Coyote Blog

From Atlas Shrugged:

Dr. Ferris smiled. . . . . ."We've waited a long time to get something on you. You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later - and this is just what we wanted."

[Hank Reardon:]  "You seem to be pleased about it."

"Don't I have good reason to be?"

"But, after all, I did break one of your laws."

"Well, what do you think they're for?"

Dr. Ferris did not notice the sudden look on Rearden's face, the look of a man hit by the first vision of that which he had sought to see. Dr. Ferris was past the stage of seeing; he was intent upon delivering the last blows to an animal caught in a trap.

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now, that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

Here is the same thing, Obama Administration style

Major U.S. corporations have broadly supported President Barack Obama's healthcare reform despite concerns over several of its elements, largely because it included provisions encouraging the wellness programs.

The programs aim to control healthcare costs by reducing smoking, obesity, hypertension and other risk factors that can lead to expensive illnesses. A bipartisan provision in the 2010 healthcare reform law allows employers to reward workers who participate and penalize those who don't.

But recent lawsuits filed by the administration's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), challenging the programs at Honeywell International and two smaller companies, have thrown the future of that part of Obamacare into doubt.

The lawsuits infuriated some large employers so much that they are considering aligning themselves with Obama's opponents, according to people familiar with the executives' thinking.

"The fact that the EEOC sued is shocking to our members," said Maria Ghazal, vice-president and counsel at the Business Roundtable, a group of chief executives of more than 200 large U.S. corporations. "They don't understand why a plan in compliance with the ACA (Affordable Care Act) is the target of a lawsuit," she said. "This is a major issue to our members."

At the exact same moment, one branch of the Administration is encouraging an activity that another branch is working to criminalize.

In the Fast and Furious and IRS scandals, the Administration has purposefully dragged its feet on disclosures.  The strategy is to let as much time pass so that when bad revelations eventually come out, the heat from the original scandal is gone.  Defenders of the Administration will then argue the revelations are "old news", as if there is some statute of limitations on outrage.  This strategy has driven Republicans crazy.

So what do Conservatives do when the torture report comes out after months and months of foot-dragging trying to prevent its release? You got it, they scream "old news".  Scott Johnson:

I confess that I do not understand the rationale supporting the publication of the Democrats’ Senate Select Committee study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. On its face, it seems like ancient history (of a highly tendentious kind) in the service of a personal grudge. It is not clear to me what is new and it is not clear that what is new is reliable, given the absurd limitations of the committee’s investigation.

By the way, I want to make one observation on this line from attorney John Hinderaker:

Similarly, the report confirms that the Agency’s enhanced interrogation techniques were used on only a small number of captured terrorists, 39 altogether. These enhanced techniques include the “belly slap” and the dreaded “attention grasp.”

Most important, it appears that waterboarding really was the most extreme sanction to which any of the terrorists were subjected (and only three of them, at that). Given all the hoopla about CIA “torture,” one might have expected to learn that far worse happened at the Agency’s dark sites. But, as far as the report discloses, the Agency stuck almost exclusively to its approved list of tactics, all of which the Department of Justice specifically found not to be torture.

Were some of the captured terrorists treated roughly? Absolutely. Their lives must have been miserable, and deservedly so. Some of the 39 were placed in stress positions for considerable lengths of time, doused with water, fed poor diets, left naked in cells. In one instance, a terrorist was threatened with a power drill. In another case, an interrogator told a terrorist that his children may be killed. There were two instances of mock execution.

A few observations:

• The fact that they were "terrorists" seems to justify the mistreatment for him.  But how do we know they were terrorists?  Because the Administration said so.  There was no due process, no right of appeal, no ability to face witnesses, no third party review, none of that.  A branch of the Administration grabbed the guy, said you are a terrorist, and started torturing them.  I am not saying that they did this without evidence, but I am sure Mr. Hinderaker know from his own experience that every prosecutor thinks every person he or she tries is guilty.  That is why both sides get to participate in the process.
• "Terrorist" is an awfully generic word to give us automatic license to torture people.  My sense is that there are all kinds of shades of behavior lumped under that word.  Conservatives like Mr. Hinderaker object, rightly, to a wide range of sexually aggressive actions from unwanted kissing to forced penetration being lumped under the word "rape".  But my sense is we do the same thing with "terrorists".
• In my mind the casualness with which he can accept these kinds of treatments for people he does not like is morally debilitating.  It is a small step from accepting it for one to accepting it for many.  It is like the old joke of a debutante asked if she would have sex for a million dollars and saying "yes", then getting asked if she would have sex for $20 and responding "what kind of girl do you think I am?"  We've already established that, we are just haggling over price.
• For those on the Right who say that all this stuff about due process does not apply because the "terrorists" were not citizens, then welcome to the Left!  Individual rights are innate -- they are not granted by governments (and thus by citizenship).  The Right generally says they believe this.  It is the Left whose positions imply that rights are favors granted by the state to its citizens.

