Lorenzo Warby on misplaced faith; Tove K on high-tech society vs. the family; Moses Sternstein on health care as the leading sector; Two views of Mr. Trump from a libertarian perspective
Fiery is right that Schedule F wouldn't accomplish much even though the question is theoretical because some Hawaiian judge would immediately kill it anyway. It's not really about Trump, Schedule F also wouldn't help whoever your vision of some ideal Republican candidate would be, either. Implementing the minimal amount of reform necessary to actually give a Republican President the same amount of control and influence enjoyed by a Democrat President is a "regime change complete problem".
Arnold sometimes says that the prime advantage of our form of democracy is the peaceful transition of power. But in fact most sovereign power that matters does not really transition in the sense of actually changing hands. As one example out of countless, when Trump came into office he issued a number of executive orders which required among other things to agencies to submit reports by a certain (reasonable) date. Many of these were around a year late and were full of errors and omissions. Everyone on team Trump involved with these efforts sooner or later woke up and realized the impossibility and futility of trying to follow the "schoolhouse rock" script of how the federal government is supposed to work, because it doesn't work that way, and no Republican can make it work that way.
Just like it's pointless to consider the merits of possible object-level reforms to immigration policy when the meta-level issue of Democrat presidents actually following the law as written is completely non-operative and without prospect of improvement, it's also pointless to try and be 'smart' about administrative leadership, legal maneuvering, bureaucracy savvy, etc. when all of that is obsolete cargo culting, imitating the mental and procedural framework of a bygone era in ritualistic cluelessness. It's true Trump couldn't fill all those positions. Republican voters also can't fill a position, that of "Actual President". They can only get a fake, 10% president. 10% of power transitioned peacefully, the rest is never going to transition without some kind of radical upheaval.
One thing I particularly like about the Jewish tradition is its relatively mild status hierarchies and the relative lack of power enjoyed by the high status people (e.g. rabbis and scholars). The Tanakh can be read in part as a record of how this was arrived at the hard way: assigning status to a variety of other possible claimants-- judges, kings, prophets etc-- led again and again to disaster. Every personality cult is a sort of worship of the golden calf, and so the condemnation of golden calf worship is a sort of intellectual vaccine (see what I did there?) against personality cults.
I wonder, what does the Christian status hierarchy look like? As a bit of an outsider I can’t quite identify a unifying theme beyond “Loves God”, and that seems to have a very wide range of expressions that are often mutually exclusive and change over time. Admittedly Christianity has been around so long that such changes are certainly going to happen, but still I don’t see a status hierarchy the way that intersectional grievance ideology has one.
I can’t get behind Tove K’s claim that we have “overcome family loyalty “. It still exists, and where it doesn’t the lack is seen as bad (who applauds abandoning one’s family?) Rather, we added to family loyalty the larger society (polis, state, religion) aspects as equal points of loyalty. If anything we expanded the group we treated as family.
Firey’s advocacy of “Reforming the bureaucracy and rewriting statutes and regulations is hard work, requiring careful policymaking and consensus‐building” would appear to validate N.S. Lyon’s observations on the fundamental problem that Schedule F was apparently intended to address:
“This is really a struggle over who rules – i.e. the genuinely political. Which means it is ultimately a struggle over the whole structure of our system of government: are we to continue living under a “depoliticized” managerial regime, or could we see the reemergence of a more democratic republic?”
Lyon, it seems, sees a system in which a Javier Milei-type president could get on with the business of governing without having to placate legions of bureaucrat stakeholders, or turn over the steering wheel to the courts, as both desirable and achievable.
Firey, on the other had, advocates Jimmy Carter style civil service reform, built on clientelism, in which all the stakehols get massaged or bribed to stand aside and even more bureaucracy larded on top to grease the system. The system will work, he political capital to it. So the managerial regime stays in place and continues playing the same games it has played for a century.
John Cochrane’s Adam Smith Award remarks seem to offer a persuasive rebuttal to what Firey has in mind:
“As we look at a typical regulatory mess, understand too that there is a certain logic to it. Many of our issues follow the old children’s rhyme: The little old lady swallows a fly, then a spider to catch the fly, a cat to catch the spider, and on we go until she swallows a horse. And dies. Of course. The Dodd Frank Act. As I look at taxes, health care, finance, and many other of decades-old regulatory tarpits, the lesson applies. There was one decision, one original sin, one somewhat sensible path taken -- the income tax, the tax deduction for employer-provided group insurance, bailing out depositors to stop runs. The original idea worked for a while, but had unintended consequences, and was patched and patched over and over again. Each patch, an expansion of the regulatory state, has a certain logic given how the last one failed. But inevitably fell apart requiring more patches.
