Coyote Blog

Kevin Drum opines:

What happens when you combine "fast track" procurement, minimal
oversight, pork-based contracting, and a comprehensive lack of
responsibility for results? Well, you get the Bush administration, of
course. More specifically, you get the Coast Guard's disastrous
Deepwater program. Nadezhda runs through the grim details.

This is perhaps the single greatest fallacy that props up big government.  Specifically, the notion that corruption, inefficiency, and stupidity are failures in government related to certain individuals.  The implication is that if only "our party" was in control, big government would be great.  Except that both parties have had their chances in alternating fashion for 70 years (what I would call the era of really big government) and government has been a mess regardless of who has been in control. 

People like Hayek and Friedman have written who books about it, so I want try to elucidate the whole theory, except to summarize that the nature of incentives in government, particularly the big sacrifice-one-group-for-another government we have today, will ALWAYS lead to massive failures.  Period.

I wrote over a year ago that statism always comes back to bite its creators, because no matter how beautiful the machinery of government control, you can never control for the human beings who get behind the levers.  At that time I pointed to three fallacies, of which the third is particularly relevant to this post:

• You don't have the right to make decisions for other people.
  Period.  No matter how high-minded and idealistic you want to portray
  it, at the end of the day you are proposing to use force to coerce
  another man into doing your will.  You may stop them from using force
  or fraud against others, but an adult may make decisions for
  themselves, even if they are bad.  I am reminded of a great line from
  the HBO show Deadwood, "Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?"

• You can't make better decisions for other people, even if you
  are smarter, because every person has different wants, needs, values,
  etc., and thus make trade-offs differently.  Tedy Bruschi of the
  Patriots is willing to take post-stroke risks by playing pro football again I would never take, but that doesn't mean its a incorrect decision for him.

• Technocratic idealists ALWAYS lose control of the game.  It may
  feel good at first when the trains start running on time, but the
  technocrats are soon swept away by the thugs, and the patina of
  idealism is swept away, and only fascism is left.  Interestingly, the
  technocrats always cry "our only mistake was letting those other guys
  take control".  No, the mistake was accepting the right to use force on
  another man.  Everything after that was inevitable.

It would be nice to think that we are this numerous:

These federal intrusions are especially scorned by
independent voters in the Western states where Republicans have been
losing ground, like Colorado, Nevada, Arizona and Montana. Western
Democrats have been siphoning off libertarian voters by moderating
their liberal views on issues like gun control, but Republicans have
been driving libertarians away with their wars on vice and their
jeremiads against gay marriage (and their attempt to regulate that from
Washington, too).

Libertarian voters tend to get ignored by political strategists
because they're not easy to categorize or organize. They don't
congregate in churches or union halls; they don't unite to push
political agendas. Many don't even call themselves libertarians,
although they qualify because of their social liberalism and economic
conservatism: they want the government out of their bedrooms as well as
their wallets.

They distrust moral busybodies of both parties, and they may well be
the most important bloc of swing voters this election, as David Boaz
and David Kirby conclude in a new study for the Cato Institute.
Analyzing a variety of voter surveys, they estimate that libertarians
make up about 15 percent of voters "” a bloc roughly comparable in size
to liberals and to conservative Christians, and far bigger than blocs
like Nascar dads or soccer moms.

I am not sure I believe it - many of the people who claim to be small government turn into statist technocrats when the right issue comes up.

I will say that the Internet and blogging in particular has really brought many libertarians to the surface.  I wrote about the phenomena of libertarians and blogging here.

David Boaz of Cato makes this comment in the context of an article on suppressing speech in modern South Africa:

In the last days of apartheid, some libertarians pointed out to South
Africa's rulers that if they left a government broadcasting operation
in place, they would one day regret the way a different government
would use it. Looks like that day has come.

This is a point I make time and time again.  When statists push their policies, it is always with the assumption that they themselves will be in control of the government machinery they create.  In contrast, the miracle of the US Constitution was that the government was constituted with the assumption that rogues and scoundrels would take control, and the founders put protections in place to limit the damage these scoundrels could do to our individual liberties.

As I said previously:

I am reminded of all this because the technocrats that built our
regulatory state are starting to see the danger of what they created.
A public school system was great as long as it was teaching the right
things and its indoctrinational excesses were in a leftish direction.
Now, however, we can see the panic.  The left is freaked that some red
state school districts may start teaching creationism or intelligent
design.  And you can hear the lament - how did we let Bush and these
conservative idiots take control of the beautiful machine we built?  My
answer is that you shouldn't have built the machine in the first place
- it always falls into the wrong hands.  Maybe its time for me to again invite the left to reconsider school choice.

Today, via Instapundit, comes this story about the GAO audit of the decision by the FDA to not allow the plan B morning after pill to be sold over the counter.
And, knock me over with a feather, it appears that the decision was
political, based on a conservative administration's opposition to
abortion.  And again the technocrats on the left are freaked.  Well,
what did you expect?  You applauded the Clinton FDA's politically
motivated ban on breast implants as a sop to NOW and the trial
lawyers.  In
establishing the FDA, it was you on the left that established the
principal, contradictory to the left's own stand on abortion, that the
government does indeed trump the individual on decision making for
their own body  (other thoughts here).
Again we hear the lament that the game was great until these
conservative yahoos took over.  No, it wasn't.  It was unjust to scheme
to control other people's lives, and just plain stupid to expect that
the machinery of control you created would never fall into your
political enemy's hands.

As I concluded before, even Star Trek figured out this whole technocrat losing control of the fascist state thing 40 years ago.

A frequent topic of this blog is to point out situations where technocrats translate their distrust for individual decision-making into the justification for government control. 

Kevin Drum provides me with one of the best examples I have seen of late of this phenomena of using distrust of individual decision-making to justify government intervention, in part because he is so honest and up-front about it.  I usually try not to quote another blogger's posts in total, because I want to give folks an incentive to go visit the site, but in this case I need to show the whole thing (the extensive comments are still worth a visit):

If we treat healthcare like any other market, allowing consumers
free rein to purchase the services they like best, will it produce high
quality results? A recent study suggests not:

Researchers
from the Rand Corp. think tank, the University of California at Los
Angeles and the federal Department of Veterans Affairs asked 236
elderly patients at two big managed-care plans, one in the Southwest
and the other in the Northeast, to rate the medical care they were
getting. The average score was high "” about 8.9 on a scale from zero to
10.

....In the second part of their study, the medical researchers
systematically examined 13 months of medical records to gauge the
quality of care the same elderly patients had received....The average
score wasn't as impressive as those in the patient-satisfaction
surveys: 5.5 on a 10-point scale. But here's the interesting part:
Those patients who graded the quality of their care as 10 weren't any
more likely to be getting high-quality care than those who gave it a
grade of 5. The most-satisfied patients didn't get better medical care
than the least-satisfied.

Surprise! Patients are
poor judges of whether they're getting good care. And if consumer
preferences don't map to high quality care, then a free market in
healthcare won't necessarily produce better results or higher
efficiency, as it does in most markets.

Back to the drawing board. Perhaps a national healthcare system
would be a better bet to reduce costs, cover more people, provide
patients with more flexibility, and produce superior outcomes. After
all, why are we satisfied with allowing the French to have a better
healthcare system than ours even though we're half again richer than
them?

There is it, in black and white:  Most of you individual slobs out there cannot be trusted to make good health care decisions for yourselves, so the government should do it for you.  (And by the way, who the hell thinks the French have a better health care system, but that's off-topic for today).

Here is the false premise:  If the intellectuals who ran the study judged that the individuals involved were getting poor care when the individuals themselves thought is was good care, this does not necessarily mean the individuals being studied were wrong.  It may very well mean they have different criteria for judging health care quality and value.  In fact, what goes unquestioned here, and I guess the reader is supposed to swallow, is that there is some sort of Platonic ideal of "high-quality care" that the people who run this study have access to.

But this is ridiculous.   Does high-quality mean fast?  painless?  private?  successful?  pleasant? convenient?  I, for example, have all the patience of an 8-year-old who just ate three pieces of birthday cake washed down by two Cokes.  I need stuff now, now, now.  I hate gourmet restaurants where meals take 3 hours.  Many gourmands, on the other hand, would probably shoot themselves before eating some of the food I eat.  We have different standards.