Well, the Senate torture report is out and it is every bit as bad, perhaps worse, than expected.   There are summaries all over but this one seems as good as any.  And here. Essentially the CIA:

• Tortured and detained more people than they ever admitted
• Were more brutal than they ever admitted
• Were more haphazard and incompetent than can be believed (losing suspects, outsourcing torture to a couple of outside psychologists with no interrogation experience or credentials)
• Achieved far less than they bragged from the torture, with results that now appear to approximate zero
• Lied about everything to everyone, up to and including Congress and the President

The CIA needs a forced enema of its own, though I am skeptical they will get it.

I will say that there is nothing really particularly surprising here to a libertarian.  This sort of lawlessness often occurs in fairly transparent government agencies (think VA) so it should be no surprise that it occurs in an agency like this that has zero accountability (because it can yell "classified" as the drop of a hat).  An agency empowered to hide stuff and keep secrets is going to hide stuff and keep secrets.  I am not even sure that if we really could turn the CIA upside down that this would be the worst thing we would find.

At the risk of diluting the totally appropriate horror with which this report should be received, I will observe a couple of positives:

1. Three cheers for partisanship and divided government.  They get a bad rap because gridlock, but without confrontational, competitive, even polarized rivals for power, this sort of thing would never have come out.  You can see pretty clearly from the minority comments that Republicans would have buried this had they controlled the Senate.
2. One cheer for American exceptionalism.  Yes, the hubris and arrogance that often accompanies American exceptionalism went a long way to contributing to these errors.   But there are not many countries in the world that would publish this report.  Forget for a minute Russia or China or Mali.  Even among western democracies there are not many countries that would voluntarily call for penalty strokes on themselves.  I can't imagine, for example, France ever making such an admission (and not, I think, because the DGSE's hands are particularly clean).

During the period that  Occupy Wall Street was making the news, I often said that I agreed with many of their problem diagnoses but absolutely disagreed with their proposed solutions.  They, like I, decried the abuse of government power via Cronyism by private parties, e.g. protection and bailout of Wall Street bankers.  Their solution, though, to increase government power never made any sense to me.

Here is Michael Huemer via Don Boudreaux:

Predatory behavior does not occur merely because human beings are selfish.  It occurs because human beings are selfish and some human beings are much more powerful than others.  Powerful, selfish people use their positions to exploit and abuse those much weaker than themselves.  The standard solutions to the problem of human predation all start by cementing the very condition most likely to cause predatory behavior – the concentration of power – and only then do they try to steer away from its natural consequences.  The alternative is to begin with an extreme decentralization of coercive power.

First, congrats to many millions of people who can remain in this country, a status they should have always have had.  We can argue whether anyone who makes his or her way over the border should be able to vote or draw benefits, but there is no doubt in my mind that they should be able to live anywhere they can pay the rent and work anywhere that there is an employer willing to pay them.

I am willing to accept the analysis of folks like Ilya Somin who say that the President's non-enforcement decision on immigration laws is legal.  But I think his concept of "precedent" when he says there are precedents for this sort of thing is way too narrow.  This is an important, dangerous new precedent.

What I think folks are missing who make this argument about precedent is that while many examples exist of the Executive Branch excercising proprietorial discretion, the circumstances are without precedent in both scale and well as in its explicit defiance of legislative intent.  One can argue that Reagan's executive actions vis a vis immigration provide a precedent, for example, but Reagan was essentially following the intent of then-recent Congressional legislation, arguably just fixing flaws with executive orders in the way that legislation was written.  What he did was what Congress wanted.

The reason I think Tiberius Gracchus is a good analog is that Gracchus too took actions that were technically legal.  Tribunes always technically had the legal power to bypass the Senate, but in hundreds of years had never done so.  Despite their technical legality, his actions were seen at the time as extremely aggressive and plowing new Constitutional ground, ground that would soon become a fertile field for authoritarians to enhance their power.

