Student Government
UPDATE: Welcome fromthearchives and MR readers. Please note that nothing untoward was meant by the poor choice of words in the first sentence below. Second, please note that I have no reason to believe that Megan would not mind abuses of power that were aligned with her beliefs; I was throwing her in with lots of other partisans who do have that problem, it was unfair, and I have apologized.
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I do not understand Tyler's attentions to Megan-non-McArdle. I had originally drafted a well-rounded criticism of both Megan and her anonymous, "libertarian" interlocutor, but in doing so I realized that what was really needed was a harsh rebuke of her impassioned but misguided defense of bureaucracy. Megan's position is that bureaucrats "BALANCE COMPETING NEEDS" [her overemphasis]. This is untrue, and belief in it is the stem of much wrongdoing.
1) Government employees created the problem in the first place.
According to this article, "Starting in the 1920s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation drained most of Tule and Lower Klamath lakes for agriculture and built an irrigation canal to send Upper Klamath Lake water to farms in the neighboring Tule Lake basin."
Then, those farmers got subsidized electricity. We know because of the furor set off when it was proposed that the subsidies be taken away:
2. Megan is very adamant about the balance claim; her caps lock key frequently gets stuck when discussing it. Unfortunately, the idea of measuring and balancing needs is meaningless. It has great emotional appeal, but doesn't describe what is really happening. At best, bureaucrats are making judgments about relative costs, but there can be no doubt that they are applying their own standards for such things as discount rates, which constituencies to poll, and how much weight to attach to them. They are not measuring the needs of fishermen, farmers, or Natives and comparing them on a calibrated needs scale. As with the global warming debate, we seem to have lots of physical science experts looking at a problem and then making a social science policy recommendation.
Balance, in any meaningful sense, means that each side gives a little and gets a little. A balanced solution would have involved give and take, bargaining, and compromise; I propose private mechanisms for such below. However, from what I can tell, the recent sequence of decisions had anything except balance in that sense. First, the Fish & Wildlife Service's biological opinions and those of judges reviewing the case have been in favor of fish, Natives, and fishermen, full stop. Then, the reversal was in favor of farmers, full stop.
In this way, bureaucratic decisions don't solve conflicts, they create the conditions for eternal conflict. One side is in, the other is out, and the side left out has no recourse but to politics. This is the unstated goal of much public policy: simultaneously remove traditional decentralized mechanisms for problem solving while replacing them with a central mechanism which puts politicians and bureaucrats in the role of Solomon. That is exactly what Megan means when she says that people with a stake in the conflict should not be allowed to decide it: bargaining should be banned and replaced with a rational, technocratic authority.
3. My original draft defended Megan and her co-workers from the association with totalitarian bureaucrats, but I realized in researching the background of how the conflict came about that bureaucrats are in fact the source of the wrongdoing in question. They don't realize it; they actually believe their own propaganda about working for the common good. But as I have just argued, they create the conditions for conflict, then they "resolve" the conflict in such a way that it guarantees it will continue, and meanwhile they eradicate all of the mechanisms which would allow the conflict to be amicably resolved for everyone.
People worry incessantly about the problems of artificial monopolies in private markets, but don't seem to recognize the analogous process in the "market" for law, a market in which the main player is also the referee and league commissioner. Bureaucrats do have a dog in this fight: their existence must be justified. They have interests at stake just as much as the farmers or fishermen. And yet they claim to be honest brokers.
From her comments, Megan seems to be aware of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil", but she does not seem to have absorbed it in a way that she can apply it. Although I'm sure there were good invoice inspectors and dam inspectors in every totalitarian regime, the pseudo-libertarian commenter was wrong to liken this particular office to one charged with the task of making sure work-camp trains were running on schedule, but that's really beside the point, isn't it? Megan makes a nice show of arguing how her particular office and the office in question in her original article are filled with people trying to do the right thing, but that is also beside the point.
The civil employees are working within a system in which the rules -- not the laws she cites, but the rules of the game -- are already set and their job is merely to be the agents of the people who set the rules.* Sure, there's a little slop in the system to let everyone believe this is a transparent democracy, but get real. Someone has already decided that your telemetry geek should measure this and not that; it serves an interest. The public meetings serve to give the public the impression that cheap talk is worth something; at the end of the day, you decide against one group and for another. Someone has dictated a long list of acquisition regulations that ensures that the invoice checker is only going to see certain kinds of invoices and look for certain kinds of data. But those are just the surface conditions.
The subsurface conditions have been in place for generations: promises were made, reclamation projects were funded, subsidies were provided. Megan makes no mention of those inconvenient facts or their implications. Second, note that the salmon industry has already gotten their settlement (here and here). Now, Megan is outraged that an elected official has the audacity to intervene on behalf of a constituency group? That is what politicians do. Note that I am not defending Cheney; doubtless what he did was as cynical as anything else this administration does. Jane's Law holds.
