation?
After the tax simplification act of 1986 NPR (You trust NPR, don't you?) gave the same financial information to ten different tax preparers. They got ten different answers.
Do you pay everything you are supposed to? Are you sure you haven't overpaid? Are you sure that you wouldn't pay less if you had a more agressive accountant?
The IRS has a relatively simple job. The EPA and the "Office for Human Research Protections" don't weigh in on everything they do. Did you know that a straightforward quality improvement in medical care, the checklist, was nixed because the patients involved had not given "informed consent"?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/30gawande.html
I understand this has since been reversed, but that it happened at all is outrageous.
Of course I do my own taxes. It took me under an hour this year, state and federal. This is one of the few things I gained in the now-defunct real estate boom. I couldn't afford an overpriced house, so I don't have mortgage interest and therefore don't itemize. (I have itemized deductions in the past, though. It's not that hard if you keep decent files.)
Seriously. Most people in this country do not have complicated taxes and do not hire accountants.
I wouldn't mind buying a house someday, though, and a little more tax hassle would be a small price to pay. (The other prices involved are still too high, though.)
Yes, bureaucracy needs checks on it. I don't believe any large organization can be entirely self-policing, which is why we have regulatory agencies in the first place. You always need some outside reviewer or auditor who is not in the same chain of command as the boss. This applies whether you are talking about government agencies or private businesses.
Funny how people who are ideologically driven always seem to focus on the failings of one side or the other on this issue. I think it is a universal problem based on human nature, which may be why I don't find myself in either of the main ideological camps.
BobW -
Oh, and I hate NPR. But don't infer that I therefore listen to right-wing talk radio. Since I got my iPod, there has been no need to do either.
How about some simple rules, like a rule against a tax deduction for things that have little economic value compared to tax value? Short and sweet, although some enforcement issues.
Or even simpler, how about Google's "Don't be evil"? we can let courts decide this on a case by case basis.
Fewer pages, right?
As far as taxes are concerned, my current simple tax situation convinces me that a simplified structure would work for everyone. I'm not a flat taxer, and the people who say they are really aren't to the extent they acknowledge the need to exempt a certain amount of income. If you can have a 0% bracket and an X% bracket, I'm not sure why you can't have a Y% bracket and a Z% bracket too.
But I would ditch almost all special-purpose deductions. Including mortgage interest, everything related to child care and education, and pretty much anything else related to lifestyle choice and phase of life. Make the rates low and that initial 0% bracket quite large, and then quit using the tax code to buy special favors for different constituent groups.
Most people spend most of their prime earning years benefiting from one special-purpose deduction or other. They're raising their kids and paying for their houses, so they get those deductions. Why not just assume all that in the overall rate structure and simplify the paperwork? Taxation should be about funding the government, not manipulating people's lifestyles through financial incentives. Controlling for household size, everyone who earns the same should pay the same.