Somin includes the following, which I think is an example of where defenders of the President's process (as different from the outcomes) are missing reality.  He writes:

I would add that the part of the president’s new policy offering work permits to some of those whose deportation is deferred in no way changes the analysis above. The work permits are merely a formalization of the the president’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion here, which indicates that the administration will not attempt to deport these people merely for being present in the United States and attempting to find jobs here. They do not purport to legalize their status, and the policy of nondeportation can be reversed at any time by the president or his successor.

This is one of those statements that are technically true, but totally obtuse at the same time.   Issuing formal get-out-of-jail-free cards to 5 million people is unprecedented.  Think of it this way:  Imagine a Republican President who is opposed to the minimum wage.  The Executive branch is tasked with enforcing that law, so wold the folks defending the President's methods also argue hat the government can issue permits to 5 million businesses allowing them to  ignore labor law?  Or emissions standards?  Or insider trading laws?

People are just being blinded by what they rightly see as a positive goal (helping millions of people) if they fail to see that the President issuing licenses to not be prosecuted for certain crimes is a huge new precedent.  Proprietorial discretion is supposed to be used to avoid patent unfairness in certain cases (e.g. the situation in Colorado with conflicting state and Federal laws on marijuana).  It is not meant to be a veto power for the President over any law on the books.  But I can tell you one thing -- it is going to be seen by future Presidents as just this.  Presidents and parties change, and for those of you swearing this is a totally legal, normal, fully-precedented action, be aware that the next time 5 million wavers are issued, it may well be for a law you DO want enforced.  Then what?

Update:  Libertarians are making the case that the Constitution never gave Congress the power to restrict immigration.  I could not agree more.  However, I fear that will have zero impact on the precedent that will be inferred from all this.  Because what matters is how the political community as a whole interprets a precedent, and I think that this will be interpreted as "the president may issue mass waivers from any law he does not like."  Now, since I dislike a hell of a lot of the laws on the books, perhaps over time I will like this precedent.  But the way things work is that expansive new executive powers seldom work in favor of liberty in the long run, so I am skeptical.

In all the states we operate in, sales tax registrations are open-ended.  This means that once you register for a sales tax license, you keep it without having to do any sort of renewal.  However, there are penalties for not reporting every month on an active license, so there are pretty strong incentives to report a closed license as soon as one is not using it.  In effect, your monthly report is your renewal.

For some reason, Arizona has decided that it needs to put businesses through an annual renewal process for sales** tax licenses.  I have no idea why.  Even California does not make folks jump through this hoop.  Anyway, I chuckled at the name they assigned to this change: "TPT Simplification Program."  Because everyone knows that adding an extra paperwork step each year is a simplification.  I guess it simplifies the process of keeping their employment numbers up at the Department of Revenue.

** AZ actually call its sales tax a "transaction privilege tax."  Since I do not consider voluntary business transactions between two individuals to be a "privilege" that can only be granted by the state, I refuse to use the term.

Nicole Kaeding of Cato has an article on the SSD system heading for bankruptcy.  I can tell you from my experience that a week does not go by when someone doesn't come to me looking for work and saying something like, "I am on full disability but I am fully able to work.  However, I can't take any pay because that would screw up my disability payments.  Can I work for you and have you write my payroll checks to my wife?"

The easy answer to that is "no".  With a backlog of 25000+ people who want a job, why am I going to help them cheat, particularly when it would be me taking the legal risk?

I once had an ex-employee who was applying for a SS disability.  You may not understand that for many folks, getting a Social Security lifetime disability is like hitting the lottery.  This employee knew that if asked, we would have to tell the SS investigator that she seemed fully able to do her job and never demonstrated any reduced functionality.  So to pre-empt that, she and her attorney sent me a letter saying that if we in any way testified to her being able to work and prevented her from getting her disability payment, she would tie me up in court for years, suing me for sexual harassment, discrimination, and everything else she could think of.

From George Will, the logic behind what I call the health care Trojan Horse

Washington’s response to the menace of school bake sales illustrates progressivism’s ratchet: The federal government subsidizes school lunches, so it must control the lunches’ contents, which validates regulation of what it calls “competitive foods,” such as vending machine snacks. Hence the need to close the bake sale loophole, through which sugary cupcakes might sneak: Foods sold at fundraising bake sales must, with some exceptions, conform to federal standards.