Let's take an example from another industry:  Cars.  Every year, the "experts" at Consumer Reports and Car and Driver try out all the new cars and publish the two or three they think are the best.  So, does this mean that everyone who does not buy one of these cars selected by the experts as the best are making a bad decision?  Does this fact tell us the government should step in and buy their cars for them because they can't be trusted to make the right evaluations?   NO!  Of course not.  It means that the people who buy other types of cars have different criteria and priorities in judging what a "high-quality" car is.  Some want high gas mileage.  Some want a tight interior with leather.  Some want a big honkin' engine.  Some want a truck jacked way up in the air.  Some want room to carry five kids.   You get the idea.

There are at least two better explanations for the study results.  Let's first be clear what the study results were:  The study found that the patients studied graded health care differently than did the people who ran the study.  That's all it found.  This could mean that the intellectuals who ran the study and the individuals studied judged care on different dimensions and with different priorities.  Or it could mean that the individuals studied had incomplete information about their care and their choices.  Neither justifies a government takeover of the industry.  (In fact, to the latter point about information, markets that are truly allowed by the government to be free, which health care has not, often develop information sources for consumers, like the car magazines mentioned above.)

The thinking in Drum's post betrays the elitist-technocratic impulses behind a lot of the world's bad government.  Look at "progressive" causes around the world, and you will see a unifying theme of individual decisions that are not trusted, whether its a poor Chinese farmer who can't be trusted to choose the right factory work or an American worker who can't be trusted to make her own investment decisions for retirement.

Postscript:  In some past era, I might have called this one of the worst excuses for fascism I had ever heard.  Unfortunately, Brad DeLong recently took that title with his post that the government needs to take even more money from the rich because the rich are ostentatious and that hurts other people's feelings.  No really, I don't exaggerate, he said exactly that.  If somehow you have missed this one, look here.

I have written a number of times that one of the problems with the Katrina aftermath was not that the federal government did too little, but that they try to do too much.  For example:

While turning down offers to help, when everyone agrees not enough
is being done, may seem unthinkable, these are actually predictable
outcomes from a [government] bureaucracy of technocrats.  Technocrats value process
over results, order and predictability over achievement.  More
important than having problems fixed is having an ordered process,
having everything and everyone under control.  In this context, you can
imagine their revulsion at the thought of having private citizens
running around on their own in the disaster area trying to help
people.  We don't know where they are!  We don't know what they are
doing!  They are not part of our process!  Its too chaotic! Its not
under control!

Nearly everyone who is in government has a technocratic impulse -
after all, if they believed that bottom up efforts by private citizens
working on their own was the way to get things done, they would not be
in government trying to override those efforts.  But most emergency
organizations are off the scale in this regard.  99% of their time,
they don't actually have an emergency to deal with - they are
planning.  They are creating elaborate logistics plans and procedures
and deployment plans.  Planners, rather than people of action,
gravitate to these organizations.  So, once a disaster really hits, the
planners run around in circles, hit by the dual problem of 1) their
beautiful plans are now obsolete, since any good general can tell you
that no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy and 2) they are
by nature still planners, trying to get order and process underway and
create a new updated plan, rather than just getting every possible
resource out there fixing the dang problem.

Kerry Howley in Reason's Hit and Run discusses a similar problem in Southeast Asia in the aftermath of the deadly Tsunami:

A year and a half after the deadliest tsunami in recorded history, a
pan-Asian warning system seems about as likely as, say, competent
airport security stateside. So Sri Lankans have poured donations into
DIY monitoring stations, using the Web and volunteers to watch for quakes...

How do officials react to the exciting new world of distributed warning technology?

But the government does not want ad-hoc tsunami warning centres handing out advice to local communities.

"Only the Met Department is authorised to give tsunami warnings and
evacuation orders. They cannot do it. It is illegal. That creates
unnecessary panic," Darmaratne said.

Just as in the Katrina aftermath, the government answer is that we would rather have nothing happen than positive efforts occur that we don't control (or take credit for).

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution makes a point I have been trying to communicate for some time now:

It's naive to only blame particular people (Bush, Cheney et al.) and
depressing when people at CT claim that if only "our guys" had been in
power everything would have been ok.  When you see the same behaviour
again and again you ought to look to systematic factors.  And even if
you do believe that it is all due to Bush, Cheney et al. it's not as if
these guys came to power randomly, they won twice.  The worst
get on top for a reason.  As a result, government ought to be designed
(on which see further below) so it works when the knaves are in power and not just when the angels govern.

I made a similar point in this post:

Over the past fifty years, a powerful driving force for statism in this
country has come from technocrats, mainly on the left, who felt that
the country would be better off if a few smart people (ie them) made
the important decisions and imposed them on the public at large, who
were too dumb to make quality decision for themselves.  People aren't
smart enough,they felt, to make medication risk trade-off decision for
themselves, so the FDA was created to tell them what procedures and
compounds they could and could not have access to.  People couldn't be
trusted to teach their kids the right things, so technocrats in the
left defended government-run schools and fought school choice at every
juncture.  People can't be trusted to save for their own retirement,
so  the government takes control with Social Security and the left
fights giving any control back to individuals.  The technocrats told us
what safety equipment our car had to have, what gas mileage it should
get, when we needed to where a helmet, what foods to eat, when we could
smoke, what wages we could and could not accept, what was and was not
acceptable speech on public college campuses, etc. etc....

the technocrats that built our regulatory state are starting to see the
danger of what they created.  A public school system was great as long
as it was teaching the right things and its indoctrinational excesses were in a leftish direction.
Now, however, we can see the panic.  The left is freaked that some red
state school districts may start teaching creationism or intelligent
design.  And you can hear the lament - how did we let Bush and these
conservative idiots take control of the beautiful machine we built?  My
answer is that you shouldn't have built the machine in the first place
- it always falls into the wrong hands.

I am particularly amazed of late at the popular leftish criticism of Bush that he was too slow after 9/11 (spending 10 extra minutes with the school kids), too slow during Katrina, and too slow entering the diplomatic fray in Lebanon.  I can't remember who, but someone lately was quoted publicly saying that they were frustrated with Bush taking vacations and that they would never vote for someone with a ranch.  Is that really the dual criticisms that people have of Bush?  That 1) he is evil and an idiot and 2) they want him to get involved faster and more aggressively in more types of problems?

Here's something everyone should know, which I have embodied in Coyote's Second Law (here's the first) which states:

Any person elected to government office has their effective IQ cut in half

I don't know if politicians wake up from this fog when they leave office or not.  I can easily imagine Bill Clinton, a man who is supposed to have a high out-of-public-office IQ, slapping his head and saying "did I really go running into Somalia and running right back out after the first casualties?' or maybe even better "jeez, I can't believe I turned down the chance to take Bin Laden into custody -- what was I thinking".  Whichever the case, governments are always stupid, even those made up of people provably of high IQ in their private lives.  Tabarrok has this humorous but depressing observation:

The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons

Like Tabarrok, I think the bar has to be pretty high to send our military into battle, and I never thought the situation in Iraq justified the excursion.  However, perhaps differing from Tabarrok, I am sensitive to historic precedent and thus doubt that defense can always just end at our borders.  While I think the Bush administration is overly optimistic to think that Iraq will become a shining beacon of democracy that will help rally the democratic forces in neighboring countries, I also think Bush opponents are overly optimistic when they say that terrorists and Middle Eastern fascists will leave us alone as long as we just keep our distance.  There are too many historical reminders that the latter is not true.  Sometimes you do have to go over there to kick their ass before they come over here.  Afghanistan probably met this criteria, but I don't think Iraq did - Iraq feels more like the Gulf of Tonkin, a war certain people in power wanted to fight and for which they needed a public excuse.

All this means that I think that the number of times we need to go out and fight wars overseas is greater than zero and less than what we actually do.  I'm not smart enough, I guess, to make a clearer policy statement, but I would be really interested to ask all those who think they would have prevented Israel and its neighbors from going to war for the 47th time if only they had been in office what their coherent policy statement would be.

A while back, I observed that liberal statists and technocrats were upset that conservative statists were using the machinery of big government they created for the "wrong" ends:

I am reminded of all this because the technocrats that built our
regulatory state are starting to see the danger of what they created.
A public school system was great as long as it was teaching the right
things and its indoctrinational excesses were in a leftish direction.
Now, however, we can see the panic.  The left is freaked that some red
state school districts may start teaching creationism or intelligent
design.  And you can hear the lament - how did we let Bush and these
conservative idiots take control of the beautiful machine we built?  My
answer is that you shouldn't have built the machine in the first place
- it always falls into the wrong hands.  Maybe its time for me to again invite the left to reconsider school choice.

