There is no will to fight back. Because fighting back would, by definition, make you a populist.
Fear of populism is the ultimate FOOLery. Literally. On the axis we're talking about, there's a continuum of government power vs. individual autonomy. Any move in the direction of individual freedom is by definition a populist appeal.
Philip Hamburger is a national treasure, but I'm not sure what the COO/CA model would do for the problem he's getting at in Purchasing Submission. The example of the drinking age wasn't even an "unelected unaccountable bureaucrats in the administrative state" issue, though, if it had been, a COO could make things even worse.
It was Congress itself in the NMDAA that said that states had to raise or age or go without 10% of their federal highway money, and in SD v Dole (1987) SCOTUS said that was fine, 7-2. More like 7.5-1.5, since one of the two dissents was O'Connor, who still agreed in principle that putting conditions on spending was fine, but who said the relationship wasn't close enough in this particular case.
The doctrine is a total mess because there is no good way in principle to precisely define this kind of soft 'coercion' that crosses the line only when SCOTUS judges feel like it does. A coherent policy would be "never any strings attached" but then state and local jurisdictions often wouldn't cooperate on even minor things like standardized data collection and reporting. That's probably a price worth paying.
Only about 74 million voted against unrestrained power - some 81 million, so it's claimed by the frequently dishonest but always power hungry Deep State, voted for unrestrained power.
Arnold doesn't like how Trump fights, and is unwilling to do anything so "icky". But let's be honest & real - fighting is lousy and is not how normal, nice people want to live. But without fighting, now, normal people lose.
Trump fights against unrestrained deep state power.
Very pleased to see Philip Hamburger mentioned. I had also read the review by Nelson Lund which motivated me to order several of Hamburger's books (quite affordable at Abebooks). Very much looking forward to reading his work which would appear to be insightful and substantive.
I completely concur with Handle's questioning of the potential for the COO/CA model. Its important to remember that the COO/CA model is written into many nations' constitutions, for example Mexico, with little result outcomes-wise. Political scientists seem to have done serious work in this area using the framework of "clientelism." That is, understanding political entities as middlemen specializing in building patterns of patronage, satisfying rent seekers, and otherwise transfering wealth around to produce stable groups of constituents who will reliably vote for their political patrons. Adding oversight bodies only smooths the process and provides a means for political patrons to ensure they receive the political support (or silence) that the transfers they provide (contracts, grants, legislative/regulatory protection, maintenance of barriers to entry, non-interference, actions against competing groups, etc. Clientelism is a very useful framework that explains a lot, particularly the rise of one-party munincipal government, and relationships like the teachers unions and the Democratic Party.
Adding another enforcer like the COO/CA will never address the problem of clientelism. Political scientists have found that the countries that have had the most success in addressing the clientelism problem are parliamentary democracies with proportional representation. These limit the payoffs to political patrons in two ways. First, members of parliaments serve as ministers of executive branch agencies so the camoflauge of bureaucratic middlemen is erased. Ministers bear more acccountability. Secondly, proportional representation allows political cleavage to persists amongst mulitiple parties. The parties must form alliances to govern. This makes arranging the patterns of specialization required for clientelism much more difficult to maintain and much more easily attacked by the greater electorate who can and do frequently punish parties that become involved in corruption. On the other hand, clientelism is endemic in presidential systems. Belgium, with the first truly modern constitution adopted back in 1830, is a great example of how clientelism can be suppressed. Their system of governance recognizes multiple major blocs of citizens and empowers the blocks politically. Political patrons have great difficulty in sustaining patters of patronage and scandals erupt regularly with real consequences when they do.
Unfortunately for the United States, far too many people believe, like Dr. Kling, that the ordinary people are incapable of participating effectively in their own governance. Which is why the US is minimally democratic and highly corrupt. Belgium on the other hand enjoys the second highest median wealth per adult in the world (second to Australia). Modern democracy and prosperity go hand in hand.
Not sure which populist figure ever called for maximum scrutiny of government officials. Would be interested in names. Clinton, Obama, and Trump, all populists, never said anything like that. I suspect that all the anti-populism espoused at this site is really just a strawman. And populism is much more about devotion to a free and fair electoral system than it is about any particular policy preference. But let's take the alternative anti-populist ideology for a spin, lets call it "Gnostic Bigotry." Gnostic because it posits that policy is the realm of of highly complex knowledge only accessibly to the select few highly credentialed topwits with the genetic superiority necessary for the job. And "bigotry" because all the midwits and little people, lets face it, just don't have what it takes to participate in their own governance which would be better off left to the chosen few. Now, who is this "we" that you are appealing to? Are you going to persuade midwits based on your claims of innate superiority? Sounds like that mutual flattery with demagogues that was being yammered about yesterday. Or is the appeal to your fellow topwits, the elect chosen to rule? Is it just all the democracy getting in the way of your campaign to purify the corrupt bureacracy? If so, the topwits don't appear to have going for them. No, I think a better alternative might be to reform the political process with incentives in mind, particularly the incentives for clientelism. As a populist, I would have to say that there are many models of democracy and some are better than others. Moving to a bettter model of democracy will produce better governance.