So if school lunch programs are a platform for so much micro-regulation, how much regulation do you think the government takeover of healthcare will justify?  If government is paying most of the health care bills, then any activity that might affect your health is then logically subject to government regulation, if for no other reason than to protect against additional costs.  Motorcycle helmet laws have been justified for years on this logic that helmetless riders impose additional costs on government health programs.  Well, if that works for motorcycling, why shouldn't government be heavily regulating skiing?  Or for that matter, why should it allow people to drive cars at all?  Perhaps we should have to get government approval before every car trip to make sure it is not "frivolous" and creating future health care costs through accident risk.

Or how about that most costly-to-health-care activity of all: sex.  Sex spreads expensive diseases.  It can lead to expensive procedures like abortion.  And of course it can lead to costly pregnancies and, worst of all, new lives that have to be maintained for another 80 years by the government health care system.  If funding school lunch programs leads logically to banning cupcake sales at schools, why won't Obamacare lead logically to micro-regulation of our every activity?

Apparently there is yet another executive order with far reaching consequences for government contractors, Executive Order 13673  (does it bother anyone else that we are up in the 13 thousands on these?  Did they start numbering at 1?)  Hans Bader has the details:

A July 31 executive order by President Obama will make it very costly for employers to challenge dubious allegations of wrongdoing against them, if they are government contractors (which employ a quarter of the American workforce). Executive Order 13,673 will allow trial lawyers to extort larger settlements from companies, and enable bureaucratic agencies to extract costly settlements over conduct that may have been perfectly legal. That’s the conclusion of The Wall Street Journal and prominent labor lawyer Eugene Scalia.

This “Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces” order allows government officials to cut off the contracts of contractors and subcontractors that do not “consistently adhere” to a wide array of complex labor, antidiscrimination, harassment, workplace-safety and disabilities-rights laws. Never mind that every large national business, no matter how conscientious, has at least one successful lawsuit against it under federal labor and employment laws, which is inevitable when a company has thousands of employees who can sue it in hundreds of different courts that often have differing interpretations of the law. The order also bans using perfectly legal arbitration agreements, overstepping the President’s legal authority.

I can say as someone who absolutely bends over backwards to be in compliance, it just is not possible to be totally clean.  We have won most all of the lawsuits and actions against us over the years vis a vis labor laws and related charges.  A lot of these are pro forma discrimination charges that some employees in protected groups file automatically when terminated, usually without any evidence of specific discrimination.  We have, to date, won all of these "was he a Hispanic that was terminated rather than he was terminated because he was Hispanic" suits.  We have only lost one case.  To give you an idea of how hard it can be to be 100% in compliance, let me describe it:

We had a government contract governed by the Service Contract Act, which sets out minimum wages to be paid for different types of jobs.  These wages typically are in two parts - a base wage and, if the company does not have benefits, a fringe payment in lieu of such benefits.  For example, it might say that a day laborer must be paid (I will use round numbers for simplicity) $12 an hour base wages plus $4 an hour for fringes.  So we paid the worker $16 and hour and felt ourselves in compliance.  

Then we had a Department of Labor audit.  The investigator insisted that the law required that we break these two payments into two lines on the paycheck.  So instead of having  a paycheck that said 40 hours times $16, it needed to say 40 hours times $12 and 40 hours times $4.  Thus we were found to be in violation and issued a huge fine.  I protested that the law said no such thing -- the law said I had to have a clear paper trail of what I paid people.  It did not say the labor and fringes had to be shown separately on the paycheck, nor did any DOL published regulation require this  (and of course I also pointed out that the intent of the law that someone get paid a minimum amount had been fulfilled).  

Apparently, the DOL had an internal handbook that suggested this as a correct practice, but this had never been tested in court nor embodied in a published regulation.  To impose the fine, my attorney said they had to take me to court.  I said go for it.  The DOL chose not to press the case, and we adjusted our paycheck practices to avoid the issue in the future.  I was happy to comply with this, as stupid as it was, but it was impossible to know it was an actual requirement until I got busted for violating this double-secret practice.  But there it is on my record - VIOLATION!