Today, via Instapundit, comes this story about the GAO audit of the decision by the FDA to not allow the plan B morning after pill to be sold over the counter.
And, knock me over with a feather, it appears that the decision was
political, based on a conservative administration's opposition to
abortion.  And again the technocrats on the left are freaked.  Well,
what did you expect?  You applauded the Clinton FDA's politically
motivated ban on breast implants as a sop to NOW and the trial
lawyers.  In
establishing the FDA, it was you on the left that established the
principal, contradictory to the left's own stand on abortion, that the
government does indeed trump the individual on decision making for
their own body  (other thoughts here).
Again we hear the lament that the game was great until these
conservative yahoos took over.  No, it wasn't.  It was unjust to scheme
to control other people's lives, and just plain stupid to expect that
the machinery of control you created would never fall into your
political enemy's hands.

Suprisingly, James Taranto in Best of the Web, who I sometimes find too partisan and socially conservative for my tastes, makes a similar point:

Liberal Democrats take credit for creating an enormous government, which, according to them, doesn't work--but would work just fine if only the populace were smart enough to elect liberal Democrats.

In sum: Republicans favor small government but embrace big government when they have the power to control it. Democrats favor big government but insist that it can work only when they have the power to control it. Politicians in both parties, then, seem to see government as a means to the same end: their own political power. Little wonder that voters are suspicious of government.

Andrew Ferguson tells the story of federal regulation of toilets (via overlawyered).  The amazing thing about this story is it is just one examples of thousands -- in other words, its not a humorous outlier, it is the rule of how government works today.  It is a common story of technocrats distrusting market signals and individual preferences, hoping to impose a better order from above, but merely resulting in reduced consumer choice and crappy low-flow toilets even in areas of the country flush with water (sorry, couldn't resist).

The grassroots revolt winked out too. Today's toilets are better than the
first 1995 models, though not as good or as cheap as the toilets of our youth.
U.S. consumers in 2006 can thus buy a worse product at a higher price than they
could in 1992, thanks to the government's insistence on fixing a problem that
wasn't there.

With a chill I remember, from the late 1990s, the look a plumber shot me when
I pleaded with him, quietly, to find me a toilet that worked.

``No way,'' he said. ``I'm not going to jail over a toilet.''

It also is yet another example of regulation primarily being supported by incumbents in an industry trying to limit the number of ways potential new competitors can come at them.  The general effect is always to raise prices and reduce consumer choice.  Ironically, consumer groups are often the worst about this.   In fact, it would be interesting to find even one regulation consumer groups have supported that is not primarily aimed at actually reducing consumer choice - i.e. not of the form "consumers shouldn't buy this because we smarter than they are and we think they should not have it."

Frequent readers of this blog know that I have a particular disdain for technocrats and the damage they do via government coercion.  Just to make sure that I am not subject to the Princess Bride accusation of "You keep using that word -- I do not think it means what you think it does", I will define my terms.

In my parlance, a technocrat is someone who believes that individuals, either acting alone or in groups, are making the wrong decisions and that a few very smart people can make things better for everyone by overriding everyone else's decision-making. 

Technocrats sometimes have a "macro" flavor, focusing on the broad sweep of the economy, seeing market failures everywhere that they feel they could override if only someone would follow their "plan".  This hubris was of course one of the foundations for that juggernaut Soviet Russian economy, and was in fact the thinking behind America's closest brush with fascism, Roosevelt's NRA, which was modeled on Mussolini's economic work.  My college roommate Brink Lindsey has a lot of background on the early 20th century roots of technocratic opposition to capitalism in his book Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism.

Technocrats also can have a "micro" flavor, focusing on individuals who they feel are making bad decisions for their own selves.  Classic examples are helmet and seat belt laws, where "smarter" people use government coercion for your own good.  We typically call these micro technocrats nannies.  I discussed governments overriding individual decision-making here.

Just the other day I mentioned in this post that I had had a conversation with a technocrat who was:

lamenting that allowing a company like GM to die is dumb, and that a
little bit of intelligent management would save all those GM jobs and
assets.  Though we did not discuss specifics, I presume in his model
the government would have some role in this new intelligent design (I
guess like it had in Amtrak?)

I went on to describe why it was OK to let GM fail.  In particular I noted that it was bad for everyone to artificially force quality assets (people and facilities) to remain in an under-performing corporate structure, which is what the government in effect does when it tries to override the market's decision that a corporation needs to die.

I bring this all up because I saw this classic example of technocratic statism from David Ignatius in the Washington Post. 

Economist Philip Verleger was traveling in Asia last month when the news
broke that General Motors was slashing 30,000 jobs to try to reverse its death
spiral. A Japanese economist he had known for many years asked him a stark
question: "What great nation will allow its major manufacturing company to
fail?"

The convulsions wracking GM are scary, but they're getting surprisingly
little attention amid America's sea of other troubles. Certainly, we've heard
barely a peep out of the Bush administration, which evidently worries more about
keeping energy companies happy than Rust Belt manufacturers. Commentators have
blamed GM management for being too shortsighted and its workers for being too
greedy. But few people seem to appreciate that the nation as a whole has a stake
in maintaining a dynamic industrial base, or that government policies could help
reverse our industrial decline....

But suppose we took GM's near-death experience as a national wake-up call and
decided to get serious about reviving the long-term health of the U.S.
manufacturing sector. What if political leaders treated this as a fundamental
national mission, equivalent to President John F. Kennedy's call to put a man on
the moon? Could government make any difference?

Try this thought exercise: Suppose a government plan could revitalize the
automobile industry and the rest of the transportation sector, encouraging it to
leapfrog several generations of technology; suppose this same plan could cut
U.S. dependence on foreign oil to zero; and suppose, finally, that the plan
could develop new technologies that would bump our economy to a higher growth
path and foster U.S. economic leadership in the 21st century. Would that idea be
worth exploring?

Yes, good idea, lets hand over the automobile industry to the same folks who built and maintained the levees in New Orleans.  It is interesting he quotes a Japanese economist chiding the US for letting its major companies fail.  The author is basically advocating the Japanese MITI approach, making technology choices and managing industries and preventing large organizations in which national pride is somehow tied up from failing.  Which, of course, has resulted in a 15 year recession in Japan.  And Europe.  Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek responds further:

I'm tempted to do a long riff here on all the details that Ignatius misses "“
such as, for example, the fact that it's simply not true that as goes GM so goes
America; such as the fact that there is
nothing at all special or inherently better about manufacturing and
manufacturing jobs over service-sector production; such as the fact that
infecting decisions about investment and production with politics will reward
political appeal at the expense of genuinely economically sound uses of
resources.

But it's late, so I'll just point you to Ignatius's closing paragraph:

I'm no technologist, so I can't evaluate the technical details of Lovins's
proposal. What I like is that it's big, bold and visionary. It would shake an
America that is sitting on its duff as foreign competitors clobber our
industrial giants, and it would send a new message: Get moving, start
innovating, turn this ship around before it really hits the
rocks.

This paragraph reflects an attitude that is rich soil for totalitarianism to
take root. It ignores individual freedom; it ignores the possibility that the
admired Big Plan might be flawed, either technologically or economically or
both. Ignatius is all orgasmic simply because The Plan is centralized and Big
and (allegedly) will compel or inspire the masses once again to behave in ways
that promote national greatness.

Heaven help us.

If you think he is exaggerating, as many people do, by invoking the threat of fascism, go back and read what the fascists of the 1930's were writing.  It is nearly identical to Ignatius's words.

There are two lessons technocrats never learn:  1) Their grand plans never work and 2) The statist machinery they create via their grand plans is always taken over from the well-meaning by the power-hungry and corrupt.  As I stated before:

Technocratic idealists ALWAYS lose control of the game.  It may feel
good at first when the trains start running on time, but the
technocrats are soon swept away by the thugs, and the patina of
idealism is swept away, and only fascism is left.  Interestingly, the
technocrats always cry "our only mistake was letting those other guys
take control".  No, the mistake was accepting the right to use force on
another man.  Everything after that was inevitable

And, in fact, you are seeing just this today, as technocrats on the left lament that the machinery of state control they created, from the FDA to public schools, is being taken over by their political enemies.  Unfortunately, they lament the loss of control, not creating the all-powerful state in the first place.  Much more on this topic here and here.

