Fear Factor

Speaking of this, wasn't that part of their political strategy? To not let a crisis go to waste because during it they could herd people into accepting things people otherwise wouldn't go for?

Projection is rife with this Administration.

Not necessarily because of the specific issue, but I'm really keen on polls with this breakdown:

But while 76% of Mainstream voters think the United States should continue to build the fence, 67% of the Political Class are opposed to it.

We need a constant stream of polls showing "N% of the general electorate has this view, X% of the political class believes the opposite."

Not because the majority is always right, but because it's absolutely critical to repeatedly demonstrate on a range of issues how detached the governing class is from the people they govern, how alienated they are from the society they rule.

Which is also why, alas, such breakdowns are unlikely to get widespread mention in the Official Press.

On this one I actually agree with the majority of the country, but "to fence, or not to fence" is not actually the point here. I'm sure there are issues where I'll disagree with the majority of the electorate, and agree with the governing class (though prolly not many issues). But still I think that, even here I think the majority is wrong, putting in everyone's face the fact that the disconnect between the governed and the governing class has become so vast is an absolute precondition to addressing a lot of the problems we have. I don't think the majority is always right, but I do think it will be...informative...for the majority to learn so decisively how often their leaders think they're wrong. Then we can all decide through democratic vote which group is really the most fsk'd up.

Lustration to follow! épuration légale!

I Win Ben Stein!

I had a e-mail exchange with Win Ben Stein this weekend after watching him on the "Cost of Freedom" block saying he felt Socialism was inevitable in America. Obviously he wasn't cheering it, he just felt it was inevitable. Well I went to the trouble of looking up his e-mail and having a polite go at him: Yes, I can do polite.

I made a bit of fun of the usual way people start off such e-mails, about saying how they love someone's work and really admire them right before they launch into a vicious attack. Then I launched into my attack not on Mr. Stein but the assertion he made and its underlying premise.

I didn't figure I'd hear back from him: Heck I wasn't even sure I had his correct e-mail. But to my pleasant surprise he did write back, saying it was a great e-mail, before having a brief go at me. Well we went back and forth a bit over the weekend. I'll spare everyone the details except to say he was polite and brief and I rambled. I haven't heard from him since my last reply.

So I'm going to say I Win Ben Stein! I'll conclude that I convinced him with my brilliant arguments, while somewhere he's out there no doubt thinking I'm an ignoramus. So then we're both winners!

The Governments Have Learned from their Mistakes

It's too easy to satirize the mocking of naive innocents such as Jonah Goldberg, to engage in the fun but unedifying art of tu quoque aimed at the well-meaning gentlemen who note market failure and imply the panacea: Good for what ails you! Got market failure? Government will cure it. Government failure? More government will cure it. Personal problems? Government is here to help you with all your needs.

We live in an era where some fringe cranks focus in an inchoate way on government failure, or the pitfalls of government solutions for perceived market failure.

Sophisticated people focus more on how we acting together in a socially-responsible way can fix the problems that irresponsible private actors have inflicted upon all of us. The enlightened main currents of opinion recognize that it is certainly annoying to clean up after these messes created by private individuals and institutions, but if we don't accept the burden, the costs to us all will be higher.

The trouble is, as sagacious as people like Kevin Drum are when compared to simple-minded people like Jonah Goldberg, these guardians of the main currents of enlightened opinion fail to think beyond stage one: Why is it that bankers won't learn from their mistakes? What incentive structures have been put in place or, as importantly, what has been demolished, so as to discourage them from learning from their mistakes?

Demolished might be too strong a word. Decayed, dissolved, deteriorated might all be better descriptions, as in a building not well maintained, as with much of our public infrastructure (oh, but shovel-ready will fix this as well!)

Here is the question they dislike most, as it reflects a shocking lack of faith in our ability to solve public problems through collective action: Have the institutions they favor demonstrated a better capacity for learning from their mistakes than the ones they mock? If not, why not?

Are California or Michigan or New York &tc doing better learning from their mistakes than Goldman Sachs is? Are they really? We mock the idea that bankers are, but is it a fair mockery? Or the gaunt, chilling laugh of those who are practically undead themselves?

Have the PIIGS learned from their mistakes? Really now, have they? Is there at least as much at stake here as there is in even the biggest "too big to fail" bank or corporation?