So, my wife is Belgian, I go there often, and I'm not seeing the Belgian system of government as any sort of example to follow. Especially not if the goal is individual liberty.
Rather, the vast number of different government bodies end up cancelling each other out and ceding power to the (unaccountable) regulatory state.
To wit:
1. Belgium had one of the worst records of any country when it came to COVID deaths.
2. In spite of pretty dramatic, continuing, and generally arbitrary restrictions on freedoms.
3. I don't care what the median wealth says it is. I'm sure it's outsized by the large number of EU bureaucrats. Levels of property crimes are amongst the highest in Europe, everyone is mad about the high levels of immigration, and the working people definitely poorer than their American equivalents.
I don’t want to violate the commenting on comments rule, so I will defer to your lived experience and clarify with respect to the post. As a populist, I believe we would be better off looking around the world to learn from countries that perform better and have surmounted problems similar to our own, rather than preemptively bowing to the superior wisdom of our alleged brain trust of genetically superior betters whose noblesse oblige would naturally lead them to bestow a utopia upon us if they were not thwarted by the rude democracy practiced by the ignorant masses.
As a populist, I believe constitutions are important for the rules they put in place and the incentives that they create. The gnostic cult of expertise opposes constitutional restraints and believes that superior intellect and academic credentials trump all.
Now as someone without lived Belgian experience, I picked Belgium because yesterday was the anniversary of the adoption of their constitution and because the Belgian constitution has been a model for many other countries. But go ahead and pick Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Australia or for that matter most any other nation with parliamentary government and proportional representation. Personally, I find Belgium’s evolution from a centrally controlled nation to decentralized federalism fascinating. Belgium has a history of ethnic and language divisions not unlike the USA, and Belgium has grown to 5 percent Muslim (above board and plain to see) although the USA is still under 1 percent although that will change as the secret flights and covert subversion of any semblance of immigration practice consistent with law. But even if as we are asked to believe the USA experts are simply the very best people in the entire world and we should just hand over everything to them, maybe, perhaps, just maybe, somebody else somewhere else accidentally discovered something useful from which to learn. But that is just me, a filthy dirty populist speaking who obviously doesn’t understand his place in the social hierarchy.
It is true that the USA does outrank Belgium on several, but not all indices of freedom. Freedom House gives Belgium a Global Freedom score of 96, the USA an 83. Belgium is ranked 18th on Transparency International’s Perceptions of Corruption Index with a score of 73, the USA is ranked 27th with a score of 67. Belgium is tied with the USA on the Human Development Index. On crime, (by the way how does your wife like that Netflix show Undercover? I binged both seasons), Belgium has an crime index rating of 43.98 which is better than Sweden, Italy, Ireland, and France. The USA was even worse yet with a 47.81. Belgian students averaged a combined 1,500 on the PISA, USA students a 1,485. Belgians have a life expectancy of 82.17 years, people in the USA only 79.11. Per the World Bank, Belgium has a poverty rate of 14.8, the USA has 17.8; Belgium a Gini index of 27.2, the United States 41.4 (yes, yes, I know, every good rational economist believes that an economy with 101 dollars and a gini coefficient of 1 is wholly superior to an economy with 100 dollars and a gini coefficient of 0.01 and anybody who doesn’t agree shouldn’t have the right to vote). And for all this, the Belgians bear just about a 9 percent greater burden in government budget per capita. Per IMF, in 2017 Belgium’s government spent $22,470 per capita and the US spent $20,674. Who really believes that the USA spending another $1,800 per capita per year is going to produce much of anything at all much less better educated students and a longer lived population? One might expect that people who profess to interested in “state capacity” might be at least a little curious about such things, but no, they are the smartest people in the room, and by golly, they really are going to reinvent the government accountability wheel this time. Only ignorant populists would have the temerity to look out the window and wonder why we can’t have nice things too.
I'll invite reconsideration on the "comments on comments" policy because they're essential to sussing out the merit of the original post.
This is a good example. Arnold is trying to understand ratcheting of power and rule by the administrative state, and he'd do well to let the conversation evolve.