Postscript:  I tossed off the statement above about letting the same organization that built the New Orleans levees fix the automobile industry.  That quick joke makes a valid point, but I should mention that Ignatious does try to preempt this argument:

But then, who can expect individuals to act responsibly when we have an
administration that asserts, in apparent sincerity, that the proper response to
our massive deficits is more tax cuts that plunge us even deeper into debt?
We've become so inured to public-sector mismanagement that the idea of
government solving problems is almost laughable.

In effect, he is arguing that yes, the government has mismanaged things, but this is only because they did not let the really smart people run things.  This is a particularly seductive argument for the left, where most technocrats reside, since it lets them say that government is inefficient only because that idiot Bush is in charge. 

But this ignores the fact that the stupid and corrupt always take over the machinery of state.  Technocrats love railroads, and think America is stupid for not riding the train, like those brilliant Europeans are.  Many supposedly smart people, both Democrats and Republicans, have had their shot at Amtrak, and it still sucks and loses money.  One reason among many for this failure is that incentives matter.  The government has the incentive to patronize powerful voting blocks, not to run an efficient operation or serve customers well.  That's why we get half-billion dollar bridges in Alaska to islands with populations of fifty people.  That's why scientific decisions at the FDA get politicized.  That is why have the government backing a technology ostensibly to reduce fossil fuel use (ethanol) that has been proven to actually increase fossil fuel use.  In effect, government always turns smart people stupid.  More on the specific dangers of government industry building here.

Another Postscript: By the way, people smarter than me do change industries all the time.  The are called "entrepeneurs" and they raise capital from people voluntarily and they succeed or fail only if individuals choose to do business with them.  I find it fascinating to compare Sam Walton with Mr. Ignatius.  Sam Walton raised money voluntarily to support a different vision of retailing, and was successful because many, many people have chosen voluntarily to shop at his stores.  Mr. Ignatius wants to change the automobile industry at the point of a gun, using government's coercive power to force companies to adopt certain technologies and build cars in certain ways, funding the effort with tax dollars taken unwillingly from productive Americans.  Isn't it amazing that "progressives" will want to rally around Mr. Ignatius's vision while excoriating Wal-mart at every turn? 

OK, another Postscript:  At the heart of many of Mr. Ignatius's concerns, and of many people on the left, is that America is "losing" to other countries.  Could someone on the planet please provide maybe just one single fact to support what they mean by this.  I mean, I hear this all the time, but what is it referring to?  Other than, of course, the lamentable fact that 43-year-old Ivy League educated men still can't stop ending sentences with a preposition.

Since 1990, the US economic growth rate has dusted that in most of Europe and Japan.  Only developing nations like China have growth rates that outpace us, and I guess that is what these folks are worried about.  But this is what is never said:  If you don't want countries like China to "catch up" with the US in technology and economy, then you have to be willing to consign billions of people to eternal poverty.  It is amazing to me that "progressives"  who ostensibly care about the poor get so upset when countries like China develop real capabilities that can finally pull themselves out of poverty.  Inevitably, as they do this, they will do some things better than we do.  Over time, our economies will shift, as we do the things we are good at and vice versa.  I know this is kind of novel for some - its an idea that has only been around for 200 years or so.  Having other people get wealthier is only a threat if you believe economics are zero-sum, another urban legend popular on the left that can be demolished with about 5 seconds thought.

One of the virtues of being a bit older is that you can start personally observing history repeating itself.  In the late 80's and early 90's everyone was running around screaming that we were "losing" to Japan and we had to imitate their statist technocratic approach.  Fortunately we did not.  Only in politics could you hear people like Mr. Ignatius being taken seriously when they scream "our economy is losing - lets go out and imitate the people losing even worse"

Update: Sorry this is getting so long, but I can't ignore Virginia Postrel on the same topic of technocrats:

Competition provides not only useful criticism but a continuous
source of experiments. It gives people...the ideas with which to create still
more progress and encourages them, too, to come up with incremental
improvements. By picking winners, stasist protectionism eliminates this learning
process, which includes learning what does not work.

"Premature choice," warns the physicist Freeman Dyson, "means betting all
your money on one horse before you have found out whether she is lame."
Protecting established interests from new challengers is one form of premature
choice. But technocratic planners also sometimes kill existing alternatives to
force their new ideas to "succeed." To protect the space shuttle, NASA not only
blocked competition from private space launch companies, it also eliminated its
own expendable launchers. Such pre-emptive verdicts often mark public works
projects. Planners pick an all-purpose winner, squeeze out alternatives, and
eliminate any real chance of experiment and learning.

Consider the infamous Denver International Airport. Aviation officials touted
the $4.9 billion project as essential to keep up with the region's growth. They
promised it would be a vast improvement over the old Stapleton Airport, which
was often socked in by bad weather. But its sponsors foisted DIA on unwilling
customers. The airport is 25 miles outside Denver, pretty much in the middle of
nowhere, while Stapleton was just 15 minutes from downtown. To make matters
worse, there are no hotels near DIA. And the new airport's cost per passenger is
somewhere between $11.75 and $18.14, depending on how you count--substantially
more than either the $4.59 at Stapleton or the $9.91 promised by former Mayor
Federico Pena. Frequent travelers resent the inconvenience and the generally
higher ticket prices. "I liked Stapleton better," one told The Denver Post. "You
could literally leave about 45 minutes before your plane departed. With DIA, you
have to leave an hour and a half before." A flight attendant expressed a common
sentiment: "It's a beautiful airport. But we hate it."

On the airport's first anniversary, journalists had trouble reaching a simple
verdict on DIA. There were complaints all right--lots of them. But some
passengers liked the spiffy new airport, with its marble floors and inviting
shops. And flight delays had in fact dropped dramatically. The first-anniversary
stories were confused, lacking a central theme.

The reporters had missed the main problem: The city had eliminated the most
obvious source of feedback--competition from the old airport. It had made DIA a
protected monopoly rather than an experiment subject to competitive trial. By
shutting down Stapleton, DIA's political sponsors had made it impossible to rule
the new airport a definite error. No matter how many complaints passengers
lodge, officials can always point to other advantages. At the same time,
however, DIA's monopoly keeps it from becoming an accepted success. Without a
genuine trial, we simply have no way to tell whether travelers (or airlines)
would rather trade a convenient location for fewer weather-related delays. One
airport must fit all: Love it or hate it, if you're flying from Denver you don't
have a choice.

Technocrats often decry competition as wasteful, and always use examples of failed companies and poor private technology choices (e.g. dot com bust companies) as an example of inefficiency of a competitive marketplace that technocrats could avoid.  As Postrel points out, though, these individual failures are not failures of the system, but rather are triumphs.  In the immortal words of the Microsoft tech center, they are a feature, not a bug, and a critical feature at that.

Every once in a while I post something off the cuff and find retroactively that I have tapped into a rich source of blogging material.  Such is the case with my post a couple of days ago about technocrats on the left regretting loss of control of the statist institutions they created.  In that article I cited examples of the left freaking out over a conservative-controlled FDA halting over-the-counter approval of the Plan B morning after pill and the injection of certain conservative dogmas (e.g. intelligent design) into public schools.  The moral was that the left is lamenting the loss of control, when they should be reevaluating the construction of the regulatory state in the first place.

David Bernstein at Volokh brings us another example with the Solomon Amendment, the legislation that requires universities that accept public funds to allow military recruiters on campus.  Folks on the left hate this act, many because they oppose the military at all junctures while others more narrowly oppose recruiting as a protest against the Clinton-era "don't ask, don't tell" policy law brainchild.  Eskridge and Polsby debate the pros and cons at the ACS Blog.  I tend to be sympathetic to the private universities, who rightly don't feel like acceptance of federal money or research grants should negate their control of their institution.

But my point is not the merits of the Solomon Amendment, but to point out the irony, very parallel with the FDA and public schools examples previously:  The Solomon Amendment is built sturdily on the precedent of Federal Title IX legislation, legislation that is a part of the bedrock of leftish politics in America.  Title IX first established the principal that the Federal government could legally override the policy-making and decision-making at private universities if they accepted any federal cash.  It was the left that fought for and celebrated this principal.  The left ruthlessly defended the state's right to meddle in private universities in substantial ways, and passed legislation to shore Title IX up when the Supreme Court weakened state control (from the Bernstein post):

The Court's attempt to preserve some institutional autonomy for universities
from anti-discrimination laws caused uproar among liberal anti-discrimination
activists. They persuaded Congress to pass the "Civil Rights Restoration Act."
This law ensured that if a university receives any federal funds at all,
including tuition payments from students who receive federal aid, as in Grove
City's case, all educational programs at that university are subject to Title
IX.

