Tag Archives: government

Big Brother Behavior Mod

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You’ve seen in some of the news media reports on a new Federal government team designed to facilitate the government’s ability to persuade us to do various things it thinks appropriate for us.  The team being formed to spearhead this effort is colloquially called a “Nudge Team” because it’s ostensibly intended only to suggest to us better, more efficient ways to achieve goals.

As you might expect, I have some thoughts on this.

The formative document is called, interestingly enough, “Strengthening Federal Capacity for Behavioral Insights,” and it has this illuminating statement in the opening paragraph:

In 2010, UK Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), which through a process of rapid, iterative experimentation (“Test, Learn, Adapt”), has successfully identified and tested interventions that will further advance priorities of the British government….

Notice that: advance government priorities, not those of a Sovereign citizen.  The next paragraph fleshes this out:

The federal government is currently creating a new team that will help…scale behavioral interventions that have been rigorously evaluated, using, where possible, randomized controlled trials.

The government intends to engage in “behavioral interventions” to “persuade” us to their (more efficiently achieved) goals.

But wait—isn’t that just ordinary advertising, something every business man, from a one-man home office business to the GEs and Bank of Americas, does to get us to buy their products?

Investor’s Business Daily talks about the government not having a clear idea of what is “good for us” (never minding the primacy of the government’s goals for us), that the government can’t be trusted to stop at any particular point—the slippery slope concern—and the (subtle at first) loss of our individual liberties as the government gets this sort of program rolling along.

IBD is right on all counts, but it’s that last that’s most important of the three.  And that leads me to my concerns.

There’s nothing wrong with advertising when businesses or individuals do this.  It is, after all, limited to more or less friendly persuasion.  We’re also free to walk away from it at any time, whether by changing the channel, hitting the mute button, turning the page in our magazine or newspaper, or closing the door on the salesman.

Not so much when it’s the government doing the “advertising.”  Government has too many ways to suggest that we heed its blandishments, from the way it “guides” potential contractors in its project notices, or “encourages” folks to get onto its food stamp program, all the way up to, and including, enemies lists and open assaults by Federal agencies on organizations that disagree with the government.

Along with that is a concept that’s being lost in modern America (and which loss facilitates government dominance of our activities): not everything done in the private sector is appropriate for the government to do also.  More strongly than that, most things done in the private sector are wholly inappropriate for government to do.  When the government does engage in what is for the private sector, freedom is put in peril.

One source of the risk is that government tends, in the end, not to do alongside private individuals or enterprises the things that we do, but to do those things instead.  This isn’t because government can do these things more efficiently.  Rather, it’s because government can do them more cheaply than the private sector: government can—must—do this with OPM, with taxpayer money.  From the beginnings of this crowding out, government winds up saying to us, “No need for you to do these things; we’ve got this.”  From there it’s a short step to, “Butt out.  This is government business.”  It’s a (subtle, but the more insidious for that) threat to our liberty.

Nudge team “persuasion” is on that latter list; it’s wholly inappropriate for our government to involve itself in such a thing.  Especially given the avowed behavior modification aspect of it.

The government’s central…Nudge Team…document can be seen here and here.

Pollution and China

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Estimates from state-affiliated researchers say that anywhere between 8% and 20% of China’s arable land, some 25 to 60 million acres, may now be contaminated with heavy metals.  A loss of even 5% could be disastrous, taking China below the “red line” of 296 million acres of arable land that are currently needed, according to the government, to feed the country’s 1.35 billion people.

And

Mr. Zhuang [Guotai, head of the Ecological Department at the Environment Ministry], of the environment ministry, said at his recent news conference that only 35% of the fertilizer used in China was being properly absorbed by crops.  The remaining 65%, he said, was being discharged as pollution that was seriously tainting China’s farmland.  Runoff of nitrogen fertilizer, among the most widely-used varieties in China, can contaminate water sources and lead to soil acidification, soil erosion and lower crop yields.

And

China has long sought to industrialize its countryside, dating to Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward beginning in 1958, when he sought rapid industrialization by urging peasants to set up backyard steel furnaces at the expense of agricultural output.  The cumulative impact of decades of building up rural industry is now taking an environmental toll, particularly as industrial growth surges forward in China’s breadbasket.

Because some things are more important than others, and Government Knows Better what those things are:

effort to keep urbanites comfortable and well-fed has also led to the poisoning of parts of the food chain, and some of the pollution is traveling back to the cities in a different—and for many, more frightening—guise.

