"Twitter is America’s version of Pravda, but with propaganda provided from the bottom up."
This continues to be a blind spot for you and a lot of others that I respect. The propaganda isn't coming from the bottom up- it only looks that way because it serves the purposes of those in power for it to do so.
Social media is by far the most valuable form of influence because not only does it have wide reach but it looks organic and credible. Nothing is more psychologically persuasive than an opinion shared by a large number of your like-minded peers.
In the beginning botting was mostly limited to online review systems because it is easy and has immediate financial payoff. But today, ontrol on Reddit and Twitter is so valuable that you can support teams of people working with AI to generate tens of thousands of accounts that sound semi-intelligble enough to look human.
You can apply a lot of influence on the algorithms with early voting pressure and if you are working deliberately you can start the snowball very easily.
People conflate governance with Government and so it goes, if you don’t have the latter you cannot have the former… therefore chaos. Those rooting for Government are those in it or its cronies. But our early societies emerged under governance (Common Law, moral code, custom, tradition etiquette, interdependence through voluntary exchange) with no centralised Government.
As for the Founding Fathers: they were certainly well informed and thoughtful, but were confounded by their conceit thinking they could write it all down in an elegant document as proof against those who in future would seek power and control and abuse it. They needed only have looked to Magna Carta which King John started to ignore before the ink was dry as did subsequent Plantagenet Kings of England requiring revised charters to be written and signed at the insistance of the Barons of the day. Its wholesale disregard finally resulted in dynastic war. Today not a scrap of it remains in the British Constitution.
Universal suffrage inevitably meant those seeking election/re-election would treat tax revenues as a slush fund to bribe voters; voters soon realised this and elections have become auctions where they sell their votes to the highest bidder. Tax revenues are mostly used for bribery than for delivering public goods efficiently - not that Government is capable of efficiency anyway.
We do need to move provision of public goods into the competitive private sector paid for directly by their consumers with the concomitant reduction in taxation. “The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism” by David Friedman explores this transition and is a thought-provoking read.
Oh man... I'm know you're going to feel as if I'm oversimplifying and not steel-manning your argument, but it very much seems to boil down to a paleo-conservative authoritarianism rather than a libertarian argument. It seems to say
1) People are fundamentally irrational
2) are the authors of their own oppression
3) so democracy is bad and
4) we should further elevate elites, limit their accountability to only some other elites, limit the right to vote, and hope this works.
Arnold, I am not trying to straw-man you, but this argument is so far out of basic explication that it has lost its way.
I see a trend in which every restriction on government, and consequently every right of the individual, is falling away. How to you propose to arrest that trend?
That's skin in the game for rulemaking. Let me explain.
Most regulations these days are accompanied by cost benefit analyses which employs a good number of economists with secure middle class lifestyles whose full time jobs it is to put their PhD stamp of approval on well-crafted arrangements of arithmetic and citations that distill down into the most incredibly brazen lies you've ever seen.
A lot of people are fans of CBA, after all, how else can we make rational decisions than by trying to estimate the various consequences of those decisions? But that's not how it works.
How it works is that people in power indeed do a CBA - The Real CBA - but it's a specific one to the costs and benefits to their own interests. Then they make a decision, and then they ask for a *cover story* that frames this decision as if it was being made in the 'public interest', The Fake CBA, that takes a much broader range of costs and benefits into consideration.
The big trouble with this is that the Fake CBA has to pretend to rely on good empirical epistemology: real facts and true models and valid math and so forth. But obviously that will not line up with the Real CBA. No, I don't mean, "not often", I mean, "never", which is just an inescapable mathematical consequences of the Real and Fake costs and benefits not measuring the same things. So, something's got to give. And, since power has already decided, the thing that is going to give is the 'facts' and the accuracy of the 'models'. That's how you got deep epistemic corruption baked into the standard operation of the current system.
As a consequence of such corruption, no surprise, the Fake CBAs always justify literally everything that is proposed to be done.
Sometimes you get good post facto audits of some CBA years later from an IG or GAO reporting, surprise again, "Turns out the costs were a lot higher, and the benefits a lot lower."
But then nothing happens.
No government economist loses his job or even gets demoted, on the contrary, promoted. He is supposed to put his stamp on lies, and if he does it proficiently, great! The regulations don't change, either.
