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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   28765 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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You dismiss the libertarian approach a little too quickly I think. The modern bureaucracy is still in need of some degree of justification. There are three major problems with bureaucracy:

  1. Political infections. One of the things bureaucracies are used to do is to reward a politicians' constituents by punishing their competitors. There was a good study of anti trust activities taken on by an anti-trust bureaucracy. 98% of the cases followed this pattern.
  2. Principal agent problems. Private markets often pay better. They get the more competent people, and the few competent people that go into government have a retirement plan of big payouts in the private sector. How do you tell your regulators to carry out some aggressive anti-industry stance when most of those regulators are counting on a job at those companies in a decade? Answer: you don't, at "best" you will just aggressively regulate all newcomers out of the market (which incumbent companies love).
  3. Beating market / court regulation. In the free market and in common law court systems there are already existing forms of regulations and limitations. Many pollution situations are covered by property rights violations. Many cases of bad products are covered by fraud in the court system. Shoddy products that don't do much harm are just handled by the market itself.

True. The libertarian approach is likely how I think this should settle legally.

The administrative state would be severely limited if they needed explicit guidance. And since congress struggles to pass sufficient legislation it would mean a very limited state.

I did want to avoid ideological debates though I opened the door to it. Even in the case at hand for what the court will settle on I would not be completely against the state putting agents on private ships but I am against the state putting agents on ships without specific Democratic legislative intent and simply ordered by a bureaucrat. Someone elected should have a connection to it.

This is a decent summary of the case which I would assume you know. And Kagan’s quote I would completely disagree with.

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/17/1224939610/supreme-court-chevron-doctrine

Justice Elena Kagan threw tough hypothetical questions at the challengers' attorneys, asking if federal judges are really the best positioned to answer questions about whether a new cholesterol-lowering product would be a dietary supplement or a drug.

"And it's best to defer to people who do know, who have had long experience on the ground, who have seen a thousand of these kinds of situations," Kagan said, referring to agency experts. "And, you know, judges should know what they don't know."

A Democracy in my opinion still needs some process to decide what a government can do. The process of a mini-legislature won’t happen but we also aren’t going to have another system either.

The main criticism that most judges are ignoring, and most commenters seems to ignore is that the bureaucracy as a whole is not public service oriented. Those are organizations are subject to incentives, they are run by regular people, and if there is congressional oversight that oversight is concerned with winning elections, not writing good legislation.

Its conflict theory vs mistake theory writ large. The libertarian story is that conflict theory explains most of the bureaucracy. But every issue that winds up in front of a court seems to be resolved on mistake theory grounds.

"Ah well, the bureaucracy filled with people that hate you didn't mean to ruin your livelihood and humiliate you, it just accidentally happened over a series of years as congress didn't provide enough oversight into the day to day rules of the organization. And they may have gotten a little too overzealous about applying certain rules."

Its politics all the way through. And I think whatever protections we expect for people to not be fucked over by their political opponents are the same type of protections people should have from bureaucratic over-reach. If that means gutting the bureaucracy then that is a win. No amount of complaining bureaucracies can't effectively legislate is ever going to move me, because I don't fundamentally trust bureaucracies in the first place.

The main criticism that most judges are ignoring, and most commenters seems to ignore is that the bureaucracy as a whole is not public service oriented.

And will never be; that's Pournelle's Iron Law of bureaucracy.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

This somewhat gets too the issue I have with the case at hand of a fisherman being forced to pay the salary of his regulator to be on the boat.

I don’t quite have an issue with the regulator being on the boat as I guess I can think of that situation being necessary for a public good. Which I’m this case overfishing leading to smaller fish catches is definitely a public good.

But I do feel like the person making that decision should be accountable to society and having congress make that decision has accountability even if it’s only a small accountability but having a bureaucrat make the decision feels like their is no accountability or process.

The low level cogs in the machine are mostly blameless. The high level parts of bureaucracies know exactly what they are doing.

Bureaucracies with enforcement powers of any kind are generally going to be worse and more politicized. IRS, ATF, FCC, etc are bad. NASA, BEA, etc are not bad.

Politics is at a level in the US where parties feel it is dumb to just leave weapons lying on the table unused.

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