Cadmium, arsenic, lead, chemical waste from chemical factories, and waste runoff from excessive use of chemical fertilizers—these are all now in the PRC’s food chain, from the soil up.

Unfortunately, the old are much more vulnerable to the privation of inadequate food supply than are the younger and healthier.  The coming starvation from this food debacle might alleviate the coming demographic implosion of the PRC’s aging population, but it’s the wrong way for demographics to be adjusted, even where that’s not the intent.  At least as bad, the children and babies also are extremely vulnerable to the ravages of privation.  Their coming starvation will leave little or no capacity in the population for recovery on the far side of the disaster.

This is an inevitable outcome, if not in detail, of a Know Better government that dictates rather than protects individual capacities.

Dysfunction and the EPA

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Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and the attorneys general of 11 other states sued the Environmental Protection Agency Tuesday, demanding that the agency turn over documents the states allege will show the agency cooperates with environmental groups as part of a “sue and settle” legal strategy to develop regulations.

And

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City, alleges that binding consent decrees between the EPA and environmental groups that have sued the agency over the years have led to new rules and regulations for states without allowing their attorneys general to defend their interests and those of its businesses and consumers.

Pruitt noted,

The EPA is picking winners and losers, exhibiting favoritism, at the expense of due process and transparency.  They are manipulating our legal system to achieve what they cannot through our representative democracy.  The outcomes of their actions affect every one of us by sticking states with the bill and unnecessarily raising utility rates by as much as 20%.

Then there’s this:

[Des Moines Water Works] General Manager Bill Stowe has said if…water goes over the EPA safe limit and Iowa policymakers fail to sign off on a plan to regulate farm runoff, Des Moines Water Works may file a lawsuit asking a federal court to force the EPA to establish standards limiting runoff and enforcement.

The environmental groups also are prepared to sue the EPA for unreasonable delay if the agency doesn’t push the state harder to begin cleaning up livestock operations.

Exactly.

A Measure of Responsibility

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The House plans to take steps to curb the power of federal agencies and impose more checks on them in response to recent scandals emanating from the Internal Revenue Service.

Here are the bills the House plans to introduce before the August recess next month—and hopefully pass and send up to the Senate for passage in September after the recess.  The several bills would

  • bar [the IRS] from implementing and enforcing Obamacare
  • make it legal for citizens to make recordings of any conversation they have with a federal enforcement official
  • necessitate[] the approval of the leadership of the agency for conferences held by government officials
  • [give] Congress…final approval of any regulations that would seriously impact the economy
  • mandate the creation of a customer service system at agencies
  • let agencies place “senior career officials on investigative leave, with or without pay, when they are under investigation for serious abuses.”

Will the Democrats in the Senate support this, or will they block the bills, favoring, instead, continued (Democrat) Executive Branch abuses?  Will the House actually pass this legislation, or is this just a Republican version of Obamatalk?

We’ll see in a bit.

Another Harebrained Idea

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Congressman Eric Swalwell (D, CA) and two colleagues, Steve Pearce (R, NM) and Cynthia Lummis (R, WY) actually think this is a good idea.  They want to

amend House rules so lawmakers can vote remotely through a secure communications system[.]  The resolution would allow lawmakers to vote on bills that require a two-thirds majority in the House to pass, meaning they are being considered under a suspension of regular rules and are typically noncontroversial….

Further,

Under the proposed resolution, lawmakers and witnesses would be allowed to participate in committee hearings held in Washington via secure videoconferencing technology….

No.  This defeats a major purpose and a major advantage of requiring an in-person quorum in order to conduct business and to vote on that business: getting our elected representatives in the same room together for face-to-face interaction.  No matter how good the virtual links get, they cannot be the same as being there in person, seeing, hearing, and interacting with everyone and everything on the floor and not just with the parts conveniently within camera or microphone range.

Also, it overstates the noncontroversial nature of votes requiring a two-thirds majority: little things like a veto override, or an impeachment vote.

It also overstates the noncontroversial nature of bills needing a suspension of regular order to pass, including a vote on the suspension of the rules.  As recently as the 108th Congress (the 2003-2004 session), for instance, the House considered some 920 bills under suspension, and only about 620 achieved final passage.  That seems a shade controversial to me, especially those 300 that failed.

Leave things alone, guys.  It won’t hurt you to show up in your place of work and do a little work there.