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Expansive Government Risks Expansive Incompetence
Over the weekend, the Biden Administration Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm proposed the utterly idiotic idea that lower- and middle-income families who are having trouble paying for groceries, utilities, and gasoline should saddle themselves with thousands of dollars of debt to possibly be able to claim a tax credit in the future.
Reacting to this latest idiotic idea from the Biden Administration, I started to think about the many examples of basic incompetence that populate the highest levels of the Biden Administration. I review these examples of basic incompetence not so much because I’m a masochist, but because we have relatives, friends, and acquaintances who advocate for an expansive government to run many areas of people’s lives. We should remind them how easy it is for an expansive government to become populated with idiots and incompetents. Even someone who agrees with stated Biden Administration objectives must be starting to see how much incompetence is present at the highest level of that administration. And I think it is valuable to remind them when they want to concentrate power in the government that power may be exercised by incompetents.
The President himself: There seems to be an effective program in the White House to keep him out of public view. When he does appear, he is often obviously confused about where he is and why he is there. Does he or does he not have the basic faculties the job requires?
The Vice President: She has accomplished none of the tasks that have been publicly assigned to her. Nor has she made even token progress on any of them. Most conspicuously on the issues at the southern border of our country. Chaos follows her, including in such basic tasks as internal office administration. Her public talks are mostly jumbles of meaningless words assembled into incomprehensible collections that sometimes have the structure of a sentence.
Justice: The head of the Department of Justice (Garland) is either indifferent or hostile to the concerns of millions of Americans that politics seems to influence the dispensing of justice, and that the application of justice seems to depend on your political party affiliation and/or your positions on certain political or policy topics. Although the federal Department of Justice is not responsible for the idiocy of local district attorneys, the federal department doesn’t seem bothered by such local idiocy either.
Homeland Security: The head of Homeland Security (Mayorkas) keeps talking nonsense. He insists the nation’s border is secure as his department is literally creating openings in the border to facilitate the importation of drugs, criminals, and slaves. He refuses to acknowledge the issues faced by municipalities along the nation’s border as thousands of people flood across that border every week. He speaks against and punishes border patrol agents trying to do what they think of as their jobs.
Defense (military): Very publicly claims to be more concerned about the minute feelings of a small number of “woke” people who may or may not be in the military than about military readiness and the defense of the country and its interests. Very public and conspicuously incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Transportation: The head of the Transportation Department (Buttigieg) decided to take off for several months during the biggest disruption to the distribution of goods the country had seen in decades (and maybe ever), many of those disruptions transportation-based. He only last week acknowledged that there were problems in the air transport system that the rest of us have known about for months. And all he could muster was to point a finger of blame at others. No ideas or suggestions. No acknowledgment of the possibility that government entities in his purview might be connected to those problems. He publicly expresses contempt for families struggling to pay for gasoline, recommending they instead spend tens of thousands of dollars on new electric cars. But then in his prior job as Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, he couldn’t get potholes in town roads fixed.
Energy: Besides advocating for people to increase individual debt as a strategy for coping with inflation, the department often seems to adopt a very narrow view of what constitutes “energy,” and to advocate against (or at least not advocate for) reasonable, practical energy sources like domestic oil and natural gas and nuclear power.
Health and Human Services: The head of “Health” (Becerra) seems to spend more energy advocating death (killing babies in abortion as a social good) and the mutilation of the children who survive gestation with “gender-affirming care” than he does promoting health and wellness across the population.
Education: The federal department of education supports tacitly, if not explicitly, the efforts of teachers’ unions to prevent children from attending school and getting an education, and to abuse many of the children who actually do make it into a classroom.
Let’s remind our relatives, friends, and acquaintances that a risk of an expansive, active government is that it will become populated with incompetents rather than experts. When we deal with private enterprises run by incompetents we almost always can find ways to avoid those incompetent enterprises. But we don’t have a choice in government. When incompetents run the governments that rule us, we have to deal with those incompetents. The more expansive government is, and the more it rules us, the greater the risk that we will find ourselves under the rule of incompetents.