That insight tells you why smart people looking at the latest fiasco, but without authority or imagination to go back to the beginning and start over, can only come up with more rules that will fall apart just as inevitably. It tells you that the answer has to be a clean slate reform from the beginning.”
Both Lyons and Cochrane express faith in functionality of the US political system. Lyon writes, “But at least this little furor has revealed that the managerial state does in fact seem to be genuinely afraid of being hit where it would actually hurt, should anyone with enough political will to do so ever to come along…”
Cochrane writes:
“We are a democracy, and a responsive one. Leaders do what people want them to. They lead, perhaps, by giving voice and unity to those desires. I have known a lot of really smart people in power who get it totally. But they say, “John, if I do that I won’t get elected.” We do not elect kings and autocrats. Whispering in the Emperor’s ear is not the answer.
Our political system does respond to the chattering classes that surround politics, and to the wisdom of ordinary american voters. They need to know — to remember — to ask for freedom.”
A bit Pollyanna-ish, no? But perhaps the most soothing dream with which to indulge oneself. Pulling the country out of its current death spiral would require starting over from a clean slate, but that won’t happen. The pragmatic maybe ought concern themselves with a strategy for crawling from the wreckage.
“If this center-left were to regain some of its vigor, you would not want to have burned your bridges to it.” - And yet the prevailing behavior by both politicians and bureaucrats of all stripes is exactly that. Namely, instead of cooperating, the goal is to win especially if it costs the “other side”. So bridge-burning is of no concern for most as long as status is maintained or achieved with the in-group. To my eyes, the lack of cooperation and disregard for interdependence is one of the biggest barriers to political progress
Fiery is right that Schedule F wouldn't accomplish much even though the question is theoretical because some Hawaiian judge would immediately kill it anyway. It's not really about Trump, Schedule F also wouldn't help whoever your vision of some ideal Republican candidate would be, either. Implementing the minimal amount of reform necessary to actually give a Republican President the same amount of control and influence enjoyed by a Democrat President is a "regime change complete problem".
Arnold sometimes says that the prime advantage of our form of democracy is the peaceful transition of power. But in fact most sovereign power that matters does not really transition in the sense of actually changing hands. As one example out of countless, when Trump came into office he issued a number of executive orders which required among other things to agencies to submit reports by a certain (reasonable) date. Many of these were around a year late and were full of errors and omissions. Everyone on team Trump involved with these efforts sooner or later woke up and realized the impossibility and futility of trying to follow the "schoolhouse rock" script of how the federal government is supposed to work, because it doesn't work that way, and no Republican can make it work that way.
Just like it's pointless to consider the merits of possible object-level reforms to immigration policy when the meta-level issue of Democrat presidents actually following the law as written is completely non-operative and without prospect of improvement, it's also pointless to try and be 'smart' about administrative leadership, legal maneuvering, bureaucracy savvy, etc. when all of that is obsolete cargo culting, imitating the mental and procedural framework of a bygone era in ritualistic cluelessness. It's true Trump couldn't fill all those positions. Republican voters also can't fill a position, that of "Actual President". They can only get a fake, 10% president. 10% of power transitioned peacefully, the rest is never going to transition without some kind of radical upheaval.
One thing I particularly like about the Jewish tradition is its relatively mild status hierarchies and the relative lack of power enjoyed by the high status people (e.g. rabbis and scholars). The Tanakh can be read in part as a record of how this was arrived at the hard way: assigning status to a variety of other possible claimants-- judges, kings, prophets etc-- led again and again to disaster. Every personality cult is a sort of worship of the golden calf, and so the condemnation of golden calf worship is a sort of intellectual vaccine (see what I did there?) against personality cults.