Well, I know I'm kind of nuts and I'm going out on a limb here with this idea, but - get this - things should happen. Automatically.
Every regulation should place a self-executing bet for its continuance and very survival on the accuracy of the claimed estimates for costs and benefits. Costs and benefits should be measurable according to pre-registered formulas using publicly accessible and observable quantities preferably deriving from market processes. Fully transparent: no black boxes, no proprietary info protections, etc. You could just have a website keep track of whether the net value if negative or positive in real time. If the true costs of the regulation exceed the true benefits at evaluation time then it dies and any proscribed or prohibited activity is legalized. Also, whoever wrote the original CBA gets fired. Sorry dude, the wages of sin and all that.
Well, I think it would be a good idea, but then again, Yancey's got a point. My experience is that making proposals gets one stuck in an Overton Window Trap.
If you propose something feasible you will be accused of it being laughably insufficient because what makes something acceptable enough to get passed is that one way or another it wouldn't change much, either too little or too easily circumvented.
On the other hand, if you propose something that would achieve real change, because this would necessarily disturb the interests of various powerful incumbents, it could never get done, and you will be accused of being naive or even kind of crazy. This is part of how we get entrenched in what Yudkowsky would call "Inadequate Equilibria".
The OWT is so true. We can imagine all of sorts of good, innovative ideas for redistributing and checking power, but the real obstacle is wresting it from those in whom it currently resides.
Outside of burn it all down and our more utopian solutions, the practical alternatives seem to be Coasian bargaining. Let's concede that Dominant Interests A->N are feeding at the trough of government. Always have been and always will be. But since all n of them are greedy a Pareto optimal improvement that makes the trough bigger should be feasible by
1. Looking for splits to divide dominant interests.
2. Straightforward buying people out of their interests.
3. Bargains between dominant interests.
In concrete terms, suppose I wanted to eliminate 90% of the CDC. I offer a bill eliminating 90% of their programs, regulations and employees. How much payout would be required to induce the average CDC bureaucrat to advocate for the elimination of their own agency?
My quick google indicates the CDC's budget is approximately $15.4B and it employs around 15,000 employees and contractors. So ~ $1M/worker.
I'd consider it money well spent to give each of these workers a two year (maybe more) "severance package" of $1M/year to go away (and as condition of payment, no longer hold any civil service status or be eligible to work in most government or contracted positions in the future). Most of these people would jump at $2M I think, but I'd think. But I'd be willing to vary the amount. Hell give them whatever pension was coming to them as well. Would this work? Who else would have to be bought off? Everyone has a price.
Bottom line up front is that you don't want to pay people to go out of power. You want to reward people in power for kicking most of those other people out. In a private company nobody likes cuts. However, if the CEO gets paid more when those cuts mean more profit, he's sufficiently motivated to get it done. Give the President, every member of Congress, and every judge a massive bonus every year that spending stays below, say, 15% of GDP. And, watch, it will.
But anyway, lots of reasons a buyout like that wouldn't work even if it were feasible.
For one thing, only a narrow elite have even a little slice of 'power', and 99% of employees are just following orders. Pointless to get rid of them.
Especially since, at the ground level, numbers are determined by the market and function (eg, TSA screeners) and even in the paperwork world, there is so much untapped potential productivity that a few minor improvements would squeeze the same output out of a fraction of the employees. Even among the narrow elite, it's not their numbers that determines their reach or the scope of their ambitions.
For another, it's not actually possible to count programs or regulations. This is the real story behind Executive Order 13771, so don't believe the hype, and anyway, Biden repealed it on day 1. (Also, the lines between 'major', 'minor', 'significant', and 'interpretive' - which sometimes doesn't even get counted - aren't very clear either, because it's not philosophically possible to make them clear.)
Go read the Federal Register, but I warn you, keep a case of Psycho-Crack energy drinks on hand if you intend to stay awake past five pages, and it can be hundreds of pages, every day. Most published 'Rules' actually contains lots of rules, and those sub-rules sometimes call for schemes or arrangements which themselves constitute lots of micro-rules, or micro-rules for the making of nano-rules, for example, a new binding ruling for some obscure cul-de-sac in the fractal map of the tariff schedule.
Point is you can eliminate ten programs and then you reinvent them with 'a' program with ten sub-programs, see?