If ultimately successful at rationalizing all decision-making in this way, a central government will have completely displaced private institutions and made the populace entirely dependent on faceless but ostensibly well-meaning technocrats. That is the problem of progressive wonkism and centralization that I have written about. And while the Fish & Wildlife service is not as dangerous as the office of Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement, passive acceptance of centralization is part of a broader problem.**
4. Megan keeps using that word "libertarian": I do not think it means what she and her sympathetic commenters thinks it means. It certainly does not mean someone who does not understand communal goods (who are Eric S. Raymond and Jimbo Wales, what is the noosphere, and how would they be relevant to this discussion?). And I'm not sure I can think of a single libertarian who would automatically side with those farmers who were essentially benefiting from at least two previous government interventions.
In fact, a libertarian response to this would have covered at a minimum the following issues:
5. Megan claims to be upset by a rogue agent hijacking government agencies for his own agenda. I'll grant her that this seems to be just that. But as I noted in this post, the left is full of people who are currently upset that NASA is not headed by a rogue agent for their interests and that the ideological purity tests are not in their favor. Must I really spend time looking up and finding all the ways that other, non-Bush administrations have applied their own purity tests? Really?? And no, don't bore me with the anecdote about the token right-to-lifer picked by Clinton to be the Second Assistant Vice-Chair of the Office of the Undersecretary for Wilderness Area Parking Lot Stripe Paint Standards. You know that in general, on average, every president picks people who broadly agree with him.
C'mon, Megan. Your real problem here is that the rogue isn't working for your team; you would be perfectly happy with a fellow traveler rogue who uses all of the right catch-phrases and paeans to the correct totems. You will happily look the other way when they violate laws with which you happen to disagree; you may even defend their behavior. Elk Hills? Serbia? Mazen al-Najjar and Nasser Ahmed? Carnivore? Echelon? Jane's Law holds.
As you mature as a civil servant, you will learn to operate within those laws with which you agree, in opposition to those with which you disagree, and in complete ignorance of many more. Hayek's theory about information in society is far more relevant to this discussion than The Road to Serfdom. It would be better if politicians and civil servants actually learned about the former, had a little more humility about their own work, and tried to think of ways to decentralize decision-making by using some of the methods bulleted above instead of thinking of themselves as hard-working, enlightened, public-interested, unbiased, angelic promoters of sweetness and light. "Civil Servant" is a misleading title intended to frame our perception: "Government Employee" is probably better.
At the same time, it would be better if citizens spent more time thinking about how to pull power back from the central authorities, to resolve conflicts ourselves, and to build or rebuild local, community-based institutions rather than actively supporting powerful, central authorities who claim to be able to do these things for us.
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*Civil servants Government employees aren't entirely passive in the process: they also shape and interpret and the laws in order to preserve or expand their own authority. Megan defends the Endangered Species Act elsewhere with an ad populum argument. While popular among the voting public, it has been less so among technical experts. In this way, Megan lines up support for her favored policies no matter what: they are either popular with the public and must be kept and enforced despite the objections of technical experts, or they are popular with technical experts and must be kept and enforced despite the public outcry. This is just one of the many techniques she will perfect as she continues her career.
** Thanks to Arnold Kling, I rediscovered Unqualified Reservations and this excellent and relevant article. Sorry, Arnold, Bryan set me straight.
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I do not understand Tyler's attentions to Megan-non-McArdle. I had originally drafted a well-rounded criticism of both Megan and her anonymous, "libertarian" interlocutor, but in doing so I realized that what was really needed was a harsh rebuke of her impassioned but misguided defense of bureaucracy. Megan's position is that bureaucrats "BALANCE COMPETING NEEDS" [her overemphasis]. This is untrue, and belief in it is the stem of much wrongdoing.
1) Government employees created the problem in the first place.
According to this article, "Starting in the 1920s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation drained most of Tule and Lower Klamath lakes for agriculture and built an irrigation canal to send Upper Klamath Lake water to farms in the neighboring Tule Lake basin."
The government not only promised land to settlers, they promised water to them and water and fishing "rights" to the Native Americans before them. This article summarizes,
Politicians and bureaucrats, having "no dog in this fight" as Megan says, simply blow with the wind, giving "rights" away to anyone who petitions strongly enough. One doubts whether private property rights would have been so poorly protected, but then she basically says that she does not think people ought to be trusted with a role in resolving disputes because they will defend their own interests.Yet according to some, the government had earlier also promised farmers irrigation water "forever" when it made Klamath Basin land grants between 1908 and the 1940s.
