You don’t control the government unless you can shut down parts of the ‘permanent’ bureaucracy and you can’t legally do this in the current regime without grabbing control of a party. It’s hard to imagine sane politics over the next 50 years without somehow closing (or at very least ‘changing beyond recognition’) the GOP, Democrats, Tories, Labour.
The post is endorsed by Tyler Cowen, and I think it says some things that Tyler would not say out loud.
Speaking for myself, I strongly agree with Cummings on this:
Whether Trump wins or loses [in 2024] his candidacy will be terrible for everybody. He demonstrated no interest in actually controlling the government. He didn’t drain even a corner of the swamp, he just annoyed it.
The sleeper permanent agency:
“VA is requesting a total of $269.9 billion in fiscal year (FY) 2022 for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), a 10 percent increase above fiscal 2021 enacted levels.”
VA has been growing a 7% to 10% annually for many years. Veterans are organized by state and Congressional district.
Call the VA a $540 billion agency in 10 years.
That will be about $4,700 for every US income tax filer in 2031.
For people reading this blog, probably double or triple that.
That is just for the VA.
Good luck everybody.
High-school-to-grave socialism.
Libertarians often rhapsodize about the US mercenary military.
What the libertarians failed to anticipate, or recognize, is that veterans would become a powerful voting block in a nation of tight elections.
The second failure of libertarians was to not note history, and the real reason for the formation of a mercenary military: Nixon and Kissinger feared that Americans would not tolerate drafts for foreign wars, after Vietnam.
They were probably right, and elections would be a democratic brake on autocratic Washington interventionism.
The mercenary military allowed for the perma-war blog to strengthen its grip on Washington year after year.
And so you have Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and who knows what.
For Biden to get out of Afghanistan was like pulling wisdom teeth. You think Americans would have tolerated a draft for such a war?
Total agreement with the first 7 points. However, the proposed solution of a “GOP startup” is a zero. It sounds like something a Mitt Romney campaign consultant would propose, knowing that when the campaign fails the consultant & friends still gets paid.
We are witnessing in realtime the purpose of the federal government bureaucracy. It is to establish and defend the status quo. Consider, if commercial air service were actually deregulated, there would be no employee vaccine mandates since many pilots and employees would swiftly join with newly created airlines not imposing such requirements. The market would reveal an optimal outcome for all interests.
But in the year 2021 could a new nationwide commercial air carrier be launched? One thing for sure, the federal government would not help this happen! The airline consolidation of the past 20 years has been blessed by the government all while the government has increased its influence and control over the airline industry. A new entrant is not only a threat to the incumbent airlines but a threat to government control!
Dominic does have a good idea that existing bureaucracies must be replaced and not reformed. I believe this plan has actually been in motion by both parties Progressives have shifted industry oversight responsibilities from less progressive departments to more progressive ones. And Conservatives,when in power, have sought to move oversight away from unfriendly departments.
When the next “Republican Revolution” occurs I expect the president to more dramatically shift power away from unfriendly departments. Of course this doesn’t eliminate the department and thus when the political cycle turns the executive decision is reversed.
Airlines are launched all the time. Breeze being the latest, launched by JetBlue’s founder. Its risky, especially since your airline will be a no vax airline. You might be limiting your customer base since 61% support vaccine requirements for air travel.
Precisely 61%?
I think those who are producing this type of poll result are demonstrating aspirational psychology. They want to believe they can be protected. So they signal that aspiration in their response.
The problem with aspirational politics and Covid is the little thing we call reality. I highly recommend reading of this post by Tyler Cowen on the politics of Covid containment in New Zealand.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/solve-for-the-kiwi-covid-equilibrium.html
Be mindful that zero Covid via vaccine shot is just as fanciful as zero Covid via quarantine. We have ample data at hand now to show that “you” getting a Covid vaccine does not protect your neighbor from Covid. And it does not even ensure the vaccinated will not get infected.
Trump got neutralized pretty effectively by the bureaucracy, but he did save the world from 4 years of Hillary. Not a candidate for sainthood, but deserving of a honorable mention at all times.
Good point. Trump was undermined by the lying, cheating, stinking bureaucracy at every turn and the bureaucracy was aided and abetted in its crimes against humanity not just by the vile and odious Democrats and the hack politicians posing as judges in the federal courts, but by the cowardly, two-faced double talking incompetent establishment, CCP quisling Republican establishment types as well. The sad thing is that for all his numerous faults and inabilities, Trump was as good a politician as we will see in our lifetime. An Article V constitutional convention to dissolve the Union is our last hope to assure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.” Only the people can make this happen as all of the current party establishments are very much in favor of seeing government with the least bit of accountability to the people perish, the sooner the better.
Trump completely failed at these spectacularly lofty goals of draining the swamp, reversing the trend of out of control spending, and fixing corrupt and bloated bureaucracies. Trump did an amazing job, far better than I expected when I voted for him in 2016. But, no, in terms of fixing all the ailments of the world, Trump was a complete failure. And so was everyone else.
The Dominic Cummings essay was insightful. I respectfully disagree with his harsh judgement of Trump, but the essay overall has good ideas. While Trump certainly didn’t come close to solving the issues of corrupt government bureaucracies, the Trump Administration really did clarify and expose the problems. I can’t imagine this essay being written pre-Trump, but this viewpoint is more mainstream on the political right, post-Trump, which highlights how these problems really were exposed over the last five years or so.
Democrats aren’t failing to reduce government waste, spending, and corruption, they are succeeding at growing it. In my view, that’s worse.