Contemporary Belgium is probably the country most run by the administrative state in the world. They went from from December 2018 to September 2020 without managing to make a parliamentary government. This was a world record length, breaking the record previously held by... Belgium in 2010-2011.
There was no government and that was fine because the administrative state runs the country. I don't know that one can say such elections constitute a peaceful transfer of power when no power is transferred.
Perhaps what must happen is not so much an election but a peaceful transfer of power between groups.
Kling criticizes people fighting back as trying to "ban" unrestrained government power and brands them as FOOLs afraid of the liberty of unrestrained government power.
Kling is right that these issues need to be fought beyond the ballot box, in the culture, and in the institutions. Winning elections isn't enough.
Kling is wrong to criticize CRT bans and similar policy. There is a moral high ground in using government power to limit government power. Playing games with words and calling it a ban doesn't change that.
Saturday we went to Frederick County MD, only to find out that the entire county had been placed in a mask mandate. This ruined a good chunk of our day, as we now had to drive all the way back to Virginia.
Apparently, the Frederick County Health Board, an unelected body of officials, imposed this requirement on Dec 31st by fiat. It is to remain in place until they reach some absurdly low case count dictated by CDC guidance (itself another unelected body). No word on weather cases rising back up during the next wave would automatically re-trigger the mask mandate (I see nothing in the regulation that would prevent this).
A similar thing happened in Carroll County MD when its local school board voted to get rid of masks and the State Health Board overruled them.
I think its wrong to blame people for COVID restrictions when, outside of deep blue enclaves, they have pretty uniformly opposed them. Whenever they have a secret ballot the restriction party gets hammered. People engage in non-compliance where possible.
The issue isn't average people being FOOLs, its public health official tyranny (and also elected officials who have not been subjected to the democratic process so far in the pandemic).
It's not clear to me how people overcome the fiat power of unelected health officials beyond protest and disobedience. Maybe that is rude, but it deserves rude.
Power centralized in the Federal government is part of the problem. These police and public health powers are safer in local government. They will still be abused, but people have more recourse. If things get too bad they can even leave town.
There is no will to fight back. Because fighting back would, by definition, make you a populist.
Fear of populism is the ultimate FOOLery. Literally. On the axis we're talking about, there's a continuum of government power vs. individual autonomy. Any move in the direction of individual freedom is by definition a populist appeal.
Philip Hamburger is a national treasure, but I'm not sure what the COO/CA model would do for the problem he's getting at in Purchasing Submission. The example of the drinking age wasn't even an "unelected unaccountable bureaucrats in the administrative state" issue, though, if it had been, a COO could make things even worse.
It was Congress itself in the NMDAA that said that states had to raise or age or go without 10% of their federal highway money, and in SD v Dole (1987) SCOTUS said that was fine, 7-2. More like 7.5-1.5, since one of the two dissents was O'Connor, who still agreed in principle that putting conditions on spending was fine, but who said the relationship wasn't close enough in this particular case.
The doctrine is a total mess because there is no good way in principle to precisely define this kind of soft 'coercion' that crosses the line only when SCOTUS judges feel like it does. A coherent policy would be "never any strings attached" but then state and local jurisdictions often wouldn't cooperate on even minor things like standardized data collection and reporting. That's probably a price worth paying.
I am fine with none/non-federal standards in the “seeing like a state” evasion sense.
Only about 74 million voted against unrestrained power - some 81 million, so it's claimed by the frequently dishonest but always power hungry Deep State, voted for unrestrained power.
Arnold doesn't like how Trump fights, and is unwilling to do anything so "icky". But let's be honest & real - fighting is lousy and is not how normal, nice people want to live. But without fighting, now, normal people lose.
Trump fights against unrestrained deep state power.
If you oppose Trump, you oppose fighting.
Very pleased to see Philip Hamburger mentioned. I had also read the review by Nelson Lund which motivated me to order several of Hamburger's books (quite affordable at Abebooks). Very much looking forward to reading his work which would appear to be insightful and substantive.
I completely concur with Handle's questioning of the potential for the COO/CA model. Its important to remember that the COO/CA model is written into many nations' constitutions, for example Mexico, with little result outcomes-wise. Political scientists seem to have done serious work in this area using the framework of "clientelism." That is, understanding political entities as middlemen specializing in building patterns of patronage, satisfying rent seekers, and otherwise transfering wealth around to produce stable groups of constituents who will reliably vote for their political patrons. Adding oversight bodies only smooths the process and provides a means for political patrons to ensure they receive the political support (or silence) that the transfers they provide (contracts, grants, legislative/regulatory protection, maintenance of barriers to entry, non-interference, actions against competing groups, etc. Clientelism is a very useful framework that explains a lot, particularly the rise of one-party munincipal government, and relationships like the teachers unions and the Democratic Party.