The Solomon Amendment is modeled after the Civil Rights Restoration Act's
interpretation of Title IX.

In fact, in the linked articles, Solomon is being attacked by the left precisely because it does not allow universities the freedom to set their own anti-discrimination policy (in this case, banning recruiters judged discriminatory to gays), when the whole issue of Title IX was precisely to override a university's chosen anti-discrimination policy (or lack thereof).  So again we have the case of the left building an government mechanism to control private decision-making, and then crying foul when their political enemies take control of the machinery.

In my naive youth, I would have assumed that this contradiction would quickly be recognized.  However, the left (and the right too, but that is for another post) has been able for years to maintain the cognitive dissonance necessary to support the FDA's meddling in every single decision about what medical procedures and compounds a person can have access to while at the same time arguing that abortion is untouchable by government and that a woman should make decisions for her own body.  In this case, it will be interesting to see if the left is able to simultaneously decry state control of discrimination policies at private universities in Solomon while continuing to support state control of private university discrimination policies as essential in Title IX.

Correction: You learn something every day.  I called don't-ask-don't-tell a "policy, as I had assumed that it was merely an internal military policy.  Apparently it is a law.

The other day, I wrote about the left of late lamenting that the machinery of state control that they created, agencies like the FDA and public schools, are being taken over by their political enemies, the "Neanderthal southern religious conservatives".  I observed that they were not apologizing for creating a statist structure to control individual decision-making, but just were upset they lost control of it.

In using the FDA as one example:

Today, via Instapundit, comes this story about the GAO audit of the decision by the FDA to not allow the plan B morning after pill to be sold over the counter.
And, knock me over with a feather, it appears that the decision was
political, based on a conservative administration's opposition to
abortion.  And again the technocrats on the left are freaked.  Well,
what did you expect?  You applauded the Clinton FDA's politically
motivated ban on breast implants as a sop to NOW and the trial
lawyers.  In
establishing the FDA, it was you on the left that established the
principal, contradictory to the left's own stand on abortion, that the
government does indeed trump the individual on decision making for
their own body  (other thoughts here).
Again we hear the lament that the game was great until these
conservative yahoos took over.  No, it wasn't.  It was unjust to scheme
to control other people's lives, and just plain stupid to expect that
the machinery of control you created would never fall into your
political enemy's hands.

That has spurred a lot of email pointing me to other FDA-related articles.  I posted this one in the updates of that same post, pointing out how the FDA process (and the tort process, by the way) puts a much higher value on a life lost to drug side-effects than to a life saved from drug benefits.

Today I was pointed to this article by Derek Lowe who has been a drug development researcher for a number of years:

As a drug discovery researcher, I can tell you something that might sound
crazy: many of these older drugs would have a hard time getting approved today.
Some of them would never even have made it to the FDA at all.

The best example is aspirin itself. It's one of the foundation stones of the
drug industry, and it's hard to even guess how many billions of doses of it have
been taken over the last hundred years. But if you were somehow able to change
history so that aspirin had never been discovered until this year, I can
guarantee you that it would have died in the lab. No modern drug development
organization would touch it.

Thanks in part to advertisements for competing drugs, people know that there
are some stomach problems associated with aspirin. Actually, its use more or
less doubles the risk of a severe gastrointestinal event, which in most cases
means bleeding seriously enough to require hospitalization. Lower doses such as
those prescribed for cardiovascular patients and various formulation
improvements (coatings and the like) only seem to improve these numbers by a
small amount. Such incidents, along with others brought on by other oral
anti-inflammatory drugs, are the most common severe drug side effects seen in
medical practice....

That brings us up to penicillin, a drug with a clean reputation if ever there
was one. But at the same time, everyone has heard of the occasional bad allergic
reaction to it and related antibiotics. Even with the availability of skin tests
for sensitivity, these antibiotics cause about one fatality per 50 to 100,000
patient courses of treatment. Other severe reactions are twenty times as common.
Those are interesting figures to put into today's legal context: over 9 million
prescriptions were written for Vioxx, for example. Any modern drug that directly
caused that number of patient deaths and injuries would bury its company in a
hailstorm of lawsuits, because (unlike the Vioxx cases) there would be little
room to argue about

Over the past fifty years, a powerful driving force for statism in this country has come from technocrats, mainly on the left, who felt that the country would be better off if a few smart people (ie them) made the important decisions and imposed them on the public at large, who were too dumb to make quality decision for themselves.  People aren't smart enough,they felt, to make medication risk trade-off decision for themselves, so the FDA was created to tell them what procedures and compounds they could and could not have access to.  People couldn't be trusted to teach their kids the right things, so technocrats in the left defended government-run schools and fought school choice at every juncture.  People can't be trusted to save for their own retirement, so  the government takes control with Social Security and the left fights giving any control back to individuals.  The technocrats told us what safety equipment our car had to have, what gas mileage it should get, when we needed to where a helmet, what foods to eat, when we could smoke, what wages we could and could not accept, what was and was not acceptable speech on public college campuses, etc. etc.

Throughout these years, libertarians like myself argued that there were at least three problems with all of this technocratic statism:

• You don't have the right to make decisions for other people. Period.  No matter how high-minded and idealistic you want to portray
  it, at the end of the day you are proposing to use force to coerce another man into doing your will.  You may stop them from using force or fraud against others, but an adult may make decisions for themselves, even if they are bad.  I am reminded of a great line from the HBO show Deadwood, "Can you let me go to hell the way I want to?"

• You can't make better decisions for other people, even if you are smarter, because every person has different wants, needs, values, etc., and thus make trade-offs differently.  Tedy Bruschi of the Patriots is willing to take post-stroke risks by playing pro football again I would never take, but that doesn't mean its a incorrect decision for him.

• Technocratic idealists ALWAYS lose control of the game.  It may feel good at first when the trains start running on time, but the technocrats are soon swept away by the thugs, and the patina of idealism is swept away, and only fascism is left.  Interestingly, the technocrats always cry "our only mistake was letting those other guys take control".  No, the mistake was accepting the right to use force on another man.  Everything after that was inevitable.

I am reminded of all this because the technocrats that built our regulatory state are starting to see the danger of what they created.  A public school system was great as long as it was teaching the right things and its indoctrinational excesses were in a leftish direction.  Now, however, we can see the panic.  The left is freaked that some red state school districts may start teaching creationism or intelligent design.  And you can hear the lament - how did we let Bush and these conservative idiots take control of the beautiful machine we built?  My answer is that you shouldn't have built the machine in the first place - it always falls into the wrong hands.  Maybe its time for me to again invite the left to reconsider school choice.

Today, via Instapundit, comes this story about the GAO audit of the decision by the FDA to not allow the plan B morning after pill to be sold over the counter.  And, knock me over with a feather, it appears that the decision was political, based on a conservative administration's opposition to abortion.  And again the technocrats on the left are freaked.  Well, what did you expect?  You applauded the Clinton FDA's politically motivated ban on breast implants as a sop to NOW and the trial lawyers.  In establishing the FDA, it was you on the left that established the principal, contradictory to the left's own stand on abortion, that the government does indeed trump the individual on decision making for their own body  (other thoughts here).  Again we hear the lament that the game was great until these conservative yahoos took over.  No, it wasn't.  It was unjust to scheme to control other people's lives, and just plain stupid to expect that the machinery of control you created would never fall into your political enemy's hands.

OK, rant over.  No one wants to hear "you asked for it", but that is indeed my answer to many of the left's laments today about conservatives taking over their treasured instruments of state control.  I hate to be a geek here, but even Star Trek figured out this whole technocrat losing control of the fascist state thing 40 years ago.

Update:  Wow, I am not that skilled with reading academix-speak, but I am pretty sure that Ed Glaeser via Margina Revolution is saying the same thing:

Soft paternalism requires a government bureaucracy that is skilled in
manipulating beliefs.  A persuasive government bureaucracy is inherently
dangerous because that apparatus can be used in contexts far away from the
initial paternalistic domain.  Political leaders have a number of goals, only
some of which relate to improving individual well-being.  Investing in the tools
of persuasion enables the government to change perceptions of many things, not
only the behavior in question.  There is great potential for abuse.