“the government does not control the government”
When ever did it? Has Dominic never watched ‘Yes, Minister’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu8JaLK03uc&list=EL3KNad_Q2amz_-1qI9MLoig&index=6
Politics and Governance are entirely non-overlapping; just look at their different revenue models. One is a monopolist that extracts revenue via tax harvesting and maintains enough popular support by bribing the public with its own money. The other is distraction-theater where the revenue model is blackmailing the middling rich and other idiots with promises to vote for or not to vote for whatever symbolic do-hickey they can sell. Actual government operations are kept well away from politics.
It’s even worse than that. Even *if* the (elected / politically appointed, temporary) government actually controlled the (permanent civil service) government, they would still have to contend with an out of control judiciary, with a thousand Hawaiian judges blocking every initiative and running out the clock. The thwarting of the DACA repeal provides a good example.
The minimum viable platform for a Cummingsian party is one that declares total political war on all fronts of the fundamental structure of the current regime, which is empirically incompatible with improvement without a radical, root and branch overhaul. Try to do that, and the opposition will make sure that every hill you try to take is one you have to die on.
Indeed! And, be careful what you wish for.
The incentive of a secure regime/monopolist is to maximize the value of the tax harvest over time by maximizing the value of their domain.
The incentive of an insecure regime/monopolist is to extract as much value as fast as possible and leave behind a smoking crater.
To be fair, a party powerful enough to get from status quo to actually control the permanent bureaucracy could likely also afford to tell the judiciary, as Jackson is said to have, “[Judge] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”
Exactly so. However, if you are going to be that powerful, then the whole implicit intellectual framework of doing things via a new party in a competitive democracy according to a Constitutional system remotely resembling the one we have now falls apart.
My line is that if you can solve a “regime-change complete problem”, you are going to be able to solve them all in short order, and that this is precisely what any movement self-consciously radical enough to go to total political war in an attempt at any of these changes would do.
The two-step way to square that circle is “The True Election”, in which a party comes to power on the explicitly articulated promise that if chosen to do so such event will be interpreted as the mandate to usher in a new era.
That is not necessarily a new regime free of all formal institutional constraints (e.g., CCP) – one could propose a resetting or reformulation of such checks and balances on a renewed basis closer to the original conception – but from a practical and realistic perspective, it would be a truly extraordinary historical event for a movement to achieve such plenary capability and then voluntarily relinquish large parts of it.
I could imagine a kind of ideological commitment to deference to the “epistemic authority”, whether religious or market-based, but the present manner of obedience to unaccountable judicial, pseudo-scientific, and bureaucratic institutions could not survive the transition without total reform.
To pullback the tyranny of the permanent bureaucracy, you must first remove the idea of “the government must do intervene” from the minds of the people.
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When we’re saying “the government should intervene,” we’re saying “an organization with guns should threaten to lock people in cages if they don’t comply with its dictates.”
–Art Carden, Econlog
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People are quick to toss around words like socialism, communism, capitalism, but few know, or dare say, interventionism. Even though as von Mises put is so well, interventionism is the road to the Zwangswirtschaft (compulsory economy) of the Nazis. And even the setback of WWII was only a slight hitch in the march of the permanent bureaucracy in Germany, at the time the pinnacle of bureaucracies, even as it shifted the New Deal bureaucracies of the US into high gear.
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The Dictatorial, Anti-Democratic and Socialist Character of Interventionism
Many advocates of interventionism are bewildered when one tells them that in recommending interventionism they themselves are fostering anti-democratic and dictatorial tendencies and the establishment of totalitarian socialism. They protest that they are sincere believers and opposed to tyranny and socialism. What they aim at is only the improvement of the conditions of the poor. They say that they are driven by considerations of social justice, and favour a fairer distribution of income precisely because they are intent upon preserving capitalism and its political corollary or superstructure, viz., democratic government.
What these people fail to realize is that the various measures they suggest are not capable of bringing about the beneficial results aimed at. On the contrary they produce a state of affairs which from the point of view of their advocates is worse than the previous state which they were designed to alter. If the government, faced with this failure of its first intervention, is not prepared to undo its interference with the market and to return to a free economy, it must add to its first measure more and more regulations and restrictions. Proceeding step by step on this way it finally reaches a point in which all economic freedom of individuals has disappeared. Then socialism of the German pattern, the Zwangswirtschaft of the Nazis, emerges.
von Mises, Ludwig (1947). Planned Chaos
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And the drive toward interventionism is sadly, baked into the American system from the beginning
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Thus at first the American people got the notion of law-making; of the making of new law, by legislatures, frequently elected; and in that most radical period of all, from about 1830 to 1860, the time of “isms” and reforms — full of people who wanted to legislate and make the world good by law, with a chance to work in thirty different States — the result has been that the bulk of legislation in this country, in the first half of the last century, is probably one thousandfold the entire law-making of England for the five centuries preceding. And we have by no means got over it yet; probably the output of legislation in this country to-day is as great as it ever was. If any citizen thinks that anything is wrong, he, or she (as it is almost more likely to be), rushes to some legislature to get a new law passed. Absolutely different is this idea from the old English notion of law as something already existing. They have forgotten that completely, and have the modern American notion of law, as a ready-made thing, a thing made to-day to meet the emergency of to-morrow.
–Popular Law-making: A Study of the Origin, History, and Present Tendencies of Law-making by Statute
by Frederic Jesup Stimson (1910)
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