Keir Starmer’s righteous war against the Blob
This highlights something interesting. Anti-bureaucratic sentiment is a traditional belief of the left. Bureaucracy is seen as a way to keep the worker down.
People forget these things.
‘This has come to the shock of liberals who see themselves as the natural advocates for the public sector. But for anyone familiar with the history of the political left, Starmer’s retrenchments seem rather more understandable. After all, for most of the modern left’s history, anti-bureaucratic politics – the belief that the modern bureaucracy is just a slick new way for the bourgeoisie to impose rules on the worker – has been a core principle. In the 19th century, one of the few ideas on which anarchist, communist and reformist factions could bring themselves to agree was not that the French Revolution had failed because it had overthrown the king, but because it failed to do away with his bourgeois functionaries, who were just as greedy and tyrannical. Indeed, it is hard to find an important left-wing figure from the 19th century who didn’t join in with the anti-bureaucratic pillorying. Christian socialists such as Saint-Simon dismissed all public administration as parasitical, anarchists like Bakunin wanted to replace the civil service with the shifting “authority of the bootmaker”, and even Marx and Engels, for all their posturing about proletarian dictatorship, longed for an “overcoming” or “withering away” of the state.’
Bonfire of bureaucracy: Regulators told to cut costs for firms
Only Nixon can go to China.
‘Chancellor Rachel Reeves will summon regulators to Downing Street today to demand they cut the cost of red tape for businesses by a quarter.
‘She will announce a plan outlining 60 measures to reduce bureaucracy and encourage growth.’
Don’t Cry for the Education Department
Musk is a negative force; he cuts and he cuts and he cuts. At some point, there will need to be a positive force. Something that does something to increase pedagogical outcomes. Maybe it is sufficient for the states to be a set of parallel experiments, but the Administration is going to have find something to claim as a beneficiary of their policies, if only for the politics of it.
‘The weakness of Mr. Trump’s approach so far, as with everything else, is that there isn’t much of a case being made for any bigger agenda that Republicans want to achieve. All the focus is on setting loose Mr. Musk with his roaring chainsaw. Yet falling U.S. test scores show a tremendous need to broaden the argument on education. Last year 33% of eighth-graders scored below “basic” on reading, according to the National Assessment for Educational Progress. The pandemic shook many parents out of contentment with their schools.
‘The GOP has a political opportunity to focus on improving school performance, expanding choice for families, and holding districts accountable for results. The nuts-and-bolts policies would have to be implemented at the state and local level, but don’t underrate the federal bully pulpit. Reagan’s education secretaries used the office to push for reforms, as did Betsy DeVos during Mr. Trump’s first term. If Ms. McMahon is a quick study on policy details, she could do the same, while enlisting Republican governors in the project.’
‘Spreadsheets of empire’: red tape goes back 4,000 years, say scientists after Iraq finds
Will we ever reach a technological or social pinnacle that enables us to escape the bondage of administrative rule? Or is bureaucracy just an inevitable consequence of human nature?
‘The red tape of government bureaucracy spans more than 4,000 years, according to new finds from the cradle of the world’s civilisations, Mesopotamia.
‘Hundreds of administrative tablets – the earliest physical evidence of the first empire in recorded history – have been discovered by archaeologists from the British Museum and Iraq. These texts detail the minutiae of government and reveal a complex bureaucracy – the red tape of an ancient civilisation.’
Churchill Would Have Approved of Trump’s Battle Against Bureaucracy
There is a principle called subsidiarity in which decision-making and responsibility should be located at the level of government closest to the problem.
In some cases that level of government is the individual engaged in self-government.
The reduction of the federal bureaucracy is an implementation of subsidiarity in this sense. As bureaucracy increases, purpose and meaning reduce.
Make America Meaningful Again.
‘Churchill opposed this de-humanizing bureaucracy because it fills us with “a sense of vacancy and of fatuity, of incompleteness.” It offers people the apparent comfort of not having to make the hard choices that are the essence of self-government, but in the process, it denies people the dignity that comes from governing oneself well.’
Trump’s Executive Order Targeting Perkins Coie Must Be Condemned
Trump is wrong to go after Perkins Coie.
‘To bolster the separation of powers, the Framers expressly forbade the federal and state governments from decreeing bills of attainder. In common law, these were legislative acts that, without trial in court, condemned a person or category of persons for alleged wrongs sufficiently serious that the death penalty could result. Wrongs calling for lesser penalties were targeted by analogous “bills of pain and penalty.” In American law, however, the prohibitions against bills of attainder cover both categories of wrongs. As The Heritage Guide to the Constitution explains regarding the bill of attainder provisions (in Sections 9 and 10 of Article I), so concerned were the Framers about this abuse of power that “these are the only two individual liberties that the original Constitution protects from both federal and state intrusion.”’
DOGE Is a Wakeup Call for Economists and Attorneys
Economists were complicit in government failure for decades. DOGE would not be in this position of influence if they hadn’t been.
‘The economics profession should reflect on the fact that DOGE is proceeding without the input of economists because economists have downplayed the persistence and extent of government policy failures. Minimizing governmental shortcomings weakens the profession’s policymaking relevance. The legal profession should reflect on the fact that lawyers lack the requisite economic training to grasp the potentially adverse implications and social desirability of DOGE policies and actions that lawyers are facilitating and defending.’
States Ramping Up Regulations Amid Federal Pullback
The interesting question here is, how much bureaucratic overhead will people tolerate? We’ve argued that there is a regulatory competition just as there is tax competition between different levels of government and between regions. There is a limit to how much tax all level of government can impose before the pushback becomes too much. Similarly, there are limits on regulation.
The states are trying to fill the breach before the upper limit resets lower.
It’s a bold move, Cotton.
‘In the vacuum left by a lack of federal mandates, state-level advocates and officials – and in some cases businesses themselves – are predicted to fill the void.’