Those who think the problem was embedded in a previous Administration or one side of the aisle need to free their minds as well. The reassuring myth that it is all caused by having the wrong sort of people in government, and now we've got the right sort of master-minds involved; those who believe in government and have faith in its capacity to solve all problems, is one they may want to reconsider, and take a more historical view. If they can open their mind to untainted history.

A few points to keep in mind as they open their minds: Firstly, a group that swept into power asserting that they were going to make break with the failed policies of the past often use as one of their cudgels against those who object to their policies the fact that their policies are no different from that of the previous Administration's. This double-think has an old and dishonorable history, dating back at least to the Administration they most admire: FDR's, which has gone down in progressive history as a sharp contrast from the supposedly do-nothing lassez faire Hoover Administration, when the truth was "practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started," as Rex Tugwell admitted.

Why is this ancient history important? Isn't it true that only cranks and nutters, usually on TV or Radio or at some obscure Think Tank, rave on about comparisons between Hoover and FDR? True, but ideological finger-pointing and sneering over this obscures rather than illuminates: It closes the mind you want open to engage in any reconsideration.

Exactly as it is meant to.

In this way, we lose track of the original task: Unravelling the big ball of string that has come down to us, in order to see where it leads us in answering our question: Why our are institutions, private as well as public, apparently no longer capable of learning from experience?

(Btw, how's fixing education working out for you? How has throwing money at the problem worked out for you? Do you retain faith in the same government that has complete and sole responsible for one District's public education system, the District of Columbia's, to solve the problem's of our country's education system? Where does DC rank in per-pupil spending? Has it become the shining jewel which the rest of the country should emulate?. Over the last, pick a time period, lets say 35 years, has government learned from its mistakes when it comes to the provision of education? And yet the wise are confident it will do the best of all possible jobs when it comes to, say, health care...or student loans...or home mortgages...or the auto industry).

Our enlightened, when they speak of society's problems and the need for "society" to address them, they always mean by the later government. <--- Non-sequitur inserted to keep in mind when considering all of this. Is their confident mocking laughter really warranted? From who's knee have the Banker's learned from since 1933 (or before)? Who shields them from the consequences of their own decisions? Who is shielding the rest of us from the consequences of ours? This confidence that we out here, private individuals and institutions, make mistakes, make blunders, but they are wise and will ever nudge us in the Correct Direction, save us from folly, and never lead us all into folly or, like lemmings, off a cliff (such as a cliff of unsustainable unfunded future mandates): Is it justified?

I assume the proper response is: If only we fallible members of the public would ever select the "correct" people to hold public trust, and never the "Right", all would be well: But again, it is our blundering that makes a mess out of their efforts on our behalf. We should not mock this confidence they have in their own ability, good intentions, and their sense that it is only the saboteurs and wreckers that constitute their political opposition who cause failures in government. But we should question this confidence as we untangle the ball of string that they have handed us in the form of opinion-leading Lippmanesque journalism and Schlessingeresque Court Historianism.

We might find that the tu quoque isn't a tu quoque at all, and that indeed it is their mindset that is the source of much of what they decry: That in the evolution of things, the problem is they have created a government that creates problems, then appoints itself to fix them, rinse and repeat ad infinatum, and that after sufficient iterations of this there is an utter displacement of responsibility. Who or what for example is really entirely to blame for the financial crisis? Both and all sides have some merit in the narratives they construct in order to point fingers at their despised boogiemen and hated political opponents. When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible, and this is the political economy we have created, and will deserve until we fix it "as a society."

If you know the solution, you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. But if you think you know the solution with the confident mockery that some have, but the solution you have is a sham-solution, one that merely iterates the cycle again rather than breaking and reversing it, then you are not a better man at all, but the worst, however full of passionate intensity you may be.

Big Blue Pill

I go on vacation and come back to find that a man who started by giving Ten Red Pills to wake us from the Matrix that is the modern Western bureaucratic State has, in the pentultimate post before his conclusion reassured us that under his utopian future government, we won't be slain and our organs harvested for profit, we'll instead all be virtualized into pods as our marginal utility runs out and we're replaced by our Rob't masters.

Gee, that's a relief! If it weren't for the dignity of it, I'd just as soon pass. I hope we can go out like Sol Roth too, if we prefer.