Update:  Cafe Hayek discusses how the FDA is failing even technocratic objectives and this is an amazing data-rich in-depth analysis of the FDA vs. markets in managing drug risk/reward choices:

The debate over off-label prescribing is not about perfect safety; it is about
whether unavoidable trade-offs are best made for everyone by a centralized authority
such as the FDA or whether those decisions are best made by patients and doctors
acting independently. Whoever makes a decision to try (patient), prescribe (doctor),
or approve (FDA) a drug must face the trade-off between the costs of prescribing a
potentially unsafe medicine (a type II cost) and the costs of not prescribing a drug
that could have saved a life (a type I cost)....

The FDA tends to overemphasize the cost of using a potentially unsafe medicine,
because type II costs are highly visible and result in punishment of the FDA, whereas
type I costs are invisible and do not result in punishment.

If the FDA approved a drug that killed thousands of people, that story would make
the front page of every newspaper in the nation. Congressional hearings would certainly he held, the head of the FDA would probably lose his or her job, and the agency would be reorganized. But if the FDA rejected a drug that could save thousands of people, who would complain? When a drug kills a patient, that person is identifiable, and family and friends may learn the cause of the death. In contrast, the patient who would have lived, had new drugs been available, is identifiable only in a statistical sense. Family and friends will never know whether their loved one could have survived had the FDA not delayed the introduction of a new drug. In some cases the drug that could have saved the patient's life is never created, because the costs of the FDA's testing procedures make the necessary research and development appear unprofitable...

Patients and doctors do not face the same biased incentives as the FDA and thus
tend to pay more attention to the costs of not using a drug that could save a life.

Those of you who wanted a strong federal welfare-nanny-state response to New Orleans, you have got your wish:

It is impossible to over-emphasize the extent to which this area is
under government occupation, and portions of it under
government-enforced lockdown. Police cars rule the streets. They (along
with Humvees, ambulances, fire apparatus, FEMA trucks and all
official-looking SUVs) are generally not stopped at checkpoints and
roadblocks. All other vehicles are subject to long lines and snap
judgments and must PROVE they have vital business inside the vast
roped-off regions here. If we did not have the services of an off-duty
law enforcement officer, we could not do our jobs in the course of a
work day and get back in time to put together the broadcast and get on
the air.

This is not poor federal management - this is exactly-what-you-always-get federal management.  Putting a premium on control and process over results is built into their DNA.  My prediction is that those areas outside federal control and allowed to be accessible to private aid and to individuals who want to, yeah I know its crazy, come into the area and take responsibility for fixing their own house rather than waiting for the feds to do it for them will fair much better in the long run.  More on the federal urge for technocratic control here  and here and here and here.

Something about this reminds me of an observation made over and over in interviews with American soldiers from WWII.  They recounted that in German villages, after a battle, the German citizens were out in the streets, starting to clean up and rebuild before the dust had even settled, while in France, villagers would just sit forlornly in the debris and wait for someone to come do something about it.

Update:  I know you are getting tired of these stories, but here is yet another example of the FEMA folks opposing private relief efforts in the name of "control". 

Starting right after midnight I began receiving calls from FEMA, HHS,
TRANSCOM and other groups whose acronyms I still cannot explain.  LCDR
Kennedy from FEMA called to understand what I was trying to do.  I told
him.  Fifteen minutes later Mimi Riley, Deputy Director from NDMS
called to beg me in a plaintive and exhausted voice not to carry out
this mission.  She had many reasons "“ you need doctors on the plane,
Chicago is too far from their home, how will we track the patients,
this is a military operation and we were not military. 

I
explained to her that we had two doctors on the plane one of whom was a
retired Air Force Doctor who had run the military hospital in Baghdad
after the invasion.  I thought we could trust him to run an airplane of
people from New Orleans to Knoxville.  We were working with NDMS
hospitals in Tennessee and Chicago so they would have a good tracking
system.  (I guess Mimi never heard of the Great Migration of African
Americans from New Orleans and the south to Chicago after the flood of
1927 and during the Depression.  Many people from New Orleans are more
at home in Chicago than Houston. )

Mimi was unmovable.  We
were not military and that was that.  She tried to sound grateful for
our intentions but she was not going to have outsiders help.  I even
offered to GIVE her the planes and the crews and the hospitals and let
her run it through her NDMS system but she would have none of it.  She
asked me at least to delay until noon the next day and I said I would
try.

A good revamp of FEMA after this is all over would put a heavy emphasis on private action and FEMA's role in aiding rather than controlling and limiting this effort.  Unfortunately, I don't expect that to be the outcome.  I fear that large government technocrats and lefties who are always suspicious of private bottom-up action will control the agenda in framing the FEMA debate.

OOPS:  Did I say that technocrats and lefties distrusted anything but top-down federal power.  I forgot the righties as well (from dubya's speech the other day):

It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal
authority and a broader role for the armed forces -- the institution of
our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a
moment's notice.

Sounds like Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.  As a libertarian, I dread the next election.  Two parties competing to see who can enhance federal power more.  Blech.

Yet another:

The patients and staff at Methodist could have been evacuated before
Hurricane Katrina hit. But instead they were condemned to several days of fear
and agony by bad decision-making in Louisiana and the chaotic ineptitude of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some of the patients died.

Incredibly, when the out-of-state corporate owners of the hospital responded
to the flooding by sending emergency relief supplies, they were confiscated at
the airport by FEMA and sent elsewhere.

Preface:  Over the years, technocrats have always had a distaste for capitalism.  Their desire has always been the curb to bottom-up disorder and inherent chaos of succesful capitalism with top-down order and control.  In the early half of the 20th centruy, the leading economic argument against capitalism was technocratic-fascist:  That capitalism and competition were wasteful and disorderly and should be replaced with a more orderly state control.  The ultimate legislative result of this thinking was FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act, his emulation of Mussolini-style corporate fascism which was fortunately struck down by the Supreme Court.

While numerous large-scale failures of state economic control have mostly beaten back the technocratic argument, we can still see the fundamental failure of this approach in the last few weeks with the government's handling of the Katrina recovery:

A few days ago I had thoughts on top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to hurricane relief.  After watching the relief effort over the last couple of days, I am more convinced than ever that part of the problem (but certainly not all of it) with the relief effort is the technocratic top-down "stay-in-control" focus of its leadership.  Take stories like this:

Lots of
people including yours truly have volunteered to bring (including food,
generators, food, etc., to be self sufficient for a week or so) the most
important thing which is a boat but have been told NO under no uncertain terms.
"My" town is under water, people are in critical condition, and I have skill
sets and assets - including a boat which will come out of the hole in 14 inches
of water - and we are being denied the opportunity to help. And quite frankly,
that REALLY PISSES ME OFF.

And this:

A visibly angry Mayor Daley said the city had offered emergency,
medical and technical help to the federal government as early as Sunday
to assist people in the areas stricken by Hurricane Katrina, but as of
Friday, the only things the feds said they wanted was a single tank
truck.
[...]
Daley said the city offered 36 members of the firefighters' technical
rescue teams, eight emergency medical technicians, search-and-rescue
equipment, more than 100 police officers as well as police vehicles and
two boats, 29 clinical and 117 non-clinical health workers, a mobile
clinic and eight trained personnel, 140 Streets and Sanitation workers
and 29 trucks, plus other supplies. City personnel are willing to
operate self-sufficiently and would not depend on local authorities for
food, water, shelter and other supplies, he said.

While turning down offers to help, when everyone agrees not enough is being done, may seem unthinkable, these are actually predictable outcomes from a bureaucracy of technocrats.  Technocrats value process over results, order and predictability over achievement.  More important than having problems fixed is having an ordered process, having everything and everyone under control.  In this context, you can imagine their revulsion at the thought of having private citizens running around on their own in the disaster area trying to help people.  We don't know where they are!  We don't know what they are doing!  They are not part of our process!  Its too chaotic! Its not under control!

