This is also very foreseeable for an administrative state, and this slippery slope has been predicted for over a century. Rule by administrators (or bureaucrats) is just as opaque/unaccountable/corrupt, and as the extent of their power grew, it was inevitable that the political leadership would exploit the power (as has already happened many times before). It seems like nobody (at least on the liberal end of the spectrum) really cared about the arbitrary use of power when it was mostly left-liberals making the choices.
The way to fix this is to reduce the power of the administrative state, not to just complain about Trump, but I have little hope of a real solution.
Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?
I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?
> Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?
Congress. The courts have clumsily dismantled the administrative state. But there are more options than an unchecked executive and unaccountable unelecteds.
Congress still has all the power granted to it by the constitution. They chose not to use those powers, because the republicans support the orange turd.
> Rule by administrators (or bureaucrats) is just as opaque/unaccountable/corrupt
I don't agree. The division of power is most likely preferable. Otherwise the politician also become the beurocrat but way more arbitrary.
When the administrators/bureaucrats (whatever your preferred terms are) have very limited and defined powers, I agree they are different. When the administrative powers become wide-sweeping and ill-defined, the powers are difficult to differentiate from those of the politicians.
What you’re seeing is the result of the USA voting in a party and president that made it clear beforehand that they were going to install puppet civil servants to do their will. Most other developed countries have avoided this scenario.
It’s important that most of the civil service is staffed by permanent employees hired through a fair and well-defined process and not appointed for political reasons.
The current path is replacing bureaucratic power with unchecked executive power which is the opposite of what you want. Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want.
>Bureaucrats who must follow the rule of law is what you want.
Under Chevron we had the opposite of that: bureaucrats who had ridiculously wide latitude to make their own rules.
What we actually need is for congress to take back control instead of passing all power and authority to the executive branch.
Are you saying Congress should be domain experts every area they allocate funds to? From maritime safety to preschool nutrition, congress should be expert enough in everything to specify all important details, and then the agencies (staffed by actual domain experts in each area) are mere accountants to execute the policies?
I don’t think it’s workable. At best it just swaps lobbyists for civil servants.
More realistically you'd end up with an official advisory body where the exact same experts would write the regulations, they would be intermittently passed by congress between their regular bouts of systemic dysfunction, and the current crop of bureaucrats would be replaced by mindless pencil pushers. Add an official title for members of this government run advisory body such as "sage" and give them lifelong tenure and we've about completed the process.
On paper it's different but in practice congress would largely be rubber stamping things. I predict the differences would be largely negative. More room for non-experts to meddle, more room for lobbyists to insert themselves into the process, and more room for broad capture of the advisory body to go unnoticed.
Ostensibly, who's paying their salary is important. Lobbyists, paid for by corporations with a vested interest in things going their way, is far worse than civil servants who's salary comes from taxpayers, and who's responsibility is to them, and not corporate interests. Ostensibly.
People don't vote for civil servants their loyality is not with the public but themselves. Congress's loyality is with donors and/or leader's who's loyality is with donors.
Nothing will work when the courts decide giving money is speech and now protected. Super pacs have unlimited spending and shield donors.
It's hard to change. You need a new supreme court or amendment to remove super pacs then you need to convince the people who got in power by having more money to limit donations to an amount an average American can afford. Then you need laws to fix gerrymandering or possible an amendment. Then you need radical laws to deal with immigration vote buy which mlght involve rules not allowing people not born in the country from voting.
And then we will realize that people with more money will actually need more power because they have bigger needs. So they will start buying people through convert ways (media ownership, ai filtered data, ...) and we'll have more disinformation. Maybe this is the best democracy can offer.
Congress always had the power to remove delegated power from an institution if it didn't like how that institution was performing. It's also had the power to disband the executive branch regime at any point since January 20. Everything that is happening now is happening with the complete approval of Congress.
Correct, and congress hasn't been exercising that power for the better part of a century now. The War Powers Resolution was 1973, for example.
I don't know what the exact solution is, but something needs to change in the structure and incentives of congress to incentivize them to exercise power again. Eliminating the filibuster and drastically increasing the total number of representatives seem like the best ways to me, but I'm open yo other possibilities.
You would be bitching and moaning just as much if Congress directly made these rules and regulations.
Just be upfront that you’re a libertarian and are allergic to government.
Going for whataboutism in the same week trump establishes a $2B find to pay off his cronies and tries to permanently exempt himself from taxes is laughable.
My points are not whataboutism; I’m saying this was predictable, forecast, and inevitable. Whataboutism focuses on tangential (or unrelated) things.
NCI and NSF recipients getting a taste of what EPA, DEA and ATF was doing to the plebs all along with random "interpretations" and bad-faith presentations of them to judge and jury. Maybe that whole "the academics and bureaucrats are so smart we totally need to cede power from congress to the executive" wasn't such a bright idea after all.
Of course, it's totally lost on the academic-bureaucratic class that the anti-intellectuals wouldn't hesitate to cut off their nose to spite their face by electing a president that would turn around and surprise pikachu the academics with the very machine they had helped build. Now that academics are losing their grips within the bureaucratic apparatus, suddenly they are deciding to rethink their strategy -- but it's not a coming to Jesus moment, but rather just a reactionary response.
