Tag Archives: government

Disruptions

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Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE) opined in the Friday Wall Street Journal about economic disruptions and how we’re undergoing the largest one in human history.  However, he exposed a number of misunderstandings about both disruptions and about proper policy responses the current one (stipulating that it’s the largest one in human history, but its size is irrelevant to the principle involved).  For instance:

[W]e don’t have a national-security strategy for the age of cyberwarfare and jihad.

This isn’t a matter of disruption per se, though. Defense establishments always have to adapt to new strategies and weapons systems. Even political disruption which he laid off to the 17th century’s invention of nation-states isn’t all that with today’s failed states and network entities like the terrorists Daesh and al Qaeda.  What did that Treaty of Westphalia of invent away from after all?  Political entities built around clans, principalities, networked entities like the feudal, often marriage-related polities.

We also lack seriousness about tackling the entitlement crisis.

True enough.  However, this, too, isn’t about responding to disruption per se.  A return to small, limited government handles this by putting solutions to the putative purpose of Big Government entitlement largesse back where it belongs: in the hands of American individuals and our families, friends, churches, and private charities.  Government does have a role here, even a properly small, limited government, but only from the bottom jurisdictions up, and only as a last resort, not the default entry.

And what about the policy implications of the economic disruption?

Again, this has nothing to do with disruption per se.  That return to small, limited government would handle this, just fine, including Sasse’s concerns regarding education and job (re)training.  Big Government involvement, especially here, is routinely obstructive.

[O]ur politics are not yet up to the challenge.

Nor need they be; this is Sasse’s underlying false premise. What is needed is more laissez faire and less Big Government fare.

Distortions

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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) is upset over his administration’s having been called soft on crime by that impertinent man, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.  Sessions, after all, said that New York

continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city’s “soft on crime” stance.

De Blasio’s response?  He transferred the target of the remark to the police themselves, pretending to wonder why the AG has

insult[ed] the men and women who do this work every day, who put their lives on the line and who have achieved so much?

Never mind that this is a naked distortion.  Sessions clearly laid the lackadaisical enforcement attitude on the city’s administration—which would include Da Mair (oh, wait—that’s the late Mayor Richard Daley (D).  But who can tell the difference, anyway?).  It’s the “men and women who do this work every day” who are the ones dangerously hampered by de Blasio’s position on law enforcement.

This is an example of why we can’t have nice things in Democrat-run cities and towns.

Shrinking the Federal Government

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…is more than just reducing spending; although that’s a major component of the necessary shrinkage.  Shrinking also must include reducing the physical size of the government, reducing its payroll.  To that end, the moves by President Donald Trump and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney will prove valuable if Congress will cooperate.

The hiring freeze of the last 11 weeks was an important first step, but it produced no actual shrinkage.  Its value consisted in halting the growth in payroll and in demonstrating over the last 11 weeks the lack of need of additional hiring.  In this latter regard, it’s much like the government shutdown of 2013, during which many Departments and Agencies were forced to furlough many of their employees—and still functioned.  The EPA, for instance, furloughed nearly 95% of its employees and ran just fine.  Treasury, Labor, and Interior furloughed over 80% each and those Departments did just as well as before.

Now the broad-based hiring freeze is about to be lifted, but all Departments and Agencies are being required to form plans to do targeted reductions in their work forces in expectation of seeing actually reduced budgets, with effect FY2019, which begins in October 2018.

This is all on the right track.  Now, it’s certainly true that the hiring freeze didn’t reduce the number of folks actually working these last several weeks, as I noted above.  It’s also true that the agencies during the government “shutdown” were on emergency manning and only so for roughly the same number of weeks.  But domestic matters should be handled, in the very large main, by the States.  The Federal government should be involved in domestic matters, in the very large main, only in emergencies.  Thus, the Departments and Agencies, in the very large main, don’t need employee complements much larger (but some larger) than emergency levels.

There are a couple of exceptions to these planned reductions.  Budget increases coupled with commensurate hiring increases will be proposed for Defense and Veterans Affairs.  The VA’s planned increases are from the best of intentions—the nearby backlog of veterans’ claims has exceeded 100,000, and so more bodies added to the payroll would seem to be needed in order to reduce this additional VA wait list fiasco, for instance—but the VA’s long-term, broad, and resolutely uncorrected failure to perform, too often with lethal results, mandates a different outcome.

Eliminating the VA and using its budget for veterans’ vouchers would be entirely consistent with shrinking the government’s payroll, even if spending associated with the VA would not shrink.  But in this case, at least the spending could be known to be going to the purpose for which it was passed originally—our veterans’ well-being, both now and, since the VA manages our military cemeteries, post mortem.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Dismembering Government?

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If the advance word leaks about President Donald Trump’s upcoming budget proposal can be believed, it would appear that his swamp-draining and Government downsizing are about to get start.  And “news” outlets like CNN are getting their panties bunched over the prospect.  This is from this outlet’s piece, tellingly headlined Trump’s plan to dismember government:

It would codify an assault on regulatory regimes over the environment, business and education bequeathed by former President Barack Obama, and attempt to halt decades of steadily growing government reach.

And this:

Slicing up government power is part of a deeper antipathy towards institutions and the political establishment that runs deep in the Trump White House.

Yewbetcha. And among us poor, dumb, gun-toting, Bible-clinging, irredeemably deplorable denizens of flyover country, too.

And this from The Washington Post, albeit a bit less strident than CNN:

President Trump’s budget proposal this week would shake the federal government to its core if enacted, culling back numerous programs and expediting a historic contraction of the federal workforce.

And this from the Post‘s cite of Robert Reischauer, of an earlier time’s CBO:

These are not the kind of cuts that you can accommodate by tightening the belt one notch, by shaving a little bit off of a program, or by downsizing a few staff here or there.  These are cuts that would require a wholesale triage of a vast array of federal activities.

Dismember government: ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished.

Privacy

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Cross-posted from my comment on the matter at Grim’s Hall and based on a CNN article.

From Comey’s quote as provided by CNN:

There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America….

That’s his (cynically offered, because I don’t agree he’s either as stupid or as ignorant as he’d have to be otherwise) straw man; he’ll have to play with his dolly without me.

He also has distorted (deliberately, if not from his lack of understanding, coming from Government’s perspective as he does) what the Founders wrought:

Our founders struck a bargain that is at the center of this amazing country of ours and has been for over two centuries.

No. Not even close. Our Founders allocated to the Federal government a strictly limited set of authorities and powers to execute them. There was, and is, no bargain other than the one that exists between any employer and employee: do your job, or I’ll fire you. And as one of our social compact documents puts it on two occasions, at gunpoint if needs be.

Full stop.

Perhaps this distorted view of things is near the core of his failures to perform–three times–vis-à-vis Hillary Clinton during the campaign, and again since the inauguration.