Nearly everyone who is in government has a technocratic impulse - after all, if they believed that bottom up efforts by private citizens working on their own was the way to get things done, they would not be in government trying to override those efforts.  But most emergency organizations are off the scale in this regard.  99% of their time, they don't actually have an emergency to deal with - they are planning.  They are creating elaborate logistics plans and procedures and deployment plans.  Planners, rather than people of action, gravitate to these organizations.  So, once a disaster really hits, the planners run around in circles, hit by the dual problem of 1) their beautiful plans are now obsolete, since any good general can tell you that no plan ever survives first contact with the enemy and 2) they are by nature still planners, trying to get order and process underway and create a new updated plan, rather than just getting every possible resource out there fixing the dang problem.

The army has had to deal with this conundrum for years.  How do you have soldiers who are good planners before a battle, but men of action and initiative once the battle is underway?  How do you run a fundamentally top-down organization such that when it matters, individuals will take the initiative to do what needs to be done?  Its a really hard problem.

Unfortunately, I fear that the lessons from this hurricane and its aftermath will be that we need more top-down rules and authority rather than less.  It is the technocrats on the sidelines who are most appalled by the screw-ups, and will demand more of whatever next time.

Here is an example of what I think we should do instead.  Let's accept that we can't plan for everything, can't have every resource stockpiled for an emergency, and that our biggest resource is our private citizenry.  Let's provide rules of engagement for 3rd parties to come into the disaster area and help with minimum supervision.  There might be different rules for trained rescue people and untrained private citizens.  Here is an example of the type of thing that might work better:

Every private citizen with a boat larger than X and a draft less than Y who would like to help can bring their boat and three days food and clothing to such and such boat ramp.  All municipal firefighters and rescue teams that want to help, come to such and such building, check in, and we will assign you a sector.  Rescue crews need to bring their own food, equipment, and waterproof paint to mark the buildings you have searched.  Then, go out to the boat ramp, find a boat and driver in the pool there, and go.  FEMA will bring in a fuel truck to refuel boats and will indemnify all boat owners for damages.  All survivors found should be brought back to the dock, and ambulances will be standing by.

Update: OK, I know some of you don't believe that this is a control issue for the bureaucrats.  Well, here is more evidence, from the Red Cross web site, via Instapundit.

Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

• Access
  to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local
  authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply
  cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.
• The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and
  continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into
  New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people
  from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

Update #2:  Still reluctant to believe that control over the process is more prized by bureaucrats than results?  Try this, from CNN and via Instapundit:

Volunteer physicians are pouring in to
care for the sick, but red tape is keeping hundreds of others from
caring for Hurricane Katrina survivors while health problems rise.

Among
the doctors stymied from helping out are 100 surgeons and paramedics in
a state-of-the-art mobile hospital, developed with millions of tax
dollars for just such emergencies, marooned in rural Mississippi.

"The
bell was rung, the e-mails were sent off. ...We all got off work and
deployed," said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich
of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"We have
tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here,"
he said. That government officials can't straighten out the mess and
get them assigned to a relief effort now that they're just a few miles
away "is just mind-boggling," he said....

It travels in a convoy that includes
two 53-foot trailers, which as of Sunday afternoon was parked on a
gravel lot 70 miles north of New Orleans because Louisiana officials
for several days would not let them deploy to the flooded city, Rich
said....

As they talked with
Mississippi officials about prospects of helping out there, other
doctors complained that their offers of help also were turned away.

A
primary care physician from Ohio called and e-mailed the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services after seeing a notice on the
American Medical Association's Web site about volunteer doctors being
needed.

An e-mail reply told him to watch CNN that night, where
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt was to
announce a Web address for doctors to enter their names in a database.

"How crazy is that?" he complained in an e-mail to his daughter.

Dr.
Jeffrey Guy, a trauma surgeon at Vanderbilt University who has been in
contact with the mobile hospital doctors, told The Associated Press in
a telephone interview, "There are entire hospitals that are contacting
me, saying, 'We need to take on patients," ' but they can't get through
the bureaucracy.

"The crime of this story is, you've got millions
of dollars in assets and it's not deployed," he said. "We mount a
better response in a Third World country."

Update #3:  Yes, there's more.  The Salvation Army has also been blocked, and the reason?  Their efforts did not fit snugly into the technocrats plans (via Cafe Hayek):

As federal officials tried to get some control over the deteriorating
situation in New Orleans, chaos was being replaced with bureaucratic rules that
inhibited private relief organizations' efforts.

"We've tried desperately to rescue 250 people trapped in a Salvation Army
facility. They've been trapped in there since the flood came in. Many are on
dialysis machines," said Maj. George Hood, national communications secretary for
the relief organization.

"Yesterday we rented big fan boats to pull them out and the National Guard
would not let us enter the city," he said. The reason: a new plan to evacuate
the embattled city grid by grid - and the Salvation Army's facility didn't fall
in the right grid that day, Hood said in a telephone interview from Jackson,
Miss.

"No, it doesn't make sense," he said.

Update #4:  I can't help myself.  Here is another:

The Fox News Channel's Major Garrett was just on my show extending the
story he had just reported on Brit Hume's show: The Red Cross is
confirming to Garrett that it had prepositioned water, food, blankets
and hygiene products for delivery to the Superdome and the Convention
Center in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, but were blocked from delivering those supplies by orders of the Louisiana state government, which did not want to attract people to the Superdome and/or Convention Center.

Update #whatever-I-am-up-to: Welcome Instapundit readers!  I have posted a follow-up on big government and disaster preparedness here.

Technorati Tags:  Katrina, Economics

In my post on "Respecting Individual Decision-Making",  which to-date I consider my favorite post, I wrote:

As a capitalist and believer in individual rights, one of the things
I notice a lot today is just how many people do not trust individual
decision-making.  Now, I do not mean that they criticize other people's
decisions or disagree with them -- in a free society, you can disagree
with anybody about anything.  I mean that they distrust other people's
free, private decision-making so much that they want the government to
intervene.

Interestingly, most people don't think of themselves as advocating
government interference with people's private decisions.  However, if
you ask them the right questions, you will find that they tend to fall
into one of several categories that all want the government to
intervene in individual decision-making in some way:  nannies,
moralists, technocrats, and progressive/socialists.  Though the
categories tend to overlap, they are useful in thinking about some of
the reasons people want to call in the government to take over parts of
people's lives.

I then spent a lot of time with examples from each category.  On Sunday, Keith Thompson in the San Francisco Chronicle (of all places) wrote an article about his disaffection with the left, which said in part:

A certain
misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally
capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their
lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view
of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence
political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

I'm not sure that he and I are in exactly the same place, but we are both looking for allies who are consistent in their defense of classical liberal values and individual rights.

In a related post, Mickey Kaus, who I seldom read because he spends more time than I care on inside-the-beltway political tactics and media stuff, has an interesting related post about the left and trusting people to do right by their own lives.  Kaus resists permalinks, but the gist is:

Two good critiques of the ubiquitous, left-pleasing menace, George Lakoff--by Marc Cooper and Noam Scheiber. Oddly, neither attacks Lakoff at what would seem to be his central weak point, namely his conflation of politics and parenting--identifying "conservative" values with "the strict father" and "liberal" values with the "nurturant parent."

Is a country really like a family? Isn't that an idea with a ... checkered
history? A family is a relationship between inherently unequal,
not-completely-free people--parents and children. A country, at least
in one American conception, is the relationship of equal, autonomous
people. Using the family as the template for politics stacks the deck against social equality (the value I'd suggest as the liberal touchstone). For one thing, it lends itself all too easily to the condescending liberal notion of compassion,
an anti-populist idea if there ever was one. It's also horribly
misleading as a guide to practical policies--no wonder that when
Scheiber asks Lakoff about President Clinton's welfare reform, Lakoff
responds "Why did he have to do that? ... I still don't understand it
fully." In Lakoff's mind, Clinton wasn't changing the welfare system,
he was beating his family's children! Aren't there values that aren't
family values?

A good example of that in recent debate has been social security.  As I argued before:

Advocates for keeping forced savings programs like Social Security in
place as-is by necessity argue that the average American is too stupid,
too short-sighted, and/or too lazy to save for retirement without the
government forcing them.  Basically the argument is that we
are smarter than you, and we are going to take control of aspects of
your life that we think we can manage better than you can.  You are
too stupid to save for retirement, too stupid to stop eating fatty
foods, too stupid to wear a seat belt, and/or too stupid to accept
employment on the right terms -- so we will take control of these
decisions for you, whether you like it or not.  For lack of a better
word, I call this intellectual welfare.