A gloomy thought is that the reach of government is determined, and thus in the long term only limited by, technological constraints, not legal ones. None of this could work at all without "IT" in the abstract. And the IT just keeps getting better and better.
Another problem is that, ok, you buy some people out. But then new people come along, see that a once-filled niche opportunity is now unexploited, and will advocate for its reincarnation the same way it was successfully argued for when it was initiated. It's much easier to add people and programs than to cut them once established, so you are fighting such a steeply uphill battle that this kind of approach is doomed.
I've thought about most of these objections before and I'm not so sure they'd be a problem in practice.
1. It wouldn't be necessary to count or delineate specific regulations. The Federal Register expands continuously, but each rule is tied to a particular program administered by a particular agency and authorized by a specific statute. The "CDC Reduction Act of 2022" wouldn't just be "defunding" the CDC but leaving regulations in place. It'd be a general revocation of (almost) all statutory authority for the CDC to operate and all administrative rules created by the CDC under that authority. By removing the employees as well, there's much reduced capability and much reduced authority for making new rules. They will of course regrow, but under the best of circumstances government can't hire people as fast as they can fire them, and we've removed both 1) statutory authority and 2) a significant chunk of "trained" workers) from the equation.
2. I don't think it's the case that 1% of employees can write the rules and 99% do nothing. They may do nothing that should be done, but a big problem in the departments I've worked with is the sysiphean management requirements that keep everyone buried in make-work. To an extent that we get rid of useless departments that remaining ones have to consult with, these requirements ease a bit. But on remaining, core programs, little to nothing would change. They'd continue to operate as they had, so I don't think the remaining bureaucrats would be willing to just suddenly work harder for the pleasure of it.
3. In any case, the point is to get a big enough inducement to the rank-and-file bureaucracy to get them to go away for good. So we want to include all of them. And... this very clearly isn't a private sector situation, so I don't think I worry too much that the private sector doesn't do it that way. The single biggest thing is that with government there's a substantial asymmetry in hiring/firing that doesn't exist in the private sector. Private sector can fire as they please.
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Bonus point: Why does the marginal member of Congress go for this? Because Congress itself has become little more than a rubber stamp for the administrative state. Do they make money off of this arrangement? Yeah, sure. But they could make more by having more control.
Of course that's the million dollar question. I've spouted off on my own idea before (of, essentially, devolving much of the budgetary process to individual voting to allocate funds to the provision of government services by competing entities), but I would need space to write it out than is appropriate here. So, let me answer by starting with a couple of basic propositions.
1. I agree that the power of the state is growing and it brings with it the reduction of individual rights. This is the problem.
2. The answer to this problem cannot be found in a reduction in individual rights. This is destroying the village in order to save it. If we are to strengthen and expand the rights of the individual, by necessity we must argue that the individual is rational, capable, and deserving of those rights.
3. I believe my approach to devolve and democratize the budgeting process is the correct one because because concentration of financial power is (outside of military power, to which it is analogous) the basic mechanism that allows the government to influence control over individuals and explains the growth of different power centers in government, the erosion of others, and thus, the weakening of traditional constitutional checks and balances. In brief, the growth and power of the administrative state resides with its increasing power of the purse. Concentration of the financial power is the problem and dispersion of this power is the solution to check the growth of government and the administrative state in particular.
4. In practice, I'd look to Switzerland as a general starting point, but my concept for budgetary voting is admittedly, very novel, and would have to be ramped up over a course of years.
No, people are rational when making all sorts of other decisions that are outside their own personal spheres. Why do you think voting is different?
What actually makes people rational is having a sense of control over outcomes. In the absence of such control, it's rational to "perform" and express underlying preferences.
This is a negative feedback loop. As your power is taken away, your vote no longer matters. As your vote no longer matters, it becomes more performative. As it becomes more performative, it becomes an excuse to declare you irrational and take away more power.
People are rational when they have something to be rational about. The solution here is to build and reinforce mechanisms of individual power and control Give people a bigger stake, more control. What makes it rational to approach a problem rationally is having some control over the outcome.
I'm curious what you think about the parameters of their proposal-- obviously self interested as an SF resident in whether this could actually improve our terrible municipal governance, but also in whether it could serve as a pilot/proof-of-concept for your Chief Auditor idea.