I will leave it to Bader's article to explore some of the implications of this order, but I want to add some unintended(?) consequences of my own:

• Government contractors would be insane to operate in California (and perhaps other regulatory hell-holes, but I am familiar with California).  California has a myriad of arcane labor laws (like break laws and heat stress laws) that are difficult to comply with, combined with a legislature that shifts the laws every year to make it hard to keep up, combined with a regulatory and judicial culture that assumes businesses are guilty until proven innocent.  If state labor violations or suits lead to loss of business at the national level, why the hell would a contractor ever want to have employees in California?
• I have a couple of smaller competitors who have sent employees into the parks we operate who then filed extensive, manufactured complaints to the government about our service, timed to make it difficult on us when we bid against them for the contract renewal.  How tempting will it be for companies to place employees in their rival who then file serial labor complaints to undermine that rival in future contract awards?
• Companies that do government contracting as a sideline are going to be driven out of the business, reducing the choice and competition among contractors.   Earlier I discussed how 41 CFR 60-2.1  and 41 CFR 60-4.1, also the result of an Obama executive order, drove our company out of our last incidental contracting business (though we deal with the government all the time, it is generally through concession contracts where we get paid by the public, not by the government, so a lot of government contracting law does not apply to these contracts).

A lot of discussion has gone into the costs of the employer mandate.

These costs certainly were potentially high for my company.  If we had to provide health care for all of our employees, it would cost us an annual sum between 3 and 4 times our annual profit.  As many of your know, my company runs public parks and campgrounds.  Already, we have struggled to get government authorities to approve fee increases driven by local minimum wage increases.  Most of these authorities have already told us that they would not allow fee increases in most cases to offset the costs of the PPACA employer mandate.   So we have spent a lot of time converting between 90 and 95% of our employees to part-time, so the mandate would not apply to them.  I have gotten a lot of grief for my heartlessness on this in the comments, but I have zero idea what else I could have done short of simply shutting down the business.

Yesterday I was in an information session about the employer mandate and saw that the other shoe had dropped for companies -- the reporting requirement.  Despite the fact that the employer mandate was supposed to kick in almost 9 months ago, until recently the government had still not released the reporting requirements for companies vis a vis the mandate.  Well, apparently the draft reporting requirements was released a few weeks ago.  I may be missing something, but the key requirement for companies like mine is that every employee must receive a new form in January called an IRS 1095-C, which is parallel to the W-2 we all get to report income.

I know that many of you have probably been puzzled as to what some of those boxes mean on the W-2.  Well, you are going to love the 1095C

Everyone is scratching their heads, wondering what this means.  For someone like me who has seasonal and part time workers, this form is a nightmare, and I have no idea how we are going to do this.  Just to give you a flavor, here are the code choices for line 14:

1A. Qualified Offer: Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to full-time
employee with employee contribution for self-only coverage equal to or less than 9.5% mainland
single federal poverty line and Minimum Essential Coverage offered to spouse and
dependent(s).

1B. Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to employee only.

1C. Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to employee and at least Minimum Essential Coverage offered to dependent(s) (not spouse).

1D. Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to employee and at least Minimum Essential Coverage offered to spouse (not dependent(s)).

1E. Minimum Essential Coverage providing Minimum Value offered to employee and at least Minimum Essential Coverage offered to dependent(s) and spouse.

1F. Minimum Essential Coverage not providing Minimum Value offered to employee, or employee and spouse or dependent(s), or employee, spouse and dependents.

1G. Offer of coverage to employee who was not a full-time employee for any month of the calendar year and who enrolled in self-insured coverage for one or more months of the calendar year.

1H. No offer of coverage (employee not offered any health coverage or employee offered coverage not providing Minimum Essential Coverage).

1I. Qualified Offer Transition Relief 2015: Employee (and spouse or dependents) received no offer of coverage, or received an offer of coverage that is not a Qualified Offer, or received a Qualified Offer for less than all 12 Months.

Completing lines 14-16 will require an integration of our payroll provider with our health insurance information that I have no idea how we are going to pull off.

Conservative sites are running with this story:

OBAMANOMICS IN ACTION: Typical US Household Worth One-Third Less Than Under Bush

Seriously?  The bursting of the housing bubble, which actually began under Bush, is Obama's fault?  Because that is what likely drove middle class household worth down (while the Fed-sponsored asset boom in financial instruments drove up wealth of the top 1%).  I suppose one could say that the Republicans sponsored a bubble that helped the middle class while Obama is sponsoring a bubble that helps the wealthy.