Adding another enforcer like the COO/CA will never address the problem of clientelism. Political scientists have found that the countries that have had the most success in addressing the clientelism problem are parliamentary democracies with proportional representation. These limit the payoffs to political patrons in two ways. First, members of parliaments serve as ministers of executive branch agencies so the camoflauge of bureaucratic middlemen is erased. Ministers bear more acccountability. Secondly, proportional representation allows political cleavage to persists amongst mulitiple parties. The parties must form alliances to govern. This makes arranging the patterns of specialization required for clientelism much more difficult to maintain and much more easily attacked by the greater electorate who can and do frequently punish parties that become involved in corruption. On the other hand, clientelism is endemic in presidential systems. Belgium, with the first truly modern constitution adopted back in 1830, is a great example of how clientelism can be suppressed. Their system of governance recognizes multiple major blocs of citizens and empowers the blocks politically. Political patrons have great difficulty in sustaining patters of patronage and scandals erupt regularly with real consequences when they do.
Unfortunately for the United States, far too many people believe, like Dr. Kling, that the ordinary people are incapable of participating effectively in their own governance. Which is why the US is minimally democratic and highly corrupt. Belgium on the other hand enjoys the second highest median wealth per adult in the world (second to Australia). Modern democracy and prosperity go hand in hand.
Not sure which populist figure ever called for maximum scrutiny of government officials. Would be interested in names. Clinton, Obama, and Trump, all populists, never said anything like that. I suspect that all the anti-populism espoused at this site is really just a strawman. And populism is much more about devotion to a free and fair electoral system than it is about any particular policy preference. But let's take the alternative anti-populist ideology for a spin, lets call it "Gnostic Bigotry." Gnostic because it posits that policy is the realm of of highly complex knowledge only accessibly to the select few highly credentialed topwits with the genetic superiority necessary for the job. And "bigotry" because all the midwits and little people, lets face it, just don't have what it takes to participate in their own governance which would be better off left to the chosen few. Now, who is this "we" that you are appealing to? Are you going to persuade midwits based on your claims of innate superiority? Sounds like that mutual flattery with demagogues that was being yammered about yesterday. Or is the appeal to your fellow topwits, the elect chosen to rule? Is it just all the democracy getting in the way of your campaign to purify the corrupt bureacracy? If so, the topwits don't appear to have going for them. No, I think a better alternative might be to reform the political process with incentives in mind, particularly the incentives for clientelism. As a populist, I would have to say that there are many models of democracy and some are better than others. Moving to a bettter model of democracy will produce better governance.
So, my wife is Belgian, I go there often, and I'm not seeing the Belgian system of government as any sort of example to follow. Especially not if the goal is individual liberty.
Rather, the vast number of different government bodies end up cancelling each other out and ceding power to the (unaccountable) regulatory state.
To wit:
1. Belgium had one of the worst records of any country when it came to COVID deaths.
2. In spite of pretty dramatic, continuing, and generally arbitrary restrictions on freedoms.
3. I don't care what the median wealth says it is. I'm sure it's outsized by the large number of EU bureaucrats. Levels of property crimes are amongst the highest in Europe, everyone is mad about the high levels of immigration, and the working people definitely poorer than their American equivalents.
I don’t want to violate the commenting on comments rule, so I will defer to your lived experience and clarify with respect to the post. As a populist, I believe we would be better off looking around the world to learn from countries that perform better and have surmounted problems similar to our own, rather than preemptively bowing to the superior wisdom of our alleged brain trust of genetically superior betters whose noblesse oblige would naturally lead them to bestow a utopia upon us if they were not thwarted by the rude democracy practiced by the ignorant masses.
As a populist, I believe constitutions are important for the rules they put in place and the incentives that they create. The gnostic cult of expertise opposes constitutional restraints and believes that superior intellect and academic credentials trump all.
Now as someone without lived Belgian experience, I picked Belgium because yesterday was the anniversary of the adoption of their constitution and because the Belgian constitution has been a model for many other countries. But go ahead and pick Switzerland, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Australia or for that matter most any other nation with parliamentary government and proportional representation. Personally, I find Belgium’s evolution from a centrally controlled nation to decentralized federalism fascinating. Belgium has a history of ethnic and language divisions not unlike the USA, and Belgium has grown to 5 percent Muslim (above board and plain to see) although the USA is still under 1 percent although that will change as the secret flights and covert subversion of any semblance of immigration practice consistent with law. But even if as we are asked to believe the USA experts are simply the very best people in the entire world and we should just hand over everything to them, maybe, perhaps, just maybe, somebody else somewhere else accidentally discovered something useful from which to learn. But that is just me, a filthy dirty populist speaking who obviously doesn’t understand his place in the social hierarchy.