Further, in an 1864 treaty with the Klamath Native American tribes, the government guaranteed water and suckerfish fishing rights downriver in exchange for their land upriver. When making land grants, the government did not tell the farmers of the tribe's rights.
Then, those farmers got subsidized electricity. We know because of the furor set off when it was proposed that the subsidies be taken away:
By first abrogating the rights granted to the Natives, then spending taxpayer money to "reclaim" the valley for agriculture, then encouraging people to move there, then subsidizing their electricity (and God knows what else), thus bringing many competing interests into the valley, bureaucrats established the conditions for conflict.Rates will go from 0.6 cents to more than 6 cents per kilowatt-hour - a tenfold increase. [and that's still less than I pay!]
The Tulelake Irrigation District in Northern California, for example, has been told that its annual power bill is expected to rise from about $70,000 in 2003 to $1.05 million in 2006, said Ed Danosky, general manager.
Farmers are screaming about economic disaster and broken promises.
"People are going to suffer," said Steve Kandra, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, who said he believes many will resort to more wasteful irrigation flooding that uses a lot less juice.
But others see market-based power rates for irrigators as the much-needed catalyst for resolving entrenched conflicts between agriculture and fish. The irony is that by leaving it to market forces rather than government, they say, fish and farmers could end up healthier.
Especially in the hillier portions of the basin in Oregon, where sprinkler irrigation is dominant and flood irrigation impractical, high power rates can be an incentive to forgo farming on marginal lands.
2. Megan is very adamant about the balance claim; her caps lock key frequently gets stuck when discussing it. Unfortunately, the idea of measuring and balancing needs is meaningless. It has great emotional appeal, but doesn't describe what is really happening. At best, bureaucrats are making judgments about relative costs, but there can be no doubt that they are applying their own standards for such things as discount rates, which constituencies to poll, and how much weight to attach to them. They are not measuring the needs of fishermen, farmers, or Natives and comparing them on a calibrated needs scale. As with the global warming debate, we seem to have lots of physical science experts looking at a problem and then making a social science policy recommendation.
Balance, in any meaningful sense, means that each side gives a little and gets a little. A balanced solution would have involved give and take, bargaining, and compromise; I propose private mechanisms for such below. However, from what I can tell, the recent sequence of decisions had anything except balance in that sense. First, the Fish & Wildlife Service's biological opinions and those of judges reviewing the case have been in favor of fish, Natives, and fishermen, full stop. Then, the reversal was in favor of farmers, full stop.
In this way, bureaucratic decisions don't solve conflicts, they create the conditions for eternal conflict. One side is in, the other is out, and the side left out has no recourse but to politics. This is the unstated goal of much public policy: simultaneously remove traditional decentralized mechanisms for problem solving while replacing them with a central mechanism which puts politicians and bureaucrats in the role of Solomon. That is exactly what Megan means when she says that people with a stake in the conflict should not be allowed to decide it: bargaining should be banned and replaced with a rational, technocratic authority.
3. My original draft defended Megan and her co-workers from the association with totalitarian bureaucrats, but I realized in researching the background of how the conflict came about that bureaucrats are in fact the source of the wrongdoing in question. They don't realize it; they actually believe their own propaganda about working for the common good. But as I have just argued, they create the conditions for conflict, then they "resolve" the conflict in such a way that it guarantees it will continue, and meanwhile they eradicate all of the mechanisms which would allow the conflict to be amicably resolved for everyone.
People worry incessantly about the problems of artificial monopolies in private markets, but don't seem to recognize the analogous process in the "market" for law, a market in which the main player is also the referee and league commissioner. Bureaucrats do have a dog in this fight: their existence must be justified. They have interests at stake just as much as the farmers or fishermen. And yet they claim to be honest brokers.
From her comments, Megan seems to be aware of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil", but she does not seem to have absorbed it in a way that she can apply it. Although I'm sure there were good invoice inspectors and dam inspectors in every totalitarian regime, the pseudo-libertarian commenter was wrong to liken this particular office to one charged with the task of making sure work-camp trains were running on schedule, but that's really beside the point, isn't it? Megan makes a nice show of arguing how her particular office and the office in question in her original article are filled with people trying to do the right thing, but that is also beside the point.
The civil employees are working within a system in which the rules -- not the laws she cites, but the rules of the game -- are already set and their job is merely to be the agents of the people who set the rules.* Sure, there's a little slop in the system to let everyone believe this is a transparent democracy, but get real. Someone has already decided that your telemetry geek should measure this and not that; it serves an interest. The public meetings serve to give the public the impression that cheap talk is worth something; at the end of the day, you decide against one group and for another. Someone has dictated a long list of acquisition regulations that ensures that the invoice checker is only going to see certain kinds of invoices and look for certain kinds of data. But those are just the surface conditions.