Published in Politics
I do sometimes wonder if there’s a secret contest within the Biden Administration to determine who can demonstrate the most incompetence.
It’s frightening, isn’t it? It seems like Biden,or those who direct him, have gone out of their way to hire people who have no clue. Maybe their handlers figure that they will be better able to manipulate them when they “play” at their roles.
On the brighter side, here is an example of a red state showing some common sense:
Idaho State Police to transition away from Dodge Chargers after car maker goes electric
And many suspect that the true power behind the throne is Ron Klain, a lifelong Washington insider who has never worked in a real job.
The one-word description of this administration, from top to bottom, is incompetence. It is really discouraging to look at the qualifications and record of each head of department. Nearly every one of them is a long-term political hack, with no experience in the private world.
What arm of the Federal government would you say is the least incompetent?
My answer is the Forest Service. We have not mislaid a single National Park or Forest during the Biden Administration.
To date.
Tabby, you’ve done an excellent job of encapsulating the Biden administration.
Now, a question.
These boobs should be easy targets for any Republican running for the House or Senate. Their stupid faces should be in each ad that the Republicans run.
Yet, the Republicans are on the verge of blowing the Senate. WHY?
This is insanity!
A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal published an article noting how little private industry experience the senior Biden Administration people had. I think this is the Daily Mail’s accessible version.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11015337/Top-68-Biden-appointees-just-2-4-years-business-experience.html
I strongly disagree.
The problem with an expansive, active government is that it is active and expansive.
It would be no better if it were populated by experts rather than incompetents. In fact, it would be worse, because it would be more effective.
This is an extremely important point. We conservatives should be repeating over and over and over again (as I have – sorry) that big government is dangerous, regardless of who is in charge.
It’s not a matter of finding competent all-knowing tyrants. It’s a matter of controlling government, so that millions of individual choices can be made every day by millions of free citizens in a free society with free markets, millions of citizens who have more local knowledge than the President of the United States. No one person is smart enough to act responsibly on their behalf, even if that were their goal.
Big governments are dangerous, no matter who is in charge.
Vote for small government, no matter who is in charge.
We should stop going on and on about the fools in positions of power.
The problem is the power. Not the fools.
It may be a small thing by comparison, but it’s also about income. Government workers are not like businesses which provide a service at a negotiated price (which is: this is too expensive and I won’t buy it, or this is inexpensive and so I will). Governments basically can not only demand you pay for their services, but they can demand their salaries. It’s almost like a protection racket.
Peter Drucker on bureaucracy, from 1969:
Whether government is “a government of laws” or a “government of men” is debatable. But every government is, by definition, a “government of paper forms.” This means, inevitably, high cost. For “control” of the last 10 per cent of any phenomenon always costs more than control of the first 90 per cent. If control tries to account for everything, it becomes prohibitively expensive. Yet this is what government is always expected to do. The reason is not just “bureaucracy” and red tape; it is a much sounder one. A “little dishonesty” in government is a corrosive disease. It rapidly spreads to infect the whole body politic. Yet the temptation to dishonesty is always great. People of modest means and dependent on a salary handle very large public sums. People of modest position dispose of power and award contracts and privileges of tremendous importance to other people–construction jobs, radio channels, air routes, zoning laws, building codes, and so on. To fear corruption in government is not irrational. This means, however, that government “bureaucracy”— and its consequent high costs—cannot be eliminated. Any government that is not a “government of forms” degenerates rapidly into a mutual looting society. If government operations are fully proceduralized, to the point of eliminating individual employee and frontline manager discretion, they will be cumbersome and inefficient. If they are not fully proceduralized in this way, then they will be subject to widespread corruption and tyrannical behavior. Hence, the expansion of government into all aspects of human life leads to increasing inefficiency, eventually resulting in sluggish performance across the entire economy–while the increasing frustration with bureaucracy results in a widespread demand to “make government more responsive” by giving more discretionary authority to administrators and to their political superiors. This, in turn, results in a government which is not only a looting society but a tyranny. Yet at the same time, there will still be enough baroque proceduralization (selectively enforced) to ensure high levels of inefficiency and very high government administrative costs.
FIFY.