“We need elites that are anti-elitist, inclined to respect the judgment of private individuals.” An elite that is modest about itself, that takes a positive view of non-elite individuals: is it any wonder we do not have that?
We need a failure mechanism for government monopoly institutions. It is the threat of bankruptcy that makes capitalism work. All (public, private and non-profit) institutions evolve towards self-serving bureaucracies where little internal fiefdoms grow at the expense of the institutional purpose or goals.
A good example is IBM, that owned the world of my generation, evolved into a non-responsive institution which finally failed (black ties and white shirts weren't forever) as its production cycle became too long. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has also totally failed and couldn't even keep basic accounting records accurately but the institution remains with a 2.7 billion/yr budget for 1.6 million people. After 100's of years and billions spent, the problems persist.
"Unfortunately, the consequence of giving more people the right to vote has been to create a constituency for erasing the boundaries and knocking down the guardrails that the Constitution tries to construct."
Is that the problem? Elite decisionmakers are too beholden to popular sentiment? FDA refused to do HCT, fractional dosing, early massive screening tests becasue they were not popular?
Regarding checks and turnover... it would be lovely if there was more competition in government. Here's a half-baked idea that almost certainly wouldn't work: split every government agency into three identical, competing organizations, each with a third the budget of the old monolithic agency.
Give citizens the choice of which one they use (e.g. imagine getting to choose which version of the department of motor vehicles gets to issue you license plates).
After some number of years (five? ten?) fire everybody in the worst-performing agency (as determined by... the chief auditor? voters? customer satisfaction survey? politicians?). And split the second-worst into two. Then let them compete for another five or ten years.
This would work best for public-facing bureaucracies. I dunno if it would work for organizations like the CDC or FDA where there isn't as clear a "customer" for them to try to satisfy.
I wonder if one can draw a parallel between the founders of the country and those who currently obtain leadership positions with the founders of your 20th or 21st century tech start-up versus those who join the party after the company I established / etc.
There are likely going to be fundamental differences between the types of people who start a new enterprise and those who rise through the ranks of an existing Goliath. And those who rise in an existing structure will probably naturally be less skeptical of power.
I think its a pretty large stretch to connect where we're at with "giving too many people the right to vote." Is there any evidence that voting restrictions lead to improved leadership of nations? That seems like a fairly significant statement to make. Obviously anecdotal but many of the dumbest voters I'm aware of (think your typical white progressive liberal) never really lacked the ability to vote in the past.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the argument Arnold makes. I like his chief auditor concept, but I doubt it carries as much efficacy as he believes.
I continue to think that we should change how independent agencies work: give the enforcement and supervision activities to a regular executive branch department, give the adjudicators activities back to the judiciary, and then strengthen the ability of the now-purely legislative commissions to legislate within their sphere and subject to control.
To me, that control looks something like this:
- Each house appoints a majority and minority representative, and the president appoints one, without Senate oversight. Members get appointed at the beginning of every Congress and their terms expire when the next Congress convenes.
- Regulations passed by only three votes come into force 180 days after the next Congress convenes (yes, that could be a delay of two years). This gives the minority party the chance to make the argument to the voters that the refs are bad, so vote for us so we can reverse them.
- Regulations passed by four votes come into effect as stated in the regulation, but only after at least 20 legislative days have passed (to limit the regulations passed when the Congress is adjourned).
- Either house can veto a regulation by majority vote before it takes effect.
-The president can veto a regulation in the same manner as any other law, in which case Congress can override the veto in the same manner as any other law.
- There would need to be some boundaries on what the commissions can do — they should not be able to create a tax, fee, public regulatory action, or private right of action; they should not have subpoena power over anyone but employees of governments and perhaps government contractors (as such in each case).
- They should have regular staff.
This feels to me like it would produce commissions that work within their boxes to legislate consistently with the will of the majority, but in a way that is relatively easy to roll back in the case of a very temporary majority. Moreover, it would give any temporary majorities a strong incentive to find a compromise to get them the fourth vote to accelerate effective dates.
"Twitter is America’s version of Pravda, but with propaganda provided from the bottom up."
This continues to be a blind spot for you and a lot of others that I respect. The propaganda isn't coming from the bottom up- it only looks that way because it serves the purposes of those in power for it to do so.
This is true, and underappreciated I think.