Given these fairly accurate descriptions of the state of liberalism in America, it is ironic that several weeks ago, Kevin Drum made the following observation:

Whenever I talk about the underlying principles that should guide liberals, as
I did a couple of days ago, one of the ideas that always pops up is privacy
rights. In fact, it comes up so often that it strikes me that we're missing a
bet by not making a bigger deal out of it.

The reason, Mr. Drum, is that a true privacy right defined as you are considering it (in particular, one defined broadly enough to give women an absolute right to abortion) would undermine much of the left's statist agenda.   A true privacy right would force the government to respect individual free decision-making, and require that the government allow individuals to make what elites might consider are bad decisions for themselves. 

Does the Left really want broad privacy rights, or just a constitutional justification for abortion?  If they really want a general primacy of a woman's decision-making over their bodies, why do they support abortion yet oppose letting women choose breast augmentation or the use of Vioxx?  Why do the same leftist politicians that oppose parental approval or even notification for teenage abortion simultaneously support requiring parental permissions for teenagers to use tanning salons?  Why do they resist random searches for terrorists but support such searches to enforce seat belt laws?

As I wrote here,

A true privacy right would allow us complete freedom over who we sleep
with, what we do with our bodies, where we work, and what we pay for
goods.  And, not incidentally, how we choose to invest for our
retirement.  Both parties want the government to control parts of our
lives, so don't expect either Conservatives or liberals to be pushing
the privacy issue very hard.

The government is not our parent, not our boss, not our priest, and not our partner.  It is our servant.  Unfortunately, a large element behind creeping statism in this country is a desire by both left and right to "correct" individual decision-making, even when those decisions affect no one but the actor himself.

I thought I had written myself dry on this topic with this long post, which got a lot of nice links around the blogospere.

However, this article by Michelle Cottle quoted approvingly by Kevin Drum is such a great example of government-as-mom fascist control of individual decision-making that I had to link it:

As a nation, Americans are apparently too stupid (or stubborn) to recognize that Big Macs and Big Gulps aren't the foundation of a healthy diet, but thanks to several gazillion dollars in direct-to-consumer drug advertising, we all consider ourselves experts in pharmacology.

....No matter what kind of qualifiers, disclaimers, and helpful tips Merck scrawls across Mevacor's box (or, more likely, crams onto a package insert printed in type so tiny it will make your eyes bleed), a fair number of self-medicating geniuses will think that the best way to prevent heart disease is to take two Mevacor for every six pieces of fried chicken they plan to eat that night. Don't laugh. It will happen and happen frequently.

It must be so wonderful to be in Ms. Cottle's shoes, to have your life so absolutely perfectly put together that you have both the time and the superior intellect to take over my life as well.  In two short paragraphs, she manages to highlight a number of statist tendancies that it took me thousands of words to describe.  At the same time, she makes a hash of my categorization scheme by simultaneously combining traits of three of my four categories, including Nanny's (you can't be trusted with your diet), technocrats (we can make more informed medication choices for you than you can yourself), and socialist-progressives (you are merely an zombie reacting mindlessly to advertising).  Wow.

As a capitalist and believer in individual rights, one of the things I notice a lot today is just how many people do not trust individual decision-making.  Now, I do not mean that they criticize other people's decisions or disagree with them -- in a free society, you can disagree with anybody about anything.  I mean that they distrust other people's free, private decision-making so much that they want the government to intervene.

Interestingly, most people don't think of themselves as advocating government interference with people's private decisions.  However, if you ask them the right questions, you will find that they tend to fall into one of several categories that all want the government to intervene in individual decision-making in some way:  nannies, moralists, technocrats, and progressive/socialists.  Though the categories tend to overlap, they are useful in thinking about some of the reasons people want to call in the government to take over parts of people's lives.

By the way, before I get started, just to avoid straw-man arguments like "well, you just want 12-year-olds to have sex with dogs", there are three philosophical limitations that apply to decisions made by individuals or between individuals:

• The decisions or agreements are made without fraud or physical coersion
• The decisions are made by adults (the very definition of adulthood is the legal ability to make decisions for oneself)
• Decisions and areements don't violate the constitutional rights of others

That being said, here are examples of the government interventionism of  nannies, moralists, technocrats, and progressive/socialists.

Continue reading ‘Respecting Individual Decision-Making’ »

It is not that often I get the opportunity to find something about taxes and markets in Kevin Drum's column that I agree with, but his guest blogger Paul Glastris has a good series of posts on state and local tax breaks, and even direct subsidies, for relocating businesses (first post here).  Glastris argues for the elimination of these tax breaks and subsidies, and I agree 100% with this conclusion, though not necesarily his legal justification for doing so (more on that later).

I have written a number of times about my frustration with a particular type of these subsidies - the public financing of stadiums for private sports teams (here, here, and here).  This stadium construction is usually undertaken as a result of corporate blackmail, where sports teams threaten to move unless they get a new stadium.  The dynamics of other tax breaks and subsidies to relocating businesses referred to by Glastris are usually similar, though these companies don't tend to have the monopsony power of sports franchises so they often get a smaller payout.

Why do local governments pay out huge incentive to corporations who after all have to put their business somewhere?  The answer is that they are caught in a classic prisoner's dilemma.  Basically, in this "game", each participant has individual incentives that seem to point to a certain set of actions.  Unfortunately, when players follow these incentives, the result is sub-optimized for everyone.

In this example, local authorities see a business that may move to town, and decide it is better to have it in their city with tax concessions than to have it in another city.  Since cities lose some of these battles and win some, and since cities that lose one battle tend to pay more to win the next one, the end result is that businesses end up being distributed fairly evenly, but cities have all given up huge tax concessions.  Clearly the ideal state, at least for city governments, is to not give any tax concessions at all.  In this case, businesses would likely still end up being distributed fairly evenly, but cities would not have given out tax breaks.

The only way to get to this end state is 1) have a philosophic change, with local citizens rejecting the use of government to affect relocation decisions (ie become libertarians!); 2) collude - have the council of mayors get together and sign a no new subsidy pledge or 3) have some higher authority police the local governments (that is the option explored in the Glastris article - can the US Government or courts constitutionally stop this). 

The Washington Monthly, in opposing these tax breaks, has a problem, though.  As good technocrats and liberal interventionists, they wholeheartedly support the government's right to regulate the hell out of business and commercial decision-making.  They can't, therefore, take the much cleaner libertarian argument I do, that the government should not be interfering in free, arms-length commercial decision-making at all. 

They are stuck with narrowly opposing just one kind of government interventionism (tax breaks to business) and this leads to a couple of problems in Galstris's argument.  The first is a consistency problem, which you can see in the attorney's letter Glastris quotes.  He argues in the first paragraph of his letter that these tax breaks violate the commerce clause because they unduly influence interstate commerce, then argues in his second paragraph that these tax breaks have no discernible influence on corporate decision making.  Well, if the second part is true, then their logic in the first part can't be true.

The other problem with their argument is that liberals want a commerce clause, as redefined by courts in the 1930's, as enabling massive government intervention, but in this case Glastris is trying to use it in its pre-1930's use, which was restrictive.  If the Glastris wants to take the position that the commerce clause limits state and local businesses from trying to change the decision-making and cost structure of businesses engaged in interstate commerce, wouldn't this same logic extend to making unconstitutional state-based business regulations?  If you can't give a local tax break to a certain industry, doesn't that mean you can't give a higher tax (say on lodging) to another industry?  The specific words of the Ohio decision referenced says:

... the tax scheme discriminates against interstate commerce by granting preferential treatment to in-state investment and activity.

I might ask, if you take this argument, wouldn't laws that make in-state investment and activity less attractive than other states also be unconstitutional? 

One final note.  As a libertarian, I have gone through phases on targeted tax breaks.  There have been times in my life when I have supported tax breaks of any kind to any person for any reason, by the logic that any reduction in taxation is a good thing.  I know there are many libertarians that take this position.  Over time, I have changed my mind.  First, targeted tax breaks seldom in practice reduce the overall tax burden - they tend to be made up somewhere else.  Second, these tax breaks tend to be gross examples of the kind of government coercive technocratic meddling in commerce and individual decision-making that I despise.  Almost always, they are trying to get individuals to do something they would not otherwise do, so in practice they tend to be distorting and carry all kinds of unintended consequences (as well as being philosophically repugnant).