In general, politicians are overworked and understaffed. They’re traveling constantly, buried under too many meetings and constituent requests, and working desperately to stay one step ahead of whatever they’re getting yelled at about that week. …however well or poorly the health-care reform effort turned out, the one thing that people on both sides agree about is that it didn’t go according to anyone’s plan. Almost nothing does, and that’s because there usually isn’t much of a plan, or because the plan that did exist was quickly overtaken by events and no one had the time to really update it.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Mr. Klein, if you were to take a job in business, you would discover the same thing. Executives are overworked and understaffed, buried under too many meetings, etc. Plans are quickly overtaken by events, etc. In fact, Mr. Klein, even technocrats and regulators are subject to human frailty and organizational dysfunction.
However, I have confidence that Mr. Klein will pick himself up and go on advocating Washington wonkery as if nothing had ever happened.*
*Winston Churchill famously said, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”
To put it more concisely, I offer: Wallach’s Law, which says that everything is more amateurish than you think, even after accounting for Wallach’s Law.
By the way, if the tone of this post is any indication, the Law seems to apply in full force to “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree.”
“Mr. Klein, if you were to take a job in business, you would discover the same thing.”
I’m not sure what this means–Ezra Klein works for a publicly-traded, for-profit business, not the government or a non-profit.
You are not sure what that means? It means that Ezra Klein does not concern himself with the petty details of the profitability and direction of the Washington Post. He is completely ensconced in the mandarin bubble of government.
Obviously Klein thinks that in some cases confused government planning beats the “natural” outcome, which is not obviously wrong. Especially since pretty much everyone but anarchists thinks that (ie, that a governmental, technocratic solution to property crime (courts) beats the natural alternative (violent self help), for example).
I sent the following email to Ezra Klein. No reply as yet.
Mr. Klein,
Your ecumenical cynicism born of experience with respect to our shortsighted and haphazard political process is well laid out in these two columns/posts. I’m also a big fan of Mencken’s Notes on Democracy.
One interesting question that occurred to me:
If you are correct about the nature of our politics (and I strongly suspect you are), why are you so optimistic about the prospective effects and benefits of expanding government’s role in society? Do you take the view that individuals, churches, charities, and corporations are similarly dysfunctional? Or that their actual (rather than stated) ends are systematically less desirable?
More generally, how does one square a tragic view of politics with an optimistic view of technocratic policy as embodied in legislation and executed by bureaucracy?
I don’t understand — if this phenomenon also applies to businesses, how does it validate the idea that government is bad?
Because we can take our business elsewhere. We can go work for someone else.
Government social-engineering is mandatory.
Ezra Klein might be one of those crazy people who thinks modern democracy tends to work. If government social engineering proves too onerous, we can get rid of it via the ballot.
Now he obviously knows that, as a general rule, government isn’t as efficient as the market (If you read him, Klein is clearly aware of how political economy problems can screw up government decision making. I just think he thinks that that happens on a smaller scale than, say, Tyler Cowen). He just thinks democracy works well enough to handle some market failures (pricing pollution, say) and some situations where we want inefficient outcomes, either for human rights reasons or because maximizing utility doesn’t always mean maximizing happiness (he probably wants universal access to some level of healthcare for both reasons).
As he should. To act or not to act is still action. To decide or to decide not to decide is still a decision.