The last generation of humanity will find "dignity" in a MMORPG until either our Rob't Masters decide to save some money and turn out the lights by running a dignified "mass-casualty event" for us to perform final heroic sacrifices in, or, more humanely, just wait till the last of us dies of old age.

Obviously there's no real - as opposed to virtual - human reproduction within the pods, and absolutely no incentive for whatever is outside of the pods to create such an opportunity, because we're in the pods as a result of having no social utility to our rulers outside the pods. Therefore, the last people to go into the pods will be the last people.

One might argue that whoever owns these new nations will neither need to go into the pods or, most importantly, allow themselves to be pushed into the pods. The stockholders will continue to govern their state, the customers consisting of pod-people, and their staff consisting of Our Rob't Masters.

However, if Our Rob't Masters are sufficiently advanced so that we are of no real use to them, as Moldbug concludes, they will certainly have greater facility for managing investments, and will use that to capture control of the State. A possible counter-argument is that human stockowners would have created such expert programs to assist them in managing their investments, and the Rob'ts could not deny them access to, and thus the benefits of, these expert programs. It's thus possible that the owners could escape this "benign" fate for a time, till the Rob'ts outlasted and outcompeted them which, if they're so sufficiently advanced, they will eventually do.

Anyhow, let us turn to an argument Moldbug uses, and which is one of the reasons why, my sympathies and general preference for Libertarian-ish policies notwithstanding, I am not a Libertarian,even of the Moldbug sort (that is to say, I di agree with him that there will be a State, and where it acts, it should be strong). It is embedded in this:

And we are just getting started. The ex-subject can then be dissected for his organs. Do you know what organs are worth? This is profit!

If we claim to derive the responsibility of government from mere financial prudence, we must explain why the business strategy of culling unwanted subjects for their organs is not viable. Most would not find this profitable strategy consistent with responsibility. Yet, since a sovereign is sovereign, no higher sovereign can exist to outlaw or preclude it. The design must solve this problem on its own.

The simplest, broadest, and most essential prevention against this degenerate result is the observation that the royal government is a government of law, and a government of law does not commit mass murder.

He's made similar arguments before. Another was along the lines that, sure, Leopold behaved badly with the distant Congolese colony, but no European ruler behaved like that towards their own domestic populations.

Which treats things as binary, when they are not analog; there is a range of misgovernment or oppressive government. It neglects the incontrovertable fact that it was during the height of the government system he has praise for that America was peopled. At the time the vast majority of those who came to America voluntarily came from Europe. They didn't leave places like Italy, Prussia, Greece, Poland, Ireland or Russia for here because they thought they were too well-governed and well-treated well by their owner/rulers.

Most schools of Libertarians, and their sympathizers (such as Moldbug) have a Modeling Fallacy not too different from that of Global Warm-mongers. Which is to say they assume all governments (except ours) and rulers (except ours) operate on a rational basis (they aren't insane), and use the same rational calculus that they would in deciding how to behave. They then assert that there would be no rational reason for rulers to do X, Y, or Z.

Which is fine and good, except that, as a matter of historical record, they have done X, Y, or Z. So epicycles are created: Oh, they did those things because we exist and threw a monkey-wrench into the works; if only we adopted a policy of isolation and left them to their own devices, they would revert to their natural rationality and things would work out perfectly. Oh, they were already infected with fill-in-the-blank (democratic calculi, religion, or whatever), and once we remove that tumor, a miracle will happen, and X, Y and Z will not occur.

We know that even the Great and Autocratic Emperor of the Romans, Basil II Makedonion, who perhaps came closest to Moldbug's ideal in a ruler having absolute power and absolute responsibility, had to deal with politics. Had to deal, indeed, with his own officials not quite enforcing the Imperial will as he would have hoped. Quite possibly machine intelligience will render the machinations of whatever administrative apparatus Moldbug's new State creates moot, making them absolutely faithful to the Ruler's will, rather than tempted by Pournelle's Iron Law, something that happens in all corporations of significant size and certainly would happen here.

Aristotle observed that man is a political animal, but Moldbug is smarter than that moron and knows that politics can be eliminated.

