Hubris, The Basis of Big Government Spending

Federal government spending problems are based entirely on hubris in government. In the US, our massive entitlement spending and huge regulatory structure is based on the idea that government experts can make decisions for people better than people can make decisions for themselves.

The morality of the government “taking care” of everyone is questionable.  It’s a given that some people are mentally unable to make their own decisions, it’s appropriate that a responsible person or institution be appointed by a local court to take care of them.  It’s not appropriate for a federal government bureaucracy to decide whole classes of people are unable to take care of themselves.  It’s even worse for the federal government to offer cash rewards if you give up taking care of yourself and let them take care of you instead.  When the federal government is taking care of you, you have to do what they tell you to do.  That includes voting for the people who take care of you, or they will stop doing it.

The faith of liberals in the purity of federal government workers’ motives has always astonished and amused me in its total naivete.   The people from the government will have the best of motives, while the evil private sector workers will not, according to liberals.  These judgements are never connected with the career paths of actual people who move between government and private sector jobs through the “revolving door” everyone complains about.  It also seems to be some miracle, a weird kind of transubstantiation, that people stop being people and become selfless saints once they start working for the government.

Computers have lead the government knows best crowd to argue that the government can use computers to collect all the information they need to run things, including large complex things like whole sectors of the economy.  Voters should notice that the government does not do computers very well. The Obamacare roll out is just one in a long line of technology flops. The Office of Personnel Management got hacked for 20 million personnel records because they did not have up to date security. Background checks for military, FBI and CIA personnel were stolen including finger print records.

If you're old enough to remember the $600 toilet seats the Pentagon was buying in the 1980's, you should notice that the problem was government using obsolete computer technology. The printers used to print parts lists could not print very wide reports. So the reports never had a part description and a price on the same page.

We need to cut government spending. We need to notice that government does not have the competence to run the things it’s supposed to be doing right now. There is no way the federal government can take on anything more.  We need to stop the idiots who think government should do more.  It’s clear from the results that the federal government can’t do any more.

Cap and Trade For Bureaucratic Regulations

I don't think it will take 30 years to halt the growth of the regulatory state. A single cap and trade bill and a slight change in court regulatory rules will do it. First, limit the total volume of government regulations and force bureaucrats to bargain with each other over which regulations are most important. If the government wants to add new regulations, they have to remove old regulations to make room for them. In addition, there needs to be a legal change in the deference federal courts give to regulatory agencies. Right now, regulations are given almost no court review because the regulatory agency is assumed to know what they are doing. The law should be instead that regulatory agencies deserve review on the relevance of the regulations to the original law authorizing the regulations. Regulators should be required to demonstrate that the effects of the new regulations will be to solve the problem they are supposed to solve at a reasonable cost compared to the benefits. Obviously, court injunctions would be allowed to delay the imposition of new regulations until they can be reviewed. With these two innovations, we will be using two of the Liberals' favorite mechanisms to restrain regulation. Liberals designed cap and trade to destroy conventional energy production.  They have always used the courts to stall construction projects with endless environmental lawsuits.  Under my scheme, when the regulatory process grinds to a halt, it will fall on the bureaucrats and courts. 
Aticle I reacted to:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390434/thirty-years-war-kevin-d-williamson

Muni Bankruptcy: Who's Next?

When liberals try to say that only Detroit is a mess, I have to laugh.  I have lived in and around Chicago for most of my life. Both the city, Cook County and the State of Illinois are on the one party road to ruin. The pension liabilities of these entities dwarf their ability to pay. The Democrat "Reform" Governor can't get the Democrat legislature to agree to even micro steps toward fixing the pension problems because the public employee unions own the legislature and refuse to see the state pension liabilities reduced in any way. Raising taxes has been the only politically correct answer so far. The corruption is legendary, and jokes about it are common. For example, Illinois governors get 3 terms: 2 in office and one in jail. The last Democrat Governor is in jail, as is the previous Republican Governor. The difference is that when the last Republican Governor went to jail, the Illinois Republican party was almost completely destroyed in the following election. When Democrat Rod Blagojevich followed Republican George Ryan into prison, the next election brought minimal to no electoral or policy changes. Some of the Democrat office holders were replaced by other Democrats. A Cook County sales tax increase was repealed. That's it. The State of Illinois no longer pays its bills on time. Getting further and further behind is the only way the state can borrow more money because its credit rating is lower than California's. I think that the public employee unions are counting on native son "The One" to save them with a big bailout. Since the states created the federal government, federal bankruptcy laws do not cover states, just municipalities. When Illinois defaults, nobody really knows what is going to happen. Maybe they'll just keep raising taxes until everybody moves to Indiana or Wisconsin.

The Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) received the nickname "Hell Upon Detroit" for reasons that are now evident. For some reason, reactionary liberalism doesn't do very well in practice no matter how good it looks in theory.

Articles on Detroit:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353862/detroit-goes-down-kevin-d-williamson

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/354461/steins-law-charles-krauthammer

Unexamined Academic Assumptions

Thomas Sowell had a great article this week on unexamined academic assumptions.  It really spoke to me.  The reason I have a BS in Math and MS in Statistics is because I wouldn't buy into the liberal mindset in Economics class.  I avoided soft subjects, like History, because I would not use Hegel's Dialectic to analyze historical events.  Also, when I was in college during the Viet Nam War, professors taught war was by definition futile.  I thought the professors were nuts to think that "war never solved anything."  It sure solved Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, not to mention Rome's Carthage problems.  I read history for fun now, but knowing too much makes me uncomfortable listening to people who believe the government is more efficient than private enterprise in running things like health care.  If I object that historically governments are usually very bad at running almost everything, the resulting argument provides a lot more heat than light.  Leftism in higher education is at least partially the result of draft deferments granted to the baby boomers who stayed in college to avoid Viet Nam.  I find the liberals who look down on my education generally have never had any of their assumptions questioned.  They think everybody knows liberals are the good guys, and folks like me are ignorant rednecks.  This attitude does not make for informed dialogue.  So I think Dr. Sowell's article matches my general experience with average "liberally" educated citizens. 

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/347003/academias-unexamined-assumptions

US Air Traffic Control:: Total Managerial Incompetence

I want to privatize US air traffic control.  That would be truly less government.  The Canadians have privatized air traffic control.  You know how liberals love to talk about how Canada does things.  The air traffic control fiasco is just another example of total managerial incompetence in government.  This incompetence is a direct result of the incentives that face government employees who make managerial decisions.  The bigger the government, the more secure your job is.  When faced with cuts, the government typically cuts the most visible services in order to get their budget restored.  This strategy is so common it has its own Wikipedia entry.  However, the FAA has a long history of such managerial incompetence.  In a recent example, the FAA did not managed to modernize US air traffic control, while wasting billions of dollars trying.  Government employees want to maximize their budget, so cost overruns are good for them. This administration's political reaction to budget cuts should make everyone think twice about allowing big government to run anything economically important, especially air traffic control.  

Description of Canadian Air Traffic Control

http://www.navcanada.ca/NavCanada.asp?Language=en&Content=ContentDefinitionFiles%5CNewsroom%5CBackgrounders%5Cairtrafficservices.xml

Article on FAA History of Waste

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346688/extravagance-faa

Cuts Politically Motivated

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/the-faa-fiasco-90603.html

Wikipedia Entry for Washington Monument Syndrome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Monument_Syndrome

We Need to Cut Amtrak

Typical liberal response to any budget cut threat is: "You can't possibly cut (fill in the blank).  It’s way too important.  Besides it's not very much money by itself."  As Everett Dirksen once said, a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.  We are borrowing 35 to 40 cents on the dollar of Federal spending.  The right answer is, we have to cut EVERYTHING WE CAN.  This includes the sacred cow of Amtrak.  The Amtrak subsidy budget is 1.45 billion dollars.  The romance of passenger trains is not worth it.  

http://www.planning.org/features/2012/federalbudget.htm