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Notes -
In the past I've heard a lot of jokes about "The People's Republic of Pennsylvania". I don't know much about the state, but the Secretary of Agriculture has been making news lately.
The latest evolving story is about Rusty Herr and Ethan Wentworth who ran a bovine reproductive services company called "NoBull Sires, LLC".
The dispute arose back in 2010 because the Ag Department sent them a cease and desist plus a statement of fine on the grounds that using an ultrasound was practicing veterinary medicine without a license. The counter argument was that the Ag Department was out of scope of the law. Routine checks don't meet the requirement of "diagnosis and treatment" for practising veterinary medicine, even if they involve an ultrasound machine.
Notably the Ag Department seems to have never filed the paperwork with a court, which is a prerequisite for enforcement. So they were likely aware of the legal issues. In 2020 the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medicine Association sent a complaint to the Department of State.
On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.
So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.
There is a culture war angle here. The press seems to be reluctant to get involved for a few reasons. These days they like to defer to the bureaucracy, particularly when the Governor is from the right party. Plus Pennsylvania is in play for 2024 so they are reluctant to kick up a fuss that could help Trump.
I'm only finding coverage in the farming press right now and they don't really dive into the legal issues.
https://www.lancasterfarming.com/farming-news/news/livestock-ultrasound-operators-jailed-accused-of-unlicensed-vet-practice/article_39004570-fcd8-11ee-8396-1f8ec41b214f.html
https://agmoos.com/2024/04/17/pregnancy-is-not-a-disease-two-men-jailed-without-bail-for-repro-ultrasounding-of-dairy-cows/
So again we see that whatever the supposed rules and procedures about how these things are “supposed to” work, in reality what matters is what you’re able to get men with guns to enforce. (As I’ve said before, a lesson I learned in 7th grade.)
And this gets to one of my common political arguments and frustrations — the perennial criticism of my support for restoring human authority and decision-making. In (the portion I watched of) Benjamin Boyce’s interview with Aydin Paladin, he makes this standard argument against her monarchism: but if you have a king, then won’t he become a tyrant, and take away people’s freedom by enacting a parade of horribles… all of which, Aydin pointed out in reply, are things which democratically-elected governments have done. People ask ‘what if the local aristocrat makes an unfair/unjust/tyrannical decision?’ as if modern bureaucracies can’t do the same (and throw in all the sorts of mistakes and irrationalities — like the classic ‘you must fill out and submit Form A before we can give you Form B, you must fill out and submit Form B before we can give you Form A’ class of problems — of which only bureaucracies are capable).
What if Baron Such-and-such throws you in the dungeon without trial? Well, what if the Pennsylvania Ag Department does it? The difference seems to be that the bureaucracy adds diffusion of responsibility. If the Baron locks you up, everyone knows who to blame. But when it’s a faceless bureaucracy, full of jobsworth human cogs, who ‘don’t make the rules, just follow them,’ where nobody is to blame; and, like @pigeonburger notes below, nobody in government really suffers serious consequences.
Some people talk about “Brazilification,” viewing us as moving in the direction of that South American nation. I say should be worried less about becoming like Brazil the country, and more about becoming like Brazil the Terry Gilliam film.
How are kings and nobles going to run anything except through bureauracies? These were things created by kings to run their countries. Kings and aristocrats will still need bureaucrats and courts to run things, your just changing who gets to decide what the laws and regulations are, not the need for them.
I'm mainly going off of Max Weber's ideas of Modernity as marked "rationalization" and the resulting bureaucratization. A king and his aristocrats may need a veritable army of clerks and petty officials (emphasis on "may"), but those need not be bureaucrats.
The key here is the element of "rationalization" that is the replacement of human judgement and leadership with the implementation rigid, "impersonal" procedures — in short, with algorithms, whether carried out by a computer made of silicon and metal, or one made of a mass of human "cogs." It's the same phenomenon that drives "software eating the world" and much of the "Seeing Like a State" problems — you've got to sanitize your data, reduce the dimensionality of the problem, and lump things together before you can enter it into your spreadsheet, feed it into your algorithm. It also relates to the late William Stuntz's lament that our justice system chose the route of "procedural due process" over the alternative of "substantive due process." It's what leads to the archetypal "Karen" asking to speak to a manager — that is, someone with actual human authority, rather than a meat drone of the Machine.
You can read online about any number of kids suspended or expelled from school for absolutely stupid reasons due to "zero tolerance" rules. Why do schools enact these rules? Because it lets teachers and principals evade any responsibility, which would come with the exercise of even the slightest common-sense discretion (which the lawyers advise, to avoid lawsuits). It wasn't this way in schools a century ago, was it? Teachers weren't always this allergic to exercising authority, were they? And if it wasn't always this way, then it doesn't have to be this way.
To quote Wikipedia:
and:
Weber may have thought this inevitable, but I disagree. Do we really need the buck-passing jobsworths "born to be all obsessive and snotty" (to quote Hermes Conrad)? How many of the sort who will argue it's not his fault he tortured a man to death because someone else brought him the wrong person, so their heart condition wasn't on the paperwork. And even worse, the petty tyrants who aren't simply enforcing the rules, and merely use such as cover.