Social media is by far the most valuable form of influence because not only does it have wide reach but it looks organic and credible. Nothing is more psychologically persuasive than an opinion shared by a large number of your like-minded peers.
In the beginning botting was mostly limited to online review systems because it is easy and has immediate financial payoff. But today, ontrol on Reddit and Twitter is so valuable that you can support teams of people working with AI to generate tens of thousands of accounts that sound semi-intelligble enough to look human.
You can apply a lot of influence on the algorithms with early voting pressure and if you are working deliberately you can start the snowball very easily.
People conflate governance with Government and so it goes, if you don’t have the latter you cannot have the former… therefore chaos. Those rooting for Government are those in it or its cronies. But our early societies emerged under governance (Common Law, moral code, custom, tradition etiquette, interdependence through voluntary exchange) with no centralised Government.
As for the Founding Fathers: they were certainly well informed and thoughtful, but were confounded by their conceit thinking they could write it all down in an elegant document as proof against those who in future would seek power and control and abuse it. They needed only have looked to Magna Carta which King John started to ignore before the ink was dry as did subsequent Plantagenet Kings of England requiring revised charters to be written and signed at the insistance of the Barons of the day. Its wholesale disregard finally resulted in dynastic war. Today not a scrap of it remains in the British Constitution.
Universal suffrage inevitably meant those seeking election/re-election would treat tax revenues as a slush fund to bribe voters; voters soon realised this and elections have become auctions where they sell their votes to the highest bidder. Tax revenues are mostly used for bribery than for delivering public goods efficiently - not that Government is capable of efficiency anyway.
We do need to move provision of public goods into the competitive private sector paid for directly by their consumers with the concomitant reduction in taxation. “The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to Radical Capitalism” by David Friedman explores this transition and is a thought-provoking read.
Oh man... I'm know you're going to feel as if I'm oversimplifying and not steel-manning your argument, but it very much seems to boil down to a paleo-conservative authoritarianism rather than a libertarian argument. It seems to say
1) People are fundamentally irrational
2) are the authors of their own oppression
3) so democracy is bad and
4) we should further elevate elites, limit their accountability to only some other elites, limit the right to vote, and hope this works.
Arnold, I am not trying to straw-man you, but this argument is so far out of basic explication that it has lost its way.
I see a trend in which every restriction on government, and consequently every right of the individual, is falling away. How to you propose to arrest that trend?
One of my proposals is "regulating in bets".
That's skin in the game for rulemaking. Let me explain.
Most regulations these days are accompanied by cost benefit analyses which employs a good number of economists with secure middle class lifestyles whose full time jobs it is to put their PhD stamp of approval on well-crafted arrangements of arithmetic and citations that distill down into the most incredibly brazen lies you've ever seen.
A lot of people are fans of CBA, after all, how else can we make rational decisions than by trying to estimate the various consequences of those decisions? But that's not how it works.
How it works is that people in power indeed do a CBA - The Real CBA - but it's a specific one to the costs and benefits to their own interests. Then they make a decision, and then they ask for a *cover story* that frames this decision as if it was being made in the 'public interest', The Fake CBA, that takes a much broader range of costs and benefits into consideration.
The big trouble with this is that the Fake CBA has to pretend to rely on good empirical epistemology: real facts and true models and valid math and so forth. But obviously that will not line up with the Real CBA. No, I don't mean, "not often", I mean, "never", which is just an inescapable mathematical consequences of the Real and Fake costs and benefits not measuring the same things. So, something's got to give. And, since power has already decided, the thing that is going to give is the 'facts' and the accuracy of the 'models'. That's how you got deep epistemic corruption baked into the standard operation of the current system.
As a consequence of such corruption, no surprise, the Fake CBAs always justify literally everything that is proposed to be done.
Sometimes you get good post facto audits of some CBA years later from an IG or GAO reporting, surprise again, "Turns out the costs were a lot higher, and the benefits a lot lower."
But then nothing happens.
No government economist loses his job or even gets demoted, on the contrary, promoted. He is supposed to put his stamp on lies, and if he does it proficiently, great! The regulations don't change, either.
Well, I know I'm kind of nuts and I'm going out on a limb here with this idea, but - get this - things should happen. Automatically.