In an ideal sense I agree with you that expansive government itself is the problem. But in our day-to-day conversations with people who already convinced that the concept of an expansive government is an inherent good, those people will not hear an argument that their fundamental assumption is incorrect. But I think they will be more likely to pay attention long enough to hear that the expansive government they say they want is not likely to produce the results they hope because it is filled with incompetents. Once they see that incompetents might derail their interests, then we can nudge them along into seeing that their basic conception of a benevolent expansive government is flawed.
I strongly recommend Francis Spufford’s book Red Plenty. A blend of factual history and historical novel, it describes the realities of Soviet central economic planning from the standpoint of those on the front lines of that system..factory managers, economic planners, mathematicians, computer scientists, and “fixers.” My review is here.
I’m reading this now! Excellent so far.
It’s nothing new.
Obama’s hiring of people for cabinet positions with no outside business experience was about the same, less than 10% of cabinet positions filled by someone with ANY private-sector experience.
There was a chart available, going back to like Teddy Roosevelt, but I can’t find it now.
Don’t be Germany.
Actual “public goods” only. This ought to be obvious by now.
The Federal Reserve stops pushing the economy around. This ought to be obvious by now.
Every government actuarial system turns into a nuclear bomb. This ought to be obvious by now.
Inflation is breaking out all over the place and … lol
https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2022/08/22/usda-invest-300-million-new-organic-transition-initiative
Biden isn’t running anything, perhaps his only goal is to keep us away from China so the Chinese don’t tell the truth about Biden and their payoffs. It may in fact be useful to them for the population to see him as incompetent and out of touch as we’ll be more relaxed leaving him “in charge” But the folks in charge are rapidly destroying the country and even they don’t know it’s just for the Chinese and a few billionaires who get to keep their money. We’ve got to get rid of him; all of them for that matter, and some Republican leaders. We are behaving as if this whole process will hurt a lot of us and harm the country, but it’ll come to an end, be fixed and we’ll be alright. That outcome is a very low probability and gets worse with time.
I have a quibble with the headline. “Expensive Government Risks Expansive Incompetence.” No. It is not a risk. It is a guarantee.
You’ll get more of what you pay for.
The most memorable thing about Gov Granholm was that she chose the star of Dumb & Dumber, Jeff Daniels, to be the spokesman for her boondoggle economic development program- The Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC). It was an inspired choice. The main vehicle the MEDC uses is the Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA) and it’s tax credits. Analysis by the Mackinac Center showed “a statistical relationship between MEGA manufacturing tax credits and county manufacturing employment, but the relationship was negative”.
https://www.mackinac.org/10933
more juicy bits on the Michigan state intervention in the economy:
“Michigan was ranked 16th among the 50 states in per-capita state GDP in 1999, the year the MEDC was formed. The state has since tumbled to 41st.
From 1999 through 2008, Michigan was the only state in the union with a negative state GDP growth rate.
Michigan’s per-capita personal income ranking has tumbled from 16th to 34th since 1999 and is now 11.2 percent below the national average, the lowest point it has reached since the start of the Great Depression, when such record-keeping began.”
I am sure Jennifer can do for America what she did for Michigan!
Her only saving grace is she can never be President.
I agree with @dr.bastiat . I don’t want a government run by experts. I’ve had enough of the elites’ arrogance. The government may consult with experts from time to time, but Fauci & crew were the poster children for “experts” showing how their narrow focus (medicine) blinded them to the bigger picture (the economy & mental health). No more experts in charge, please.
The Fed is literally “experts” guessing the interest rate and shoving it down everybody’s throats. lol It’s as stupid as GOSPLAN. Look around.
Not a risk. A guarantee.
This all started when the “expert” Alan Greenspan started goosing the economy in 1996. Big Ayn Rand guy that wrote a paper on how great gold was.
https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2022/08/22/the-pause/
Central planning begets more central planning until everything collapses.
If you are familiar with Murray Rothbard and Arthur burns, you’ll really like this. Arthur Burns and Alan Greenspan were the central planners from hell. 100% pandering to the wrong people all of the time.
https://mises.org/library/parallel-lives-liberty-or-power