How far apart are "I don't make the rules, I just follow them" and "just following orders," really? Zygmunt Bauman seems to have had similar views. Again from Wikipedia:
How much of this kind of bureaucracy did societies before the Enlightenment and Modernity really have? You say even kings need such to run things. How many of this sort of bureaucrat did Genghis Khan have? Magnus the Good? Alexander of Macedon? Tarquin the Elder? Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui? Sargon of Akkad? How many were in the court of King Kamehameha I? How much bureaucracy does the average Amish community have? How much did the Iroquois Confederacy have? How much do you suppose the builders and inhabitants of Çatalhöyük had? How much bureaucracy do the Sentinelese have?
I've spent much of my life fighting intransigent bureaucracies, and the useless meat machines and petty tyrants that fill them, starting with Anchorage School District administrators. I've spent most of the last year fighting with either Social Security, Alaska's Medicaid department, or both. And I have plenty to say about especially the incompetence of the Anchorage SS office.
I'm tired of these people, and the system that empowers them. I don't want to navigate a stupid "for inconvenience, press 1" automated phone system, I want to talk to a human being. I want to speak to the manager. I want someone to be in charge, someone to be responsible, someone to blame. Whatever it takes to get rid of the Dolores Umbridges, the Carol Beers, even the Hermes Conrads. So many of the people discussed on that "Rationalization" page point to "modernity" and the "Enlightenment" as the root of this process; which is Reason Number One I want the entire Enlightenment project destroyed.
To quote God-Emperor Leto II (from before the awful prequel books retconned the history):
It is worth noting that Dolores Umbridge and Carol Beer are very different phenomena, and the only thing they have in common is that they use femininity as a way of making their obnoxiousness less obvious. But you are not the first person to lump them together - the comments to Scott Aaronson's "blankface" post are a dumpster fire because Scott chooses a word that suggests he is talking about Carol Beer and then writes a long post insisting he is talking about Umbridge.
The basic difference is that Dolores Umbridge does, in fact, have agency, and is abusing it. In Order of the Phoenix Umbridge is a senior official who is given broad discretionary authority by Fudge to root out Hogwarts-based opposition to the regime, and does in fact try to do that (ultimately unsuccessfully) while treating the opportunity to sadistically abuse Harry as a fringe benefit. In Half-Blood Prince she fails upwards to become Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic - which to someone familiar with British bureaucratic titles is a high-level policy making role at the same level on the org chart as a Deputy Secretary or Assistant Secretary in the US executive branch. (The equivalence is complicated by the complete absence of political appointees in the Ministry of Magic), although in so far as we see the internal workings of the Ministry she actually appears to be functioning as Scrimgeour's chief of staff. Umbridge is useful to Power, and Power supports her in her abuse of Harry, and would continue to do so even if they knew everything.
If Curtis Yarvin or Peter Theil was critiquing Fudge's performance, they would see his decision to appoint Umbridge and let her get on with it (including backing her up as necessary when she is e.g. accused by Dumbledore of sadistically abusing students) as a relative high point in his career - he actually tried something that could have worked, and would have worked if Fudge hadn't been forced to resign because Voldemort showed up in person around the time Umbridge was completing her takeover of Hogwarts.
Carol Beer, on the other hand, is a shit-tier grunt with no authority. Her only source of power is that she can refuse to do her job some non-zero fraction of the time without getting fired - and it isn't even clear if she is refusing to do her job, or if she is unable to do it because she does not even have sufficient authority to override the computer. But assuming the unfavourable interpretation, Beer is useless to everyone, and the only reason she gets away with her petty sadism is because her uselessness is beneath the notice of Power. If Karen managed to speak to the manager, Beer would be fired. I suspect if Curtis Yarvin wrote a review of Little Britain, he would say that someone in Beer's reporting line was asleep at the wheel, and needed some encouragement.
The two failure modes (evil backed by Power, and evil operating beneath the notice of Power) both function in the same way regardless of whether Power is personal or bureaucratic. The fundamental case for the Rule of Law and bureaucratic process is that it constrains Dolores Umbridge. The case being made against it in this thread is that it creates Carol Beers. This is a trade-off, and the trade-off is real and is not one-sided in the real world. To give a recent notorious example in the UK, Dominic Cummings noticed and has repeatedly blogged about the legal-accountability-driven incompetence of UK government procurement, including how it was likely to kill people during the COVID-19 pandemic. So during the pandemic he used emergency powers to throw out procurement law and allow the government to just buy PPE from willing sellers. The result was a spectacular feeding frenzy of peculation as people with the right connections realised that selling to the government was now a pure matter of getting into the ministers' in-tray, and that anyone who could do that could buy non-working PPE at retail from dodgy Chinese websites and mark it up even further to the government. The total loss to the taxpayer was c. £4 billion, with the £200 million paid to shell companies linked to lingerie entrepreneur and Tory peer Michelle Mone for unusable PPE being the headline example
There are two sayings I sometimes to use to think about this trade-off:
The Cossacks Work for the Czar. To paraphrase Brad de Long, it isn't immediately obvious if the Cossacks who raided your village are:
What de Long means by "The Cossacks work for the Czar" is that above a certain level of sophistication (which a band of raiding Cossacks crosses), Carol Beers have been weeded out, and you can assume that what the system does or fails to do is the result of (often foolish) choices made by the people in charge of it.
It cannot deal with plain error. The full quote from Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism is about the necessity for both political and legal accountability.
Not firing Carol Beer is an example of plain error. An awful lot of what goes wrong with modern bureaucracies (State and private sector) is that trying to create legal remedies for plain error creates more problems than it solves. But the world where the local Boyar enjoys a de facto droit de seigneur over the peasants as long as he remains useful to the Czar is worse.
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