I won't say this stuff is meaningless to the economy, because clearly they affect people's perception of wealth and thus spending and optimism.  But sound long-term economic growth has got to come from stable and rational monetary policy that allows interest rates and financial assets to find their correct level.  Getting political mileage out of bubble pricing of assets only creates incentives for politicians such that they will never stop fiddling with interest rates and credit.

I don't think anyone would say:

• Help!  I have been denied access to housing because my employer won't pay my mortgage
• Help!  I have been denied access to clothing because my employer won't pay my Nordstrom bill
• Help!  I have been denied access to leisure because my employer won't pay my resort bill
• Help!  I have been denied access to child care because my employer won't pay my nanny
• Help!  I have been denied access to food because my employer won't pay my grocery bill

Yet half the country seems to be saying

• Help!  I have been denied access to birth control because my employer won't pay for it

I cannot find a single opposition statement to the Hobby Lobby decision that does not contain some variant of this:

Today, the Supreme Court ruled against women’s basic access to contraceptive healthcare. This decision opens up the door for for-profit companies to impose their personal beliefs on their employees and deny them basic contraceptive care.

Basic healthcare decisions shouldn't be subject to the whims of bosses and employers. ...

I will continue to fight for the right of every woman to make her own private medical decisions. #notmybossbusiness

It seems that a huge number of Americans, even nominally intelligent ones, cannot parse the difference between banning an activity and some third party simply refusing to pay for you to engage in that activity.  This really does not seem to be a complicated distinction, but yesterday I watched something like 40% of America fail to make it.  How is it possible to make any progress on liberty and individual rights if peoples' thinking is so sloppy?

By the way, the passage above is from the Facebook page of Hanna-Beth Jackson, a California state senator.  The reason I find her faux libertarianism initeresting is that Ms. Jackson is co-sponsor of the bill requiring explicit verbal or written consent for each sex act (and each step of the sex act) in California colleges.  A woman's body may not be her boss's business but it appears it is the California government's business, at least according to Ms. Jackson.  This is typical of the abortion and birth control issues, where supporters use libertarian-ish arguments narrowly to defend abortion and contraception rights, but then go all-in for authoritarianism everywhere else.  Jackson's bedroom regulation bill is co-sponsored by Kevin De Leon, who said yesterday "No boss should have the power to interfere with a worker’s personal health decisions."  Because that's his job, I guess.

Loved this passage from Glen Reynolds on the VA:

There's a naive tendency to believe that whatever a government agency's mission is supposed to be, is really the mission that its people pursue. That's seldom the case for long.

Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, observing such things, has formulated what he calls the Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In every organization there are two kinds of people: those committed to the mission of the organization, and those committed to the organization itself. While the mission-committed people pursue the mission, the organization-committed people take over the organization. Then the mission-committed people tend to become discouraged and leave.

As a result, the strongest priority of most bureaucracies is the welfare of the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats it employs, not whatever the bureaucracy is actually supposed to be doing. That's worth remembering, whenever someone says they've found something else that we should "choose to do together."

This is not unique to government, but a rule for all organizations.  However, in a private-sector, organizations that devolve in this way get slaughtered (except of course for crony favors and bailouts, but that is another topic).  Accountability never ever comes to government organizations.

Update:  One other observation -- in criticizing Obamacare in advance of its implementation, I never mentioned computer systems problems.  And I always assumed that if you threw enough money and mandates at the problem, the number of uninsured (not to be confused with the number of people with access to quality care) would be reduced.  So all the current triumphalism around Obamacare are about issues that were in fact never raised in advance as criticisms.

One issue that was raised time and again was the information and incentives issues that make it almost impossible to government health care to deliver quality care at a reasonable price.  And the heart of the VA disaster is all an incentives issue.  And it will not get solved.  In part because the incentives issues are endemic to monopoly government services (see: public high schools).  But the government is not even trying to solve the incentives issue.

If you were getting investigated by the IRS, and you gave the IRS the answers that they have been giving the public over Lois Lerner's and others' lost emails, do you think that the IRS would accept your answer?

By the way, a system crash that makes a hard drive totally unreadable is just vanishingly rare nowadays.  It is possible to corrupt certain system files in the root that will make it impossible to log on to the computer or access the hard drive files normally, but they are still there.  Something with the hard drive's motor or read heads could fail, but the data is still there.  Even if you highlighted every file in your hard drive and hit the delete key, they are still there.  When you hit delete they are taken out of the file directory and may get overwritten if you add new data to the computer, but without special software, it is actually hard to totally delete files (this is why you have to be careful when you donate or dispose of computers).  It actually can take the better part of an hour to really remove all files from a hard drive so that they are unrecoverable.