Every regulation should place a self-executing bet for its continuance and very survival on the accuracy of the claimed estimates for costs and benefits. Costs and benefits should be measurable according to pre-registered formulas using publicly accessible and observable quantities preferably deriving from market processes. Fully transparent: no black boxes, no proprietary info protections, etc. You could just have a website keep track of whether the net value if negative or positive in real time. If the true costs of the regulation exceed the true benefits at evaluation time then it dies and any proscribed or prohibited activity is legalized. Also, whoever wrote the original CBA gets fired. Sorry dude, the wages of sin and all that.
Well, I think it would be a good idea, but then again, Yancey's got a point. My experience is that making proposals gets one stuck in an Overton Window Trap.
If you propose something feasible you will be accused of it being laughably insufficient because what makes something acceptable enough to get passed is that one way or another it wouldn't change much, either too little or too easily circumvented.
On the other hand, if you propose something that would achieve real change, because this would necessarily disturb the interests of various powerful incumbents, it could never get done, and you will be accused of being naive or even kind of crazy. This is part of how we get entrenched in what Yudkowsky would call "Inadequate Equilibria".
The OWT is so true. We can imagine all of sorts of good, innovative ideas for redistributing and checking power, but the real obstacle is wresting it from those in whom it currently resides.
Outside of burn it all down and our more utopian solutions, the practical alternatives seem to be Coasian bargaining. Let's concede that Dominant Interests A->N are feeding at the trough of government. Always have been and always will be. But since all n of them are greedy a Pareto optimal improvement that makes the trough bigger should be feasible by
1. Looking for splits to divide dominant interests.
2. Straightforward buying people out of their interests.
3. Bargains between dominant interests.
In concrete terms, suppose I wanted to eliminate 90% of the CDC. I offer a bill eliminating 90% of their programs, regulations and employees. How much payout would be required to induce the average CDC bureaucrat to advocate for the elimination of their own agency?
My quick google indicates the CDC's budget is approximately $15.4B and it employs around 15,000 employees and contractors. So ~ $1M/worker.
I'd consider it money well spent to give each of these workers a two year (maybe more) "severance package" of $1M/year to go away (and as condition of payment, no longer hold any civil service status or be eligible to work in most government or contracted positions in the future). Most of these people would jump at $2M I think, but I'd think. But I'd be willing to vary the amount. Hell give them whatever pension was coming to them as well. Would this work? Who else would have to be bought off? Everyone has a price.
Bottom line up front is that you don't want to pay people to go out of power. You want to reward people in power for kicking most of those other people out. In a private company nobody likes cuts. However, if the CEO gets paid more when those cuts mean more profit, he's sufficiently motivated to get it done. Give the President, every member of Congress, and every judge a massive bonus every year that spending stays below, say, 15% of GDP. And, watch, it will.
But anyway, lots of reasons a buyout like that wouldn't work even if it were feasible.
For one thing, only a narrow elite have even a little slice of 'power', and 99% of employees are just following orders. Pointless to get rid of them.
Especially since, at the ground level, numbers are determined by the market and function (eg, TSA screeners) and even in the paperwork world, there is so much untapped potential productivity that a few minor improvements would squeeze the same output out of a fraction of the employees. Even among the narrow elite, it's not their numbers that determines their reach or the scope of their ambitions.
For another, it's not actually possible to count programs or regulations. This is the real story behind Executive Order 13771, so don't believe the hype, and anyway, Biden repealed it on day 1. (Also, the lines between 'major', 'minor', 'significant', and 'interpretive' - which sometimes doesn't even get counted - aren't very clear either, because it's not philosophically possible to make them clear.)
Go read the Federal Register, but I warn you, keep a case of Psycho-Crack energy drinks on hand if you intend to stay awake past five pages, and it can be hundreds of pages, every day. Most published 'Rules' actually contains lots of rules, and those sub-rules sometimes call for schemes or arrangements which themselves constitute lots of micro-rules, or micro-rules for the making of nano-rules, for example, a new binding ruling for some obscure cul-de-sac in the fractal map of the tariff schedule.
Point is you can eliminate ten programs and then you reinvent them with 'a' program with ten sub-programs, see?
A gloomy thought is that the reach of government is determined, and thus in the long term only limited by, technological constraints, not legal ones. None of this could work at all without "IT" in the abstract. And the IT just keeps getting better and better.