Right! Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise and totally has the time, patience, and will to cleanly and carefully craft the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society. No reason for those awful technocrats to usurp such authority when we've got a capable and knowledgable legislative branch capable of doing the work just as well.
> the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society.
If you actually believe this is true, I have some sad news for you. Does the term "regulatory capture" mean anything to you?
> those awful technocrats
If you actually believe the "technocrats" have the knowledge required to craft regulations that actually are a net benefit, again, I have some sad news for you.
Your solution is?
Align congressional incentives with reduction in the size of the US code and regulations.
The current US code, printed as a book, could not be read in five lifetimes of daily 9-5 reading. Make reading the law aloud a requirement of their job -- they're not permitted to stop until they've completed it, except they may sleep at night and they may assemble to vote to remove laws which are no longer needed. Failure to read the laws at the start of their tenure results in being held in federal court for the duration of their time in office.
There is no magic solution to the "problem" of "how to dictate rules to a large society that will keep things smooth and productive". The problem is fundamentally intractable if you insist on looking at it that way.
There is another option, which is to not dictate rules at all, unless you absolutely have to in order to have a civil society in the first place. For example, we have laws against things like murder and theft and fraud, because you can't have a civil society if those things aren't deterred and punished.
But the vast majority of the laws and regulations we have in place now are not doing that. They're attempts to micromanage from the top something that fundamentally cannot be micromanaged from the top. Nobody has enough knowledge to do that. So we should stop doing it.
Giving up is not a strategy. Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity, but not having any at all is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster.
For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
FYI, poisonous chemicals are allowed in your drinking water.
The current federal limits include:
Dosis sola facit venenum https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison> Giving up is not a strategy.
Nor is it what I advocated.
> Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity
That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their markets.
> allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.
Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened?
> Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
You're assuming that food and water providers would be able to do such things in a "free market". But doing such things is obviously bad for business, so providers would have a strong incentive not to do it in a free market, since in a free market, doing things that are bad for business makes you go out of business.
In our current regulatory environment, however, large corporations can do many things that are bad for business, as long as they can get government regulators to agree to let them. For an example from a few years ago, a major aicraft manufacturer got the FAA to approve a change to one of its oldest aircraft types that ended up killing two airplanes full of people. How? Because the FAA didn't even look at the change: the "regulation" had evolved to the point where the FAA just took the manufacturer's word for it that everything was OK.
In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business. But of course in our current regulatory environment that can't happen, because regulation has forced aircraft manufacturers to amalgamate to the point that neither of the two biggest ones can ever be allowed to go out of business--too many long chains of dominoes, including much of the US's military capability (and not just in airplanes), depend on them.
Tell me again how regulations make things better?
> > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.
> humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years
You really can't compare pre and post industrial revolution like that. Large scale synthesis of toxic chemicals as a byproduct of some unrelated industry just wasn't a thing previously.
> In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business.
Extremely doubtful. Air travel has been intentionally pushed to a ridiculously high level of assurance by regulation. I don't think the free market would have selected for the current cost vs safety balance on its own.
I appreciate where you're coming from, that a large portion of existing regulation is gratuitous, being structured the way it is primarily for the benefit of the incumbent. But that doesn't mean that such regulation isn't doing anything useful at the same time.
The idea that being "bad for business" is a sufficient disincentive to dissuade commercial entities in a free market from harming and killing people is risible.
Even if you eliminated the immunity shield for corporate leadership so they couldn't skate after their company goes bankrupt, there would still be innumerable risk-takers willing to gamble with human lives to make more money.
I expect the argument you want to make is that having people harmed and killed is an acceptable sacrifice for greater economic efficiency, but you're aware that it doesn't play well — especially when the benefits of economic efficiency tend to flow to the people doing the killing rather than the people being killed.
Don't put words in my mouth. I have never said that people being harmed and killed is acceptable. My disagreement is about whether government regulations, on net, actually result in fewer people being harmed and killed, or more. That's a factual disagreement, not a disagreement about values. If I believed, factually, that government regulations actually did result in fewer people being harmed, on net, I would be in favor of them, no matter what libertarian beliefs I might have in the abstract. But my factual belief is the opposite.
To the extent it's true that being "bad for business" is no longer enough of a disincentive for corporations, as I've already said, one key reason is that the corporations have bought regulations that favor them and disfavor potential competitors.
It's true that that's not the only factor involved. Corporate governance is broken. A big part of that is also government regulation, which does to some extent prevent outright fraud (for example, the S&L debacle in the 1980s), but is perfectly fine with other practices, like golden parachutes for executives and corporate takeovers in which the buyer gets the assets but offloads the liabilities on the taxpayers, that do just as much damage, if not more. All of these things are regulated--but the regulations don't stop harm from being done.