Given all this, I think the odds are that 6 or 7 computers of a group of senior leaders in the same office all crashed at roughly the same time in a way that wiped out all the data from their hard drives such that all data would be unrecoverable is simply beyond credulity.

Actually trying to understand how those you disagree with think, rather than just accepting some straw man version, can make one a much better debater.  Bryan Caplan's ideological Turing test is not just about empathy and being open to opposing arguments, but it also pays dividends in making better arguments for one's own positions.  I love how Jesse Walker begins his pitch to Conservatives against the death penalty:

The typical conservative is well informed about the careless errors routinely made by the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Postal Service, and city hall. If he's a policy wonk, he may have bookmarked the Office of Management and Budget's online list of federal programs that manage to issue more than $750 million in mistaken payments each year. He understands the incentives that can make an entrenched bureaucracy unwilling to acknowledge, let alone correct, its mistakes. He doesn't trust the government to manage anything properly, even the things he thinks it should be managing.

Except, apparently, the minor matter of who gets to live or die. Bring up the death penalty, and many conservatives will suddenly exhibit enough faith in government competence to keep the Center for American Progress afloat for a year. Yet the system that kills convicts is riddled with errors.

Via Alex Tabarrok

A major concern in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones is power. Almost everybody – except maybe Daenerys, across the waters with her dragons – wields power badly.
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone – they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?

In real life, real-life kings had real-life problems to deal with. Just being a good guy was not the answer. You had to make hard, hard decisions. Sometimes what seemed to be a good decision turned around and bit you in the ass; it was the law of unintended consequences. I’ve tried to get at some of these in my books. My people who are trying to rule don’t have an easy time of it. Just having good intentions doesn’t make you a wise king.

I warned you that Cliven Bundy's ranch was the wrong hill to fight on over property rights and the role of government ownership on western lands.  And I was right.

This kind of thing should not come as a surprise.  This is a guy who simply did not want to pay his rent, and used the catch phrases of liberty to try to get sympathy.  I could find about a thousand far more sympathetic examples of folks screwed over by government land use regulations -- e.g. people whose puddle in the backyard is suddenly a wetlands that they can't build on.  But for some reason Conservatives all rushed to pile on this one example.  Stupid.  The media can probably be counted on to hide the unsavory back stories of Occupy Wall Street supporters, but there is no way they are going to do so for a "hero" of the right.   The BLM almost bailed Conservatives out of their stupid support for Bundy by their execrable on-site management of the raid, but Conservatives are now getting what they deserve for jumping in bed with this guy.

The Peoria, IL mayor used the city police to raid and shut down the owners of a Twitter account that mocked the mayor.  The original twitter feed probably had about 12 followers when it was shut down.  I suggest that it is now past time for him to Google the "Streisand Effect"

Too bad she didn't have a police force.

Update:  Told you so.  Popehat has a go

Many on the Left often deride the notion that government regulation really affects business behavior and reduces business activity.  But it turns out that even the Feds themselves throw up their hands and give up in the face of trying to deal with their own regulations

Government estimates suggest there may be 77,000 empty or underutilized buildings across the country. Taxpayers own them, and even vacant, they’re expensive. The Office of Management and Budget believes these buildings could be costing taxpayers $1.7 billion a year.

…But doing something with these buildings is a complicated job. It turns out that the federal government does not know what it owns.

…even when an agency knows it has a building it would like to sell, bureaucratic hurdles limit it from doing so. No federal agency can sell anything unless it’s uncontaminated, asbestos-free and environmentally safe. Those are expensive fixes.

Then the agency has to make sure another one doesn’t want it. Then state and local governments get a crack at it, then nonprofits — and finally, a 25-year-old law requires the government to see if it could be used as a homeless shelter.

Many agencies just lock the doors and say forget it.

Today I had to do my annual renewal of my corporate registration in Arizona.  As in most states, this involves a bit of information foreplay followed by the purpose of the exercise -- sending in a check to the corporation commission.

But here is the extraordinarily scary part -- I started the annual reporting process by just typing in the name of my company and getting started.  There was no password protection, no identity check.  They had no way of knowing I had anything to do with this corporation and yet I was answering questions like "have you been convicted for fraud."  The potential for mischief is enormous.  One would have to get the timing right (an annual report must be due before one can get in) but one could easily open the site on January 1 and start entering false information in the registrations for such corporations as Exxon and Wal-Mart.