The subsurface conditions have been in place for generations: promises were made, reclamation projects were funded, subsidies were provided. Megan makes no mention of those inconvenient facts or their implications. Second, note that the salmon industry has already gotten their settlement (here and here). Now, Megan is outraged that an elected official has the audacity to intervene on behalf of a constituency group? That is what politicians do. Note that I am not defending Cheney; doubtless what he did was as cynical as anything else this administration does. Jane's Law holds.
If ultimately successful at rationalizing all decision-making in this way, a central government will have completely displaced private institutions and made the populace entirely dependent on faceless but ostensibly well-meaning technocrats. That is the problem of progressive wonkism and centralization that I have written about. And while the Fish & Wildlife service is not as dangerous as the office of Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement, passive acceptance of centralization is part of a broader problem.**
4. Megan keeps using that word "libertarian": I do not think it means what she and her sympathetic commenters thinks it means. It certainly does not mean someone who does not understand communal goods (who are Eric S. Raymond and Jimbo Wales, what is the noosphere, and how would they be relevant to this discussion?). And I'm not sure I can think of a single libertarian who would automatically side with those farmers who were essentially benefiting from at least two previous government interventions.
In fact, a libertarian response to this would have covered at a minimum the following issues:
- native property rights (wouldn't the 1864 treaty have priority over everything else?)
- actual fishing rights which are defensible and transferable, as opposed to fishing licenses
- Groups like Trout Unlimited have been promoting the idea of in-stream rights for years. Many states have laws oriented towards farming or ranching that dictate that non-use or in-stream use of water rights results in the forfeit of those "rights". Where TU has been successful at changing the status quo, they can buy water rights and then leave the water in the river so their favorite game can flourish.
- Stop subsidizing the farmers' inputs such as electricity: see above.
- Bargaining between the fishermen and the farmers. Unfortunately, while I found several articles dealing with proposals to buy farmers out, I found none that discussed direct bargaining between the two groups. Buying the farmers out is something Richard Epstein, another quasi-libertarian, would get behind. Some sources claim that by buying out just the most marginal farms in Klamath, it might be possible to leave the remaining farms and restore enough water to the river to meet the needs of fishermen. Direct bargaining between the two groups is something in which Ronald Coase might be interested. However, contra several quasi-libertarian commenters who have joined the fray since the original post, there are large transaction costs problems to be sorted out, so the Coase Theorem does not "guarantee" an efficient solution regardless of who gets the rights. Sorry.
5. Megan claims to be upset by a rogue agent hijacking government agencies for his own agenda. I'll grant her that this seems to be just that. But as I noted in this post, the left is full of people who are currently upset that NASA is not headed by a rogue agent for their interests and that the ideological purity tests are not in their favor. Must I really spend time looking up and finding all the ways that other, non-Bush administrations have applied their own purity tests? Really?? And no, don't bore me with the anecdote about the token right-to-lifer picked by Clinton to be the Second Assistant Vice-Chair of the Office of the Undersecretary for Wilderness Area Parking Lot Stripe Paint Standards. You know that in general, on average, every president picks people who broadly agree with him.
C'mon, Megan. Your real problem here is that the rogue isn't working for your team; you would be perfectly happy with a fellow traveler rogue who uses all of the right catch-phrases and paeans to the correct totems. You will happily look the other way when they violate laws with which you happen to disagree; you may even defend their behavior. Elk Hills? Serbia? Mazen al-Najjar and Nasser Ahmed? Carnivore? Echelon? Jane's Law holds.
As you mature as a civil servant, you will learn to operate within those laws with which you agree, in opposition to those with which you disagree, and in complete ignorance of many more. Hayek's theory about information in society is far more relevant to this discussion than The Road to Serfdom. It would be better if politicians and civil servants actually learned about the former, had a little more humility about their own work, and tried to think of ways to decentralize decision-making by using some of the methods bulleted above instead of thinking of themselves as hard-working, enlightened, public-interested, unbiased, angelic promoters of sweetness and light. "Civil Servant" is a misleading title intended to frame our perception: "Government Employee" is probably better.
At the same time, it would be better if citizens spent more time thinking about how to pull power back from the central authorities, to resolve conflicts ourselves, and to build or rebuild local, community-based institutions rather than actively supporting powerful, central authorities who claim to be able to do these things for us.
---------------------------------------
*
** Thanks to Arnold Kling, I rediscovered Unqualified Reservations and this excellent and relevant article. Sorry, Arnold, Bryan set me straight.
Labels: centralization, Coase, environment, failure, politics, property_rights, state-capitalism, subsidization
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