There is one other factor that works against corporate governance which is not, in itself, a product of government regulation: the fact that most share ownership now is not individual stockholders but mutual funds. That means most people don't even know what corporations they own even small pieces of. But mutual funds are a big advantage for most people investing for their retirement, because they're an obvious hedge against risk, so they would exist even in a true free market without any government regulation. The problem is that, as far as the individual corporations are concerned, their time horizon is now much shorter. The mutual fund has to care about providing returns over a long time horizon, because it's holding people's retirement accounts, which might not be drawn on for decades. But the corporations only see short term trades being made, many of them by those same mutual funds, trying to increase their returns. So corporations have to focus much more on short term returns instead of long term planning.
That would be one area where a government ought to be able to improve things, because a government's time horizon ought to be long-term. But it isn't. Government's time horizon is the next election. So even in this area, governments are actually worse than corporations.
> > allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.
> Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened?
Ok, so you just don’t know history. Many people died. Fuck have you never even heard of the Jungle?
Upon Sinclair wasn’t even trying to get food regulations to improve the quality, he was trying to improve workers rights but the public was so disgusted with what food companies were doing to their food that we as a society demanded the government regulate it.
Or superfund sites?
Getting rid of government regulations in their entirety just cedes all the decision making power to corporations.
I am sick and tired of these libertarian types who either want to repeat experiments that have never succeeded in their utopian outcome or that want to convince us that the corporate boot tastes so much better than the government one.
> Getting rid of government regulations in their entirety just cedes all the decision making power to corporations.
The massive power that corporations have, as compared to individuals, is itself a product of the fact that our society has evolved now for well over a century to have government regulations that are bought by corporations to favor them. So you are correct that we can't just instantly scrap every government regulation, but not change anything else.
That does not mean that the regulations, on net, are doing more good than harm. It just means we've gotten ourselves into a very deep hole, which we can't climb out of in a short time. But at the very least we could try to stop digging.
Indeed, I’m not sure what compels people to compare real regulatory systems from now or history to some imaginary free market where producers always act in their long-term interest and consumers always have perfect information.
Every functioning society on earth regulates food drugs and infrastructure. We lived through the unregulated version for centuries, and it took mountains of dead children and poisoned workers to win the rules we have now; tearing them down just means ordinary people will pay the price all over again.
Capture is a failure mode of every institution humans have ever built, including the courts we presumably still want. The answer is to design better institutions, not to get rid of them and hope things work out.
How do you suppose the conditions in the Chicago meat packing industry that Upton Sinclair wrote about, or those that produced superfund sites, came about? If you think it was a "free market" that did it, you are the one who doesn't know history.
The Chicago meat packing industry, for example, did much the same kind of bullying of their supply chains that Amazon and Walmart are now infamous for. And governments that were supposed to be preventing that sort of thing (since much of it was illegal even then--the tactics are basically the same ones organized crime has used for centuries, after all) did absolutely nothing to stop it. The Federal government finally stepping in and passing laws and regulations was not a case of government reining in a free market; it was a case of a bigger government stomping on a smaller government.
It did improve things, at least for a time, but what's the condition of the Chicago meat packing industry now? Or for that matter our food supply chain in general in the US, which has been regulated up one side and down the other for more than a century? We have beef full of antibiotics, vegetables full of pesticides, ethanol from corn in our gasoline while other food crops can't be grown profitably because the government doesn't subsidize them the same way, and a massive epidemic of obesity. So how is government regulation helping, exactly?
The federal bureaucracy is dictating[1] a lot of minutia on the square centimeter level that should be getting done at the square kilometer level. We could probably give up on a lot of detailed stuff without any negative effect.
Like for example the amount of water a toilet flush can has been federally regulated since the 90s. Sure, that might be important if you need to keep some schmucks in the desert from bickering over aquifer depletion and whatnot. But the majority of jurisdictions in the east "we take surface water and give it back to the same watershed" jurisdictions who can use all the water they want and only impact the required size of the hardware at the treatment plant. So why are we even regulating this? And any issue you look into there's a plethora of stuff like that. Theoretically it's all justifiable in abstract but that's like littering, it doesn't scale.
[1] via "states shall adopt in order to qualify for this grant" type rules which the states then roll downhill
> Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise…
Congress knew of that issue; for decades, Congress has delegated the nitty gritty to regulatory agencies, who employ said experts.
SCOTUS, on the other hand, are the idiots you seek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...
Don't worry, we're going to enjoy the fruits of your thought process real well and good -- the very last guy left in the House with any constitutional focus just got blasted out with the most expensive outside funding campaign against a rep in the entire history of the USA. It looks like the bureaucratic state is just getting on its next level roll, so enjoy the ride. A few of you may even realize in the coming years why the 10th amendment wasn't meant to just be an inconvenience to ignore.
But I'm not dumb enough to think you'll believe my words, you'll only learn by experience.
I've been where you are. In your coming years you will realize that the bureaucracy had at least brought us stability, prosperity, and a modicum of protection against abuse from big business, the rough edges for small businesses and individuals near the edge of the law notwithstanding. Characterizing Massie's loss as an aspect of that bureaucracy is a mistake - Trumpism is a repudiation of the bureaucracy in favor of autocracy, while the all of the authoritarianism sticks around (or even grows!). Expect those rough edges to become much more arbitrary and capricious. And no, accelerationism or "I told you so" won't save you.