Wasted, Slow, and Toothless

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The European Union is moving, in its glacially stately pace, toward addressing another vestige of slavery: the use of forced labor in production.

The Council of the EU on Tuesday approved a regulation that would forbid throughout the bloc’s 27 member states the sale of goods made with forced labor either within Europe or outside it.

That’s broader than the US’ ban on forced labor, which is primarily targeted at the People’s Republic of China’s use of Uighur forced labor. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the Council then wasted the effort.

The Council said the regulation will be applied three years and a day after it is published in the European Union’s official register.

There’s no reason for that much delay; it needn’t take that long to adjust supply chains, even by the bureaucrats of European businesses. Eighteen months to two years from enactment is all that’s really needed.

Then,

Investigations into forced labor within the bloc will be led by national governments, whose decisions will be binding on all EU members, the council said.

That’s the toothless part. A national government (Slovakia? Hungary? Germany?) that decides a region’s forced labor matter really isn’t by its own standards would bar all the other 26 member nations from objecting to that region’s use of forced labor as defined by any of those other member nations.

Promises, Promises

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President-elect Donald Trump (R) has nominated a number of folks for various Cabinet and Agency positions. Three, in particular, already are (potentially) having a salutary effect: Matt Gaetz for AG, Robert F Kennedy Jr for HHS, and Pete Hegseth for SecDef.

Folks in those departments now are threatening mass resignations should they be confirmed.

That’s a built-in promise to shrink government employment, and by itself it’s reason enough to confirm Gaetz, Kennedy, and Hegseth. Then hold those bureaucrats to their word.

Another Misapprehension

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Some tax cuts are better than others goes the headline, and that’s true enough. But then the newswriter wanders afield.

…extending the lower individual tax rates that expire after 2025—by far the largest component of any likely tax bill and the one that directly affects the most voters—would put more money in consumers’ pockets without driving a meaningful change in the economy’s long-run trajectory. There is broad bipartisan support for retaining those lower tax levels that Republicans created in 2017, but keeping individual tax rates in place is unlikely to change most people’s decisions about whether and how much to work.

It’s certainly true that not all tax cuts would change, or have any effect, on us taxpayers’ spending behavior. So what? Those favoring higher taxes have yet to articulate a coherent government need for the money, beyond expansive welfare payments and expansive welfare transfers to the States—all without any sort of work requirement.

At bottom, too, it’s our money, not government’s, and we should be the ones who decide how to spend it, or not. Nor do the taxers and government bureaucrats and politicians get to tell us how or whether to spend our money—not directly (that’s part of the intrusiveness of Obamacare that has yet to be corrected), and not indirectly by taxing us and spending our money in government’s name. We’ll allocate our money to our financial needs and desires far more efficiently and with far more specificity than government can ever be capable of.

Full stop.

Chopping Blocks for DOGE

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There are several such in the form of overlapping and shared responsibilities across a variety Executive Branch Departments and Agencies.

Three that come to mind are anti-trust enforcement, which is shared between DoJ and FTC, among others; environmental concerns, which are shared among EPA, Interior, Energy, and DoJ among others; and energy development/production, which is shared among Interior, Energy, and EPA, among others.

There are many more.

What DOGE needs to recommend and what President Donald Trump (R) and Congress (because much of this must be done statutorily) need to do is designate one Department/Agency in each of those areas as the Responsible Department/Agency, remove all responsibility, including the Civil Service positions and authority to consult “outside experts” from the other entities, and return the associated personnel to the private sector (no reallocating them to other areas of the Federal government). This both streamlines government and reduces its size by eliminating the jobs altogether.

With regard to DoJ in particular, that Department’s role in any of this should be limited to bringing cases to court; those personnel are enforcers of existing law, not definers of what the law is or should be (though, in the latter case, they certainly can recommend to Congress).

Another target rich environment for DOGE is entirely within the Pentagon. Defense systems development and acquisition is entirely too byzantine, and that labyrinth contributes in large part to the excessive amount of time—years—it takes the Pentagon to develop a system from an initial idea and to the excessive amount of time—more years—to acquire the systems in operationally useful numbers, once a decision to acquire is made. Those interminable delays also vastly increase the costs of both development and acquisition. Here, too, the Responsible Office needs to be designated, and the number of bureaucrats required to sign off (and the number permitted to sign off) need to be reduced, with the others (particularly the erstwhile required signers) returned to the private sector.

The Pentagon moves need especially to be centered on reducing the civilian workforce and on increasing the role and the responsibility of the Combatant, Transportation, and Materiel Commands, with the Combatant commanders being the sole definers of their requirements and numbers, Transportation and Materiel being the definers of the requirements and numbers needed to satisfy the Combatants’ requirements.

The moves and cuts need to be draconian, too; half measures will only perpetuate the current waste and opportunities for waste.

A Misapprehension

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The headline suggests it.

How Science Lost America’s Trust and Surrendered Health Policy to Skeptics

Science hasn’t lost our trust, not by a long shot. What—who, really—has lost our trust is government bureaucrats who happen to have science degrees. The misapprehensions begin early in the article.

The rise of Robert F Kennedy, Jr, from fringe figure to the prospective head of US health policy was fueled by skepticism and distrust of the medical establishment—views that went viral in the Covid-19 pandemic.

No, it wasn’t. It was fueled by distrust of the government’s bureaucrats who held medical degrees.

People once dismissed for their disbelief in conventional medicine are now celebrating a new champion in Washington. Scientists, meanwhile, are trying to figure how they could have managed the pandemic without setting off a populist movement they say threatens longstanding public-health measures.

Some did have a disbelief in conventional medicine. However, what most of us began to disbelieve was not conventional medicine but the non-conventional positions of those medical degree-holding bureaucrats in our medicine-centered agencies and their naked power grabs via their diktats of how us average Americans must during—and after—the Wuhan Virus situation, with their credibility further damaged by their manufactured hysteria about the severity of a virus whose lethality was a small fraction of one percent except for the slice of our population already afflicted with severe comorbidities or who were very old.

Those bureaucrats’ contemptuous dismissal of us and their equally contemptuous dismissal of a range of paliatives and alternative cures—many of which actually did, and do, work, and many more of which, if not effective, also did no harm. We insisted on following actual science, while those bureaucrats pursued their personal power, and in some cases, their pocketbooks.

Those bureaucrats also too often dismissed research that supported those alternative treatments and with equal disdain research that called into question the risks of the Wuhan Virus vaccines on offer. Many (most?) of those researches were, in fact, highly questionable. Some were quite sound, though, and the bureaucrats’ shotgun dismissal of all of them—generally without explanation, holding us average Americans as too grindingly stupid or ignorant to understand—further damaged their credibility.

Nor did those degreed bureaucrats care a farthing about our children—the portion of our population uniquely immune to the virus. Lock them out of school these Know Betters demanded, then required, isolate them from their peers, friends, adults other than their parents—even from their grandparents, uncles, and aunts. We’re seeing now the damaging outcomes of that isolation in lost education and especially in their inability to get along with each other.

No, we trust science. We insist that government bureaucrats trust science, as well, and until they demonstrate that they do, those bureaucrats are demonstrating that they cannot be trusted by us.