Similarly, in reality Monarchs and rulers of all types have behaved in ways that the ruled found quite sufficiently oppressive, even though stopping short of harvesting them for their organs. There is no reason to believe that a government that ruled with all the power of a Chinese Emperor and His Glorious Mandarinate wouldn't so treat us, all Confucian injunctions to the contrary notwithstanding.

Theory of how they Ought to behave, if they were to behave as a Libertarian would rationally want them to behave, is controverted by all actual experience with how such rulers and governments, even the best of them, do behave. Pliny, for example, after a fire at Nicomedia, wrote to Emperor Trajan advising the Emperor encourage the establishment of a volunteer fire brigade, but the Emperor denied the request on the grounds that it would become a political party (brotherhood). But we're supposed to put all our trust in the Global Warming Computer Model Libertarian Rational Government Actor Model, and little in historical experience, which is that our ancestors fled such places when they could get away from them, and thus even if some might live well enough treated as such governments might treat us, the descendants of those who fled might not be best suited to life under a revived version of it. Odd that someone who has learned so much from his reading of history would have such a massive blindspot, in my opinion, but perhaps this is due to the fact that he abhores Progressive/Whig historiography so much he is willing to give its antithesis too much faith.

This on top of the fact that, Oh Happy Day, if everything works as well as Moldbug desires, the endpoint of humanity is virtualization into a pod! Moldbug's comeback may - I don't want to put words into his mouth - be that this is the likely endpoint of "The Singularity" even under our current misgovernment (if it's not Idiocracy), it will just take longer.

But I suppose I'll pass on his reassuring offer, and take my chances with some other endpoint. I do want to close in some other way, though; I owe Moldbug that much. This is a rather severe critique of his proposal, but I have read his writings with great interest because he has much to offer and his thoughts are well worth the time and consideration you give them.

Not Can't. Won't

A decent post here, but I must quibble with some things.

First, if you're British, I can't give you better advice than what Peter Hitchens regularly gives: Don't vote BNP. Ever.

If you're looking for a solution to these problems, look elsewhere. If none exists, create one. Anyhow UKIP is much preferred over anything akin to the BNP. (I'm sure Shannon Love feels the same way about the BNP).

Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.

How did Britain come to this state?

Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces, in a narrative both historical and current that all the "stupid" people know is rubbish, but which the educated, intelligent people either believe or people pretend to believe and insist we all must as well.

That is because discussion of many of these problems are ruled out of bounds of civil discussion, except in the most anodyne and Progressive ways. But, more importantly, a response to a section later in the post is required:

If the mainstream parties cannot address the real concerns of many Britons, and if they cannot at least pretend to respect and value lower-income white Britons, then Britain may be only one ugly incident away from a political seismic shift.

Not "cannot" but will not. They could address these things, but they have become so wedded to certain ideas, they do not want to. For the Progressive Left, these are not "problems", except to the extent that people resist their effects, and the mainstream conservatives have largely been coopted for their own reasons, suffering from, at best, learned helplessness in the face of them, because seriously working to fix these problems and undo their effects gets you castigated as a fascist hatemonger.

So then it should not be surprising to anyone that real problems that the political mainstream will not address are left to the real fascist racist hatemongers. They remain real issues, and people who want them fixed are left with no real recourse.

Let us not kid ourselves that this is a meta-Political Problem that only Britain or Europe faces. In America as well, matters which receive upwards of 70% of public support when polled are routinely declared "outside of the political mainstream", off the table of civic debate. The problems are real and remain, however. Eventually some person or party will come around vowing to address them, as things worsten.

A mainstream political party could. It is not a matter of they can't. They simply will not, for reasons of their own. This then makes it inevitable that solutions will be extremist ones. No one should want that, but they are making it increasingly likely.

This then is the real corruption of our political class, our elites, what Glenn Reynolds has called "the worst political class in [American] history". Petty graft in the form of earmarks pale by comparison.

Enema of the State: The Galbraith Plan to Destroy Opposition in Action

We've seen, recently, attacks on Limbaugh by the Left, which is par for the course. But also a war on news entities that are not sufficiently servile, coupled with warning to the others. We've seen a war on the Chamber of Commerce which consists in part of an effort to dismantle it, because they oppose the Administration on some issues (I.E. Cap and Trade) after supporting it on other measures (I.E. the "Stimulus"), and an attempt by the government to gag a private entity, intimidating it and others from using their free speech.