Another problem is that, ok, you buy some people out. But then new people come along, see that a once-filled niche opportunity is now unexploited, and will advocate for its reincarnation the same way it was successfully argued for when it was initiated. It's much easier to add people and programs than to cut them once established, so you are fighting such a steeply uphill battle that this kind of approach is doomed.
I've thought about most of these objections before and I'm not so sure they'd be a problem in practice.
1. It wouldn't be necessary to count or delineate specific regulations. The Federal Register expands continuously, but each rule is tied to a particular program administered by a particular agency and authorized by a specific statute. The "CDC Reduction Act of 2022" wouldn't just be "defunding" the CDC but leaving regulations in place. It'd be a general revocation of (almost) all statutory authority for the CDC to operate and all administrative rules created by the CDC under that authority. By removing the employees as well, there's much reduced capability and much reduced authority for making new rules. They will of course regrow, but under the best of circumstances government can't hire people as fast as they can fire them, and we've removed both 1) statutory authority and 2) a significant chunk of "trained" workers) from the equation.
2. I don't think it's the case that 1% of employees can write the rules and 99% do nothing. They may do nothing that should be done, but a big problem in the departments I've worked with is the sysiphean management requirements that keep everyone buried in make-work. To an extent that we get rid of useless departments that remaining ones have to consult with, these requirements ease a bit. But on remaining, core programs, little to nothing would change. They'd continue to operate as they had, so I don't think the remaining bureaucrats would be willing to just suddenly work harder for the pleasure of it.
3. In any case, the point is to get a big enough inducement to the rank-and-file bureaucracy to get them to go away for good. So we want to include all of them. And... this very clearly isn't a private sector situation, so I don't think I worry too much that the private sector doesn't do it that way. The single biggest thing is that with government there's a substantial asymmetry in hiring/firing that doesn't exist in the private sector. Private sector can fire as they please.
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Bonus point: Why does the marginal member of Congress go for this? Because Congress itself has become little more than a rubber stamp for the administrative state. Do they make money off of this arrangement? Yeah, sure. But they could make more by having more control.
Of course that's the million dollar question. I've spouted off on my own idea before (of, essentially, devolving much of the budgetary process to individual voting to allocate funds to the provision of government services by competing entities), but I would need space to write it out than is appropriate here. So, let me answer by starting with a couple of basic propositions.
1. I agree that the power of the state is growing and it brings with it the reduction of individual rights. This is the problem.
2. The answer to this problem cannot be found in a reduction in individual rights. This is destroying the village in order to save it. If we are to strengthen and expand the rights of the individual, by necessity we must argue that the individual is rational, capable, and deserving of those rights.
3. I believe my approach to devolve and democratize the budgeting process is the correct one because because concentration of financial power is (outside of military power, to which it is analogous) the basic mechanism that allows the government to influence control over individuals and explains the growth of different power centers in government, the erosion of others, and thus, the weakening of traditional constitutional checks and balances. In brief, the growth and power of the administrative state resides with its increasing power of the purse. Concentration of the financial power is the problem and dispersion of this power is the solution to check the growth of government and the administrative state in particular.
4. In practice, I'd look to Switzerland as a general starting point, but my concept for budgetary voting is admittedly, very novel, and would have to be ramped up over a course of years.
I agree that people are rational when making decisions in their own personal sphere. But not as voters.
No, people are rational when making all sorts of other decisions that are outside their own personal spheres. Why do you think voting is different?
What actually makes people rational is having a sense of control over outcomes. In the absence of such control, it's rational to "perform" and express underlying preferences.
This is a negative feedback loop. As your power is taken away, your vote no longer matters. As your vote no longer matters, it becomes more performative. As it becomes more performative, it becomes an excuse to declare you irrational and take away more power.
People are rational when they have something to be rational about. The solution here is to build and reinforce mechanisms of individual power and control Give people a bigger stake, more control. What makes it rational to approach a problem rationally is having some control over the outcome.
I would say there is no way to arrest that trend other than burning it all to the ground and starting over from scratch.
And do note that *that* would be very unlikely to result in improvement.
(apologies for commenting on a "stale" post, it's the most recent relevant one I could find)
Here in San Francisco, a newish moderate organization is calling for a unified and more independent city auditing agency:
https://www.sfgate.com/politics-op-eds/article/how-to-fix-sf-government-17430726.php
I'm curious what you think about the parameters of their proposal-- obviously self interested as an SF resident in whether this could actually improve our terrible municipal governance, but also in whether it could serve as a pilot/proof-of-concept for your Chief Auditor idea.