See for yourself.  .  Below is a screen shot of the site letting me in to edit one of Wal-Mart's corporate registrations in Arizona:

Again, note what I am saying.  This is not the result of hacking.  This is not lax security I figured out how to evade.  This is the result of no security whatsoever.  I simply went to the link above, clicked on the Wal-Mart Associates link, and then clicked on the annual report link.  I know from doing my own registration that there is a signature page at the end, but all you do is type in the name of an officer and a title -- data that is right there on the site.  It's like asking you for a password after the site just listed all the valid passwords.

If I disliked Wal-Mart, I could put all kinds of crazy garbage in here.  I did not go further, because I would have had to answer these questions to proceed and I had no desire to mess with another company's critical data, but if I had gone further I could have changed their mailing address, the names of their officers, etc. -- all I had to do was just pay the $60-ish registration fee for them and they would have a big mess on their hands to sort out.   If I had access to a fake or stolen credit card and a public computer, I could have done it all without any hope of being traced.

By the way, from my experience, this is not unique to Arizona.  This criminally lax behavior seems to be the norm in most states.

I have submitted this all as a complaint to the state, so far with no response.  If anyone in AZ knows how I can get someone's attention with this, let me know.

Via Kevin Drum

The intelligence community can spy on millions of Americans and Dianne Feinstein yawns. But spy on Dianne Feinstein and you're in trouble.

This week's episode:  Spending enormous resources on a program to reduce X, and then not tracking (or even putting in place a mechanism to track) whether X was reduced as promised.   James Taranto quoting the National Journal quoting Administration officials:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the health care law will reduce the number of uninsured people by about 24 million over the next few years, and that about 6 million previously uninsured people will gain coverage through the law's exchanges this year. So, is enrollment on track to meet that goal? Overall enrollment is looking pretty decent, but how many of the people who have signed up were previously uninsured?

"That's not a data point that we are really collecting in any sort of systematic way," Cohen told the insurance-industry crowd on Thursday when asked how many of the roughly 4 million enrollees were previously uninsured.

Nicely done.  The PPACA was passed first and foremost to bring insurance to the uninsured.  I always thought that the Left misunderstood (accidentally or on purpose, I do not know) the nature of the uninsured and thus overestimated what impact the PPACA would have in this regard.  But one way or another, you would track the impact, right?  I can just imagine trying to explain to my old boss Chuck Knight why we spent billions to gain new customers for a product but didn't track how many new customers we gained.

Postscript:  Here is my prediction -- The Administration will declare that no one had "real" insurance (as they define it) so everyone in the exchange was previously uninsured.

Today I have yet another person with a full disability settlement (e.g. from Social Security) telling me that they are fully capable of working and pestering me to hire them.  The rub is that paying them any money would endanger their disability payments, so they ask me to pay the money to someone else (husband, child) or to pay them off books in cash.  Essentially, they are asking me to violate the law in order the help them violate the law.

Why would I take this risk?  Last year I had 21,000 people sign up on a mailing list looking for work.

Perhaps I am somehow an outlier because I hire so many older folks, but I get dozens of request like this a year.  You can't convince me that the disability system is not broken.

One of my favorites writers Megan McArdle comments on my post about the regulatory excess in California.  The same post was linked by Reason as well.  The Reason post got the attention of Ron Paul, who will be interviewing me for his radio show next week.

I posted a few updates on the article today:

Wow, reading this again, I left out so much!  An employee once sued us at this location for harassment and intimidation by her manager -- when the manager was her sister!  It cost me over $20,000 in legal expenses to get the case dismissed.  I had an older couple file a state complaint for age discrimination when they were terminated -- despite the fact that our entire business model is to hire retired people and the vast majority of our employees are 70 and older.  And how could I have forgotten the process of getting a liquor license?  I suppose I left it out because while tedious (my wife and I had to fly to California to get fingerprinted, for example), it is not really worse than in other places -- liquor license processes are universally bad, a feature and not a bug for the established businesses one is trying to compete with.   We gave the license up pretty quickly, when we saw how crazy and irresponsible much of the customer base was.  Trying to make the place safer and more family friendly, we banned alcohol from the lake area, and faced a series of lawsuit threats over that.