When insurance companies came out against Congressional Health Care proposals, Congress initiated a fishing expedition against them. Meanwhile, entities like ACORN are not investigated.

What is going on here was revealed in Steven M. Teles' review of "The Predator State" by James Galbraith in the March/April 2009 issue of "The American Interest". You may or may not decide to read the book itself, but even the sympathetic review is illustrative. I wasn't blogging in the Spring when this was published, so the below is adapted from an e-mail I wrote on it. I think it's even more self-evident now that the tactics recommended by Galbraith and endorsed by Teles are the ones being employed by the government now.

Before proceeding, I must note the method of Progressives on display here: Projection. It consists of three main steps. First, describe a tactic and declare its use completely outrageous and despicable. Second, claim that the opponents of Progressivism have been engaging in that tactic. Thirdly, use that claim to rationalize their own use of said tactic on a massive scale.

One of the premises of Galbraith's is that conservatives attempted to demolish Progressive opposition. The accuracy of this assertion can be seen in the fact that entities like ACORN were hounded out of existence by the Bush Administration's Justice Department, and how the Republican Congress was completely successful in pursuing a "de-fund the Left" agenda. Right.

On to the review, which I believe illuminates the overarching vision of the current Administration:

"The shift of power to allocate capital from the financial industry to government is, for Galbraith, far from unfortunate. Galbraith sees higher taxes and more debt as serving political objectives as well as economic ones. He wants to dry up the political power of the financial industry that courses through both parties because he is intensely skeptical of the capacity of financial markets to allocate capital in a way that meets the long-term needs of society. The real economic issue, Galbraith argues, is where the 'true seat of economic power' lies. The new liberal regime will be one that empowers 'scientists, engineers, some economists and public intellectuals -- who attempt to represent the common and future interest', and deposes 'banks, companies, lobbyists, and the economists they employ -- that represent only the tribal and current interest.'"

By empowering "some economists", I think we can take it as a given Galbraith does not mean members of the Mises Institute or Cato. He doesn't mean we will turn to Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams for sage advice. He means empowering members of his father's school of thought.

"...The planner rather trhan the entrepreneur will hold the position of honor in the new liberal American regime of political economy. Our system of education will be called upon to disseminate the findings of the professions, and, one suspects, to enshrine the new hierarchy of honor."

One where those who depend upon tax revenues for their existence (NGOs that receive grants from government, and the like) will be elevated, while those who pay taxes or engage in commerce will be looked down upon by the honored the way any entrenched Mandarinate or Feudal Nobility does in Ancien Regime states.

Opposition from these lessers is not tolerable in the fa>ce of their honored betters:

"...As Galbraith states bluntly, a key objective of the new liberal regime will be to use political means to produce market outcomes that strengthen its allies and weaken its enemies."

I'm not sure that "political means" so employed produce "market outcomes", but such a phrasing is simply evidence of the Orwellian manipulation of language we are being subjected to. See also "choice and competition" used as a mantra by those who want a government operated health care system.

"This may seem a breathtaking admission, but only to those who haven't been paying much attention to American politics for, say, the past two centuries."

Progressives can only speak for themselves and their own methods, but it is nice to see someone being candid about how they see government power: As a tool with which to destroy their domestic political opponents. Even more candidly:

"...The new regime [Obama's] may adopt many of the measures Galbraith recommends not because it shares his vision, but because crisis [don't want to let one go to waste] will force it to do so. Faced with a full-bore attempt by the deposed regime to reassert itself by obstructing the Administration's agenda, the new regime may find that it has no choice but to use the economic tools at its disposal to destroy its opponents root and branch."

"Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l'attaque, il se defend"

The use of the phrase "no choice" of course is a deceit meant to keep people from thinking too much about just what is being argued for here: In effect, a one-party state, where nothing like a "loyal opposition" is tolerated. Instead, anything that dissents from the Progressive line and seeks to use the options available to it in a liberal democratic structure is to be crushed. By any means necessary.

Conservative resistance is an attack on Universalism, and must be destroyed root and branch - dissent is no longer patriotic, disagreement and efforts to resist policies one disagrees with is the project of wreckers, horders, and Kulaks, who must be ground to dust.