It is true that the USA does outrank Belgium on several, but not all indices of freedom. Freedom House gives Belgium a Global Freedom score of 96, the USA an 83. Belgium is ranked 18th on Transparency International’s Perceptions of Corruption Index with a score of 73, the USA is ranked 27th with a score of 67. Belgium is tied with the USA on the Human Development Index. On crime, (by the way how does your wife like that Netflix show Undercover? I binged both seasons), Belgium has an crime index rating of 43.98 which is better than Sweden, Italy, Ireland, and France. The USA was even worse yet with a 47.81. Belgian students averaged a combined 1,500 on the PISA, USA students a 1,485. Belgians have a life expectancy of 82.17 years, people in the USA only 79.11. Per the World Bank, Belgium has a poverty rate of 14.8, the USA has 17.8; Belgium a Gini index of 27.2, the United States 41.4 (yes, yes, I know, every good rational economist believes that an economy with 101 dollars and a gini coefficient of 1 is wholly superior to an economy with 100 dollars and a gini coefficient of 0.01 and anybody who doesn’t agree shouldn’t have the right to vote). And for all this, the Belgians bear just about a 9 percent greater burden in government budget per capita. Per IMF, in 2017 Belgium’s government spent $22,470 per capita and the US spent $20,674. Who really believes that the USA spending another $1,800 per capita per year is going to produce much of anything at all much less better educated students and a longer lived population? One might expect that people who profess to interested in “state capacity” might be at least a little curious about such things, but no, they are the smartest people in the room, and by golly, they really are going to reinvent the government accountability wheel this time. Only ignorant populists would have the temerity to look out the window and wonder why we can’t have nice things too.
I'll invite reconsideration on the "comments on comments" policy because they're essential to sussing out the merit of the original post.
This is a good example. Arnold is trying to understand ratcheting of power and rule by the administrative state, and he'd do well to let the conversation evolve.
Contemporary Belgium is probably the country most run by the administrative state in the world. They went from from December 2018 to September 2020 without managing to make a parliamentary government. This was a world record length, breaking the record previously held by... Belgium in 2010-2011.
There was no government and that was fine because the administrative state runs the country. I don't know that one can say such elections constitute a peaceful transfer of power when no power is transferred.
Perhaps what must happen is not so much an election but a peaceful transfer of power between groups.
Kling criticizes people fighting back as trying to "ban" unrestrained government power and brands them as FOOLs afraid of the liberty of unrestrained government power.
Kling is right that these issues need to be fought beyond the ballot box, in the culture, and in the institutions. Winning elections isn't enough.
Kling is wrong to criticize CRT bans and similar policy. There is a moral high ground in using government power to limit government power. Playing games with words and calling it a ban doesn't change that.
The links here are all unusually excellent. Kling has turned me on to many great wise pundits and thinking that I wouldn't have read otherwise. Bravo!
The government HAS unrestrained power because we didn’t fight back.
Saturday we went to Frederick County MD, only to find out that the entire county had been placed in a mask mandate. This ruined a good chunk of our day, as we now had to drive all the way back to Virginia.
Apparently, the Frederick County Health Board, an unelected body of officials, imposed this requirement on Dec 31st by fiat. It is to remain in place until they reach some absurdly low case count dictated by CDC guidance (itself another unelected body). No word on weather cases rising back up during the next wave would automatically re-trigger the mask mandate (I see nothing in the regulation that would prevent this).
A similar thing happened in Carroll County MD when its local school board voted to get rid of masks and the State Health Board overruled them.
I think its wrong to blame people for COVID restrictions when, outside of deep blue enclaves, they have pretty uniformly opposed them. Whenever they have a secret ballot the restriction party gets hammered. People engage in non-compliance where possible.
The issue isn't average people being FOOLs, its public health official tyranny (and also elected officials who have not been subjected to the democratic process so far in the pandemic).
It's not clear to me how people overcome the fiat power of unelected health officials beyond protest and disobedience. Maybe that is rude, but it deserves rude.
Power centralized in the Federal government is part of the problem. These police and public health powers are safer in local government. They will still be abused, but people have more recourse. If things get too bad they can even leave town.
True, we do travel more, and more widely.
Excellent comment. Permission to share?