Re: regulation:
Casey Mulligan on Trump:
https://manhattan.institute/article/trumps-vast-deregulatory-landscape-goes-unnoticed-by-the-experts
Casey Mulligan on Biden:
chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/hoc_testimony_mulligan_20230614-1.pdf
I wonder, what does the Christian status hierarchy look like? As a bit of an outsider I can’t quite identify a unifying theme beyond “Loves God”, and that seems to have a very wide range of expressions that are often mutually exclusive and change over time. Admittedly Christianity has been around so long that such changes are certainly going to happen, but still I don’t see a status hierarchy the way that intersectional grievance ideology has one.
I can’t get behind Tove K’s claim that we have “overcome family loyalty “. It still exists, and where it doesn’t the lack is seen as bad (who applauds abandoning one’s family?) Rather, we added to family loyalty the larger society (polis, state, religion) aspects as equal points of loyalty. If anything we expanded the group we treated as family.
Firey’s advocacy of “Reforming the bureaucracy and rewriting statutes and regulations is hard work, requiring careful policymaking and consensus‐building” would appear to validate N.S. Lyon’s observations on the fundamental problem that Schedule F was apparently intended to address:
“This is really a struggle over who rules – i.e. the genuinely political. Which means it is ultimately a struggle over the whole structure of our system of government: are we to continue living under a “depoliticized” managerial regime, or could we see the reemergence of a more democratic republic?”
(https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/democracy-means-never-having-to-hear)
Lyon, it seems, sees a system in which a Javier Milei-type president could get on with the business of governing without having to placate legions of bureaucrat stakeholders, or turn over the steering wheel to the courts, as both desirable and achievable.
Firey, on the other had, advocates Jimmy Carter style civil service reform, built on clientelism, in which all the stakehols get massaged or bribed to stand aside and even more bureaucracy larded on top to grease the system. The system will work, he political capital to it. So the managerial regime stays in place and continues playing the same games it has played for a century.
John Cochrane’s Adam Smith Award remarks seem to offer a persuasive rebuttal to what Firey has in mind:
“As we look at a typical regulatory mess, understand too that there is a certain logic to it. Many of our issues follow the old children’s rhyme: The little old lady swallows a fly, then a spider to catch the fly, a cat to catch the spider, and on we go until she swallows a horse. And dies. Of course. The Dodd Frank Act. As I look at taxes, health care, finance, and many other of decades-old regulatory tarpits, the lesson applies. There was one decision, one original sin, one somewhat sensible path taken -- the income tax, the tax deduction for employer-provided group insurance, bailing out depositors to stop runs. The original idea worked for a while, but had unintended consequences, and was patched and patched over and over again. Each patch, an expansion of the regulatory state, has a certain logic given how the last one failed. But inevitably fell apart requiring more patches.
That insight tells you why smart people looking at the latest fiasco, but without authority or imagination to go back to the beginning and start over, can only come up with more rules that will fall apart just as inevitably. It tells you that the answer has to be a clean slate reform from the beginning.”
(https://www.grumpy-economist.com/p/adam-smith-remarks )
Both Lyons and Cochrane express faith in functionality of the US political system. Lyon writes, “But at least this little furor has revealed that the managerial state does in fact seem to be genuinely afraid of being hit where it would actually hurt, should anyone with enough political will to do so ever to come along…”
Cochrane writes:
“We are a democracy, and a responsive one. Leaders do what people want them to. They lead, perhaps, by giving voice and unity to those desires. I have known a lot of really smart people in power who get it totally. But they say, “John, if I do that I won’t get elected.” We do not elect kings and autocrats. Whispering in the Emperor’s ear is not the answer.
Our political system does respond to the chattering classes that surround politics, and to the wisdom of ordinary american voters. They need to know — to remember — to ask for freedom.”
A bit Pollyanna-ish, no? But perhaps the most soothing dream with which to indulge oneself. Pulling the country out of its current death spiral would require starting over from a clean slate, but that won’t happen. The pragmatic maybe ought concern themselves with a strategy for crawling from the wreckage.
“If this center-left were to regain some of its vigor, you would not want to have burned your bridges to it.” - And yet the prevailing behavior by both politicians and bureaucrats of all stripes is exactly that. Namely, instead of cooperating, the goal is to win especially if it costs the “other side”. So bridge-burning is of no concern for most as long as status is maintained or achieved with the in-group. To my eyes, the lack of cooperation and disregard for interdependence is one of the biggest barriers to political progress
The bureaucratic state is a giant Gordian Knot. It cannot be reformed without a giant sword.