"[W]hen they had the Power in their hands, those Graces were strangers in their gates!" indeed...


Update: See here for a mild noting of this effort.

Legislative Decline Reaches Hypertrophy

Not only do they no longer read the Bills they pass, but they have gone so far now as to vote a bill out of committee that hasn't even been written yet:

The bill offers a basic framework for eventual legislation, the closest glimpse yet into what reform might look like.

The fact is, the legislative language, that is the actual Bill, was unavailable at the time of passage, because it hadn't been written:

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who is considered a pivotal figure in efforts to win Senate approval of health-care legislation, cited the importance of keeping the price tag stable, even though final legislative language on the bill is not yet written.

By Their Own Model, Stimulus Doing Harm

"The stimulus apologists are ignoring the original prediction based on a model. By that prediction, the stimulus is doing harm"

It was obvious in advance of the passage of the "Stimulus", even in advance of the Inauguration, that the Stimulus would not live up to the predictions they were making in arguing for it, and that they would end up dropping those arguments entirely and instead say it was successful anyhow because things would have been even worse without it.

Why should I say it was obvious? Because this happens every time, with virtually every Progressive policy since the Great Society, if not before. They almost always fail if judged on the bases of the original arguments of what benefits they would produce, so those are dropped down the memory hole and "things would be worse without it" is substituted as the new rationale.

I agree wholeheartedly with this, with one caviat:

"I suppose I should be relieved. Claiming success is far less destructive than another irresponsible "stimulus." I'm grateful for small favors."

Their argument that it was a success is destructive down the road, because it always leads to more stimulus packages, which historically have always been successful only in political terms, by allowing politicians to claim credit for the upside of the business cycle while putting all the blame on private actors for downturns in the same cycle, but such packages are not successful in economic terms.

Update: Graphs! We have graphs!

Exchange With Mencius

Mencius responds to post and some e-mail exchanges, very lucidly. Some reactions:

No, I haven't enabled comments, and for reasons only known to myself I haven't even provided an e-mail to contact me with, which is rather boorish and inhospitable. I might rectify at least one of these soon. [Indeed I just did, so it's possible to comment on this if one wants].

"Porphyrogenitus" means "Born in the Purple [room]", but I'm sure Mencius knows that and is just having a little fun with me. :p

"Therefore, this problem must be solved politically - ie, through the usual old-fashioned means."

Well, then we haven't eliminated politics after all, which was one of your goals. We may have minimized it, but it can never be eliminated, because of human nature.

"Unfortunately, while Europe existed, the joint-stock sovereign does not."

We have had joint-stock corporations ruling/governing nations though. The attractiveness of Moldbug's outline will depend in part on how well or badly you think they governed the lands they held, and leads to:

"But had it been perfectly stable, it would still exist. So why not shoot for perfectly stable?"

True; also true of Cameralism, but you combine it with your technological system, and I include that in the "NeoFeudal" structure as well. So it would be as stable.

I personally don't think anything human-made can be perfect. It's always worth striving for the perfect and achieving excellence along the way, but belief in the perfectibility of human institutions has been a pitfall of Progressivism and utopians generally, one no reactionary should fall into.

That said, your system might endure longer than the current system. It does have more stability built in. Hopefully that does not mean it will also achieve stasis, but there is enough competition among states for clients/residents that this would only be a problem if they cartelized somehow, something that's difficult if there is enough of these polities.

"The latter question can be answered easily: no. We know that the answer is no because we know that a crazy person can buy a publicly listed company, today, and intentionally run it into the ground in some deranged manner. And how often does this happen? Never."

Nobody ever intentionally runs something very expensive that they own into the ground. This does happen unintentionally all the time. Leopold's Congo is always a possibility. Helotism is always a possibility. Faddish-but-ineffective management theories are always a possibility. Humans are not always rational, even rich ones, and the unintentional effect of their actions can be counterproductive, contrary to what they expected and hoped for.

Historically, in my observations, corporations have been best run while under the dominance of their original owner(s): U.S. Steel, The House of Morgan, Microsoft, and it's not a surprise Apple brought Steve Jobs back. But management tends to deteriorate or ossify over time. See IBM, K-Mart, &tc, which decline or go out of business and are replaced by more vigorous competitors A question might arise whether Moldbug's polities become so stable they are too stable, and cannot be supplanted. (It's possible that they can be "not as stable as Moldbug expects" and "too stable, even if they stagnate", but these are really separate points; we don't know what might happen, because it hasn't happened yet, so both sides of the coin should be considered).

