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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30450 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Do you truly believe classical liberalism is at all viable in a society that's not heavy on small businesses, small companies and independent farmers ?

Look how it ended up the first time - it stopped being viable due to increased scale of businesses. In the US it started getting replaced by the managerial state in late 1930s and this was mostly finished by 1980s.

In case anyone is unclear on what the 'managerial state' is, here's a handy explainer:

The managerial state is the system in which technical–bureaucratic elites, rather than elected politicians or private owners, exercise effective control over economy and society. James Burnham argued that the separation of ownership from control in large corporations produced a new “managerial class” whose power rests not on property but on its command of administrative expertise; the state becomes the ultimate lever, so that “the institutions which comprise the state will … be the ‘property’ of the managers” . Critics such as Samuel Francis add that this regime replaces law with administrative decree, federalism with executive autocracy, and limited government with an unlimited apparatus that pursues open-ended social goals in the name of abstract ideals like equality or positive rights .

World War II was the catalytic moment for America’s managerial turn. Wartime mobilization created vast federal agencies that coordinated production, prices, and labor; the organizational techniques forged in battle were carried into the post-war civilian economy as Washington converted military supply chains to consumer manufacturing, subsidized higher education for millions of veterans (GI Bill), and normalized Keynesian macro-management . The Cold War then locked this arrangement in place: a permanent defense–industrial complex, rising federal share of GDP, and an alphabet soup of regulators (EPA, OSHA, EEOC) extended managerial oversight into labor relations, environmental quality, and social equity, while the new social-science “policy expert” displaced the traditional politician as the central figure in legislation and adjudication .

By the 1970s the managerial state had become bipartisan and self-sustaining. Regardless of which party won elections, power continued to migrate toward executive agencies, independent central banks, and transnational regulatory networks; large corporations operated as quasi-public utilities under federal charter, and citizens were recast as clients whose behavior is continuously shaped by tax incentives, administrative rules, and court orders . The cumulative effect has been a shift from constitutional self-government to what critics call “soft totalitarianism”: an ostensibly apolitical technocracy that expands its jurisdiction by discovering ever-new social problems requiring expert management, while insulating its own authority from democratic reversal .

God, if only big-business-influenced technical-bureaucratic elites really ran things, instead of the ideologically captured bureaucratic and political and academic progressive elites we actually have (on average, of course). It's so weird to conflate Big Business and Big Government in a world where Lina Khan Thought is popular on Left and Right.

Independent central banks are wonderful inventions it must also be said.

In other words, FDR-loving progressives are responsible for the administrative state's regulatory growth and misadventures, not our kindly corporate overlords, who fundamentally wanna make a buck by increasing consumer welfare.

We have not had "an ostensibly apolitical technocracy" in many government agencies in a long time. The DoD and DoJ were some of the best ones here, but public administration theory gave up on neutrality/objectivity as "impossible" a long time ago as a field.

Sadly, the consistent attempt of political neutrality, or even the pretense, was a load-bearing effort, even if imperfect. Hard to get it back now.

Bureaucrats used to be a lot better in the 40s, accumulation of bloat and it all went to the shitter after Carter on purpose lost that lawsuit over competence exams.

In general, yes.

But consider that the State Department has continued to use a very selective hiring process, starting with an exam, this whole time and was corrupted by other forces.

If you have a selective exam but don't get enough applicants because e.g. the wages are not that attractive anymore, or the institution has a bad smell, you're not going to get as good a selection.

e.g.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/U-S-Department-of-State-Foreign-Service-Officer-Salaries-E32768_D_KO24,47.htm?experienceLevel=FOUR_TO_SIX&location=

96-140k. 140K after six years isn't going to get you top talent these days.

I assure you that you have no idea what you're talking about. They get plenty of applicants for the FSOT.

Also, a member of the Foreign Service gets their life heavily subsidized when overseas. It's one of the most competitive entry level jobs out there. https://old.reddit.com/r/foreignservice/comments/1dtl17q/pipeline_funnel_numbers/

Plenty of brilliant people make career decisions based on considerations other than monetary compensation as the primary concern, especially if an early career choice is also considered a good stepping stone for a pivot. (Do you know how much academics make?)

A number of prestigious government careers have a model where effectively it's deferred career compensation, and/or a unique job you can't do elsewhere.

a) The people who were fired at state weren't FSOT?

b) even if you say it doubles compensation, it's still nothing compared to what very capable people can get in law, trading, finance, tech..

You don't want 90th percentile, you want 99.9th percentile people for your important diplomatic roles.

The Foreign Service is who runs State (leaving aside the whole appointee issue). I don't know what the downsizing breakdown was. But that's not what we've been arguing.

