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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25963 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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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.

I can't speak for the American bureaucracy but in Sweden I can fairly confidently say that most of bureaucracy is public service minded, and to the extent I've interacted with other western European bureaucracies they have been too.

People of course complain about the actions of the bureaucracy but this mostly comes off as them disagreeing with the stated goals of the bureaucracy but blaming the personal motives of the workers.

America seems like it's becoming partisan to truly stupid degrees so maybe the bureaucracy at large really is out to get people for ideological reasons, but I have a hard time believing this.

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.

I don't know what the law says here but usually these things are handled by laws giving fairly wide powers to governmental agencies to fulfill their mission as defined by the executive. They are indirectly accountable through the executive (and legislature through whatever overarching laws there are). If there is no legal basis for this agency exacting fees for this kind of category of inspections then it does seem iffy.

I can of course not speak for US law, I'm not very interested in this particular case, I just commented on the claim that the bureaucracy isn't public service oriented, which I disagreed with.

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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