"But any system containing an election can be no better than its electors."

This is the real crux of the matter. Almost any sort of government can work well if properly run (and under certain definitions of "work well" - work well for whom?), but the mechanism for selecting proper people, letting the cream rise to the top instead of the scum, is the fundamental problem of good government.

I do applaud Mencius for trying to devise a structure that is more likely to result in responsible, accountable rule than what we have today.

Good Government Can't Happen

A Commission created to study tax options for California, whose tax structure has weakened the State's economy and revenues even before the recession hit, recommends bold changes that might actually improve things.

Of course, it will never happen, because bad policy is preferred.

Critics also argue that the plan has not been well studied.

Wasn't that what the commission did? Has the proposal been studied better than, oh, I don't know, Federal Health Care bills that won't even have been completely written till the day they are voted into law, and never read by 90% of the "legislators" voting on them? You be the judge.

"The reception will be somewhere between cool and arctic," said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College in Southern California. "At a time of economic distress, the legislators are going to be very reluctant to embrace big changes in the tax code."

Notice how this is the time to make other radical changes to everything in the country, but not fix the tax code. Tax increases, sure: There's never a better opportunity than now.

Note that this argument would also be used in prosperous times "if it ain't broke" (which it is) "why meddle with it?" and that is also seen as the time to raise taxes ("the rich can afford to pay more, they're doing well in this prosperous economy" is the argument used then).

A generation and a half ago a poor Austrian moved to a prosperous State, and one day he rose to be the prosperous Governor of a poor State, and they're sti, apparently, clueless as to why that happened.

The Left and Laffer

When it suits them, Progressives recognize that taxation changes people's behavior, by raising the cost of activities, causing people to engage in them less.

When it doesn't suit them, they scoff at the concept, the idea of "dynamic scoring", and dismiss Laffer as an ideologue.

Pointless Aside since it is referenced: McArdle is correct on the subject of Health Care, because if, for example, a whole bunch of savings could be made in Medicare costs, as Obama claims, then it should be done now (if not already), rather than being held hostage to his (non-existent) health care plan.

True, the Laffer Curve can be exaggerated, but the TNR article is objectively false on the facts. Revenues increased throughout the Reagan Administration (it was additional spending that grew the deficit), and after the 2001 tax cuts, tax revenues grew "unexpectedly".

De Administrando

In correspondence to someone last week I wrote to the effect that, in taking prescriptive action, you can't just enact a policy and say "well, I applied the Rawlsian Standard", and then just walking away (or administer it) and be satisfied.

Usually we think that if someone does something and then just walks away it is irresponsible. But when it comes to policies, ones that are administrated are more often worse, and are much are harder to get rid of. This is because they have a built-in constituency: Those within government who administer it, and those (technically) outside government, in NGOs &tc, that swarm like pilot fish around any government activity, advocating more, and getting both private donations and budget line-items based on their "advocacy" of it.

Programs whose only constituencies are their intended beneficiaries are very easy to get rid of, even if they are successful. Perhaps especially if they are a success, if only because they threaten to upset the apple cart and cause it to crash down upon people's rice bowls.

Perhaps this is why most of the policies enacted over the last 80 years have been "administered", rather than just involving cutting people a check, and the vast majority of the ones enacted over the last 40 are, even though they usually degenerate into boondoggles even if they do not start out that way. Thus most proposals will remain subtextually titled "The Social Worker Full Employment Act of 2008" or "Educrat Job Security Bill of 2011".

Government is not a charity, but tends to crowd out and/or corrupt ones that are (beguiling them away from directly assisting those in need to increasingly "advocating", that is, petitioning for government programs). They transform over time from being intermediary institutions of true civil society to "NGOs" - "Non" added to remind us, lest we forget, that they are not government agencies themselves, they're simply pro-government activists, "advocacy" groups seeking expanded government. Often their members think of themselves as outsiders struggling against The Man, but they're really advocating an increase in his sway.

See also "Community Organizing" and similar activities, along with anything that seeks "funding" or involves grant proposals.