“We need elites that are anti-elitist, inclined to respect the judgment of private individuals.” An elite that is modest about itself, that takes a positive view of non-elite individuals: is it any wonder we do not have that?
We need a failure mechanism for government monopoly institutions. It is the threat of bankruptcy that makes capitalism work. All (public, private and non-profit) institutions evolve towards self-serving bureaucracies where little internal fiefdoms grow at the expense of the institutional purpose or goals.
A good example is IBM, that owned the world of my generation, evolved into a non-responsive institution which finally failed (black ties and white shirts weren't forever) as its production cycle became too long. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has also totally failed and couldn't even keep basic accounting records accurately but the institution remains with a 2.7 billion/yr budget for 1.6 million people. After 100's of years and billions spent, the problems persist.
"Unfortunately, the consequence of giving more people the right to vote has been to create a constituency for erasing the boundaries and knocking down the guardrails that the Constitution tries to construct."
Is that the problem? Elite decisionmakers are too beholden to popular sentiment? FDA refused to do HCT, fractional dosing, early massive screening tests becasue they were not popular?
Your examples don't have anything to do with Constitutional boundaries and guardrails.
Regarding checks and turnover... it would be lovely if there was more competition in government. Here's a half-baked idea that almost certainly wouldn't work: split every government agency into three identical, competing organizations, each with a third the budget of the old monolithic agency.
Give citizens the choice of which one they use (e.g. imagine getting to choose which version of the department of motor vehicles gets to issue you license plates).
After some number of years (five? ten?) fire everybody in the worst-performing agency (as determined by... the chief auditor? voters? customer satisfaction survey? politicians?). And split the second-worst into two. Then let them compete for another five or ten years.
This would work best for public-facing bureaucracies. I dunno if it would work for organizations like the CDC or FDA where there isn't as clear a "customer" for them to try to satisfy.
I wonder if one can draw a parallel between the founders of the country and those who currently obtain leadership positions with the founders of your 20th or 21st century tech start-up versus those who join the party after the company I established / etc.
There are likely going to be fundamental differences between the types of people who start a new enterprise and those who rise through the ranks of an existing Goliath. And those who rise in an existing structure will probably naturally be less skeptical of power.
I think its a pretty large stretch to connect where we're at with "giving too many people the right to vote." Is there any evidence that voting restrictions lead to improved leadership of nations? That seems like a fairly significant statement to make. Obviously anecdotal but many of the dumbest voters I'm aware of (think your typical white progressive liberal) never really lacked the ability to vote in the past.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the argument Arnold makes. I like his chief auditor concept, but I doubt it carries as much efficacy as he believes.
I continue to think that we should change how independent agencies work: give the enforcement and supervision activities to a regular executive branch department, give the adjudicators activities back to the judiciary, and then strengthen the ability of the now-purely legislative commissions to legislate within their sphere and subject to control.
To me, that control looks something like this:
- Each house appoints a majority and minority representative, and the president appoints one, without Senate oversight. Members get appointed at the beginning of every Congress and their terms expire when the next Congress convenes.
- Regulations passed by only three votes come into force 180 days after the next Congress convenes (yes, that could be a delay of two years). This gives the minority party the chance to make the argument to the voters that the refs are bad, so vote for us so we can reverse them.
- Regulations passed by four votes come into effect as stated in the regulation, but only after at least 20 legislative days have passed (to limit the regulations passed when the Congress is adjourned).
- Either house can veto a regulation by majority vote before it takes effect.
-The president can veto a regulation in the same manner as any other law, in which case Congress can override the veto in the same manner as any other law.
- There would need to be some boundaries on what the commissions can do — they should not be able to create a tax, fee, public regulatory action, or private right of action; they should not have subpoena power over anyone but employees of governments and perhaps government contractors (as such in each case).
- They should have regular staff.
This feels to me like it would produce commissions that work within their boxes to legislate consistently with the will of the majority, but in a way that is relatively easy to roll back in the case of a very temporary majority. Moreover, it would give any temporary majorities a strong incentive to find a compromise to get them the fourth vote to accelerate effective dates.