You need to understand that monetary comp is but one thing people look for in their careers. And that many ambitious and highly capable people optimize for something other than wealth in their utility function. The IQ -> Income correlation is positive, but weaker than merely "smart people do things to make more money." Salespeople, for example, can be talented and wealthy from hard work and charisma, more than being "very capable" in the same dimensions as a biologist making far less money researching some fly.

Inasmuch as the FSOT is g-loaded at all you're getting pretty smart people into the Foreign Service. But you're also getting ideologically self-selected people. Same general issue as much of academia and teaching and government at large.

You don't want 90th percentile, you want 99.9th percentile people for your important diplomatic roles.

The funny thing about this is how much of US diplomacy is not carried out by career diplomats. Dang appointees.

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Organisms attempt to grow. Unless there is a countermeasure, they will grow. There was for a long time no countermeasure to bureaucracy and therefore it grew.

This is not really true.

Wilson's Bureaucracy does a good job of showing empirical cases where agencies resisted growth and scope creep, but it was hoisted upon them.

Public choice theory is great overall, but Wilson pointed out where it got a little overdone in some respects.

Oh, and it's true because the bureaucracy grew a ton starting in the 30s, but in terms of government civilians it's been flat (and therefore proportionately lower) for some decades now. Of course, spending and regulation has gone up, overall including spending on contractors and NGOs.

There should always be the countermeasure of "can we afford this?"

Deficit spending outside defined emergency conditions ought to be unpermitted.

That seems like an overly narrow definition of bureaucracy. All of the revolving door between the official bureaucracy and the related contractors (with people going back and forth) form the true bureaucracy.

Well, I'd argue "bureaucracy" is an overly narrow conception of what the problem is with "big government."

I don't know how much "revolving door" you think there is, but it's not all that much in my experience in the DoD/IC. Mostly, people leave federal/mil service to become a contractor for more money doing much the same job.

Mostly though, the idea that you can map any given government agency onto a model where it always or by default seeks to maximize its size/budget/power/whatever is empirically false. That is often true, but it's a loose assumption. Or often various subunits of a given agency have ambitious careerists trying to maximize their impact via mission growth, but that is a zero-sum competition by default as the overall agency has a set budget.

Mostly, as someone with a (past) career and professional education in government bureaucracy, I get a bit up in arms about simplistic notions of government bureaucracy because it leads to obvious idiocy like DOGE, instead of actually getting us limited, effective government.

I think honestly any future government would do well to have an automatic sunset to the creation of new agencies. Once a generation we really need to look into whether or not the laws, mandates, regulations, and agencies we built for the crisis of the moment even make sense generations later. It would also prevent those agencies from deciding on their own to do things that harm the country. If you know that in five years your environmental agency will be called to defend its right to exist, you might well think twice before regulating carbon and other common chemicals, or at least keep the regulatory regime as light as possible.

Every year, technically, agencies have to justify their budgets. Any given agency could be eliminated by Congress at nearly any time, if they so chose. The USAID demolition for example is a problem procedurally because Trump is trying to use the executive branch to effectively nullify what the legislative has done in creating and funding it. If you think a weak legislative branch and a lack of separation of powers is a big problem, this is not a positive development overall.

Sunset clauses always sound better in theory than they work in practice as an accountability mechanism. (Just ask the haters of FISA 702 about that.)

Nothing but mandated fiscal responsibility solves the overall problem of government spending growth. Regulatory growth is a harder nut to crack, since no budget is necessarily required. Perhaps law sunsets could help there because they would at least force a review, but that also generates a lot of work that itself could be a pretty big drag.

I’d agree very strongly with balanced budget amendments as good. But I don’t see any way to slow the growth of regulatory agencies other than having the government — be it executive or legislative — have to manually re-approve the agency (with the default being no) at regular intervals will at least allow for review and revision and avoid mission creep. If we have a department of horse welfare in 2025, it doesn’t need to exist anymore because few people need horses for transportation.

If there is some non-trivial amount of work to re-review each regulation, then a balanced budget would also impose limits on at least the number of regulations. It would be harder to account for the impact of a regulation's scope though. Maybe if it was coupled with constitutionally-backed standing to sue if you are affected by a regulation which doesn't meet strict scrutiny for not being over-broad.

The problem is almost never that an agency outlives the original purpose, like horses becoming largely irrelevant.

The problem is that the original purpose is inflated, particularly in a regulatory way. But that's usually not literally the agency's fault. It's usually a combo the Congress and the courts, and/or a presidential initiative. So the Department of Transportation is forever, horses or not. "Do they have good policies?" is the real question and a harder one to answer.

We have the system we have because "we" "wanted" it. Manual reapproval would be very hard to even design--look at how there's gridlock for the budget. Scaling that up won't help us get an effective limited government.

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