Greg

First, it was not just Heritage, when I read bureaucracy theory, Anthony Downs, Robert Dahl and Alvin Gouldner all discussed the "iron triangle" of civil service, clients and Congressional committees to produce more and more government. This is why the tendency of Democrats to form agencies and then ignore how they were run led to the Reagan "Revolution."

Reagan then beat on government as if it was the enemy of the American people. The current Bush sort of took that idea and has used government to reward cronies, a pattern he followed when he was governor of Texas. The result was two big lies. That government was unnecessary or that it could be run by those who 's only claim was political or personal allegiance to the President.

Clinton and Gore demonstrated that if you appointed competent people and let government focus on helping ciizens and not the political machinery you could get both better results and cheaper costs. Democrats should take to heart the idea that big agencies are not the same as dealing with problems but that there is often a very necessary role for government.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I'm not up on the competing strands of academic economic theory, but I'm puzzled as to how rational choice theory can continue to survive in the fact of evidence from Kahneman and Tversky, Stephen Stitch and a host of others that people don't make decisions in a rational way (in the sense that economists and logicians define as rational anyway).  Seems to me that rational choice theory is flawed from the start by its psychological premises.  But I'm an utter dilletante.  Am I missing something?

Nice graphic on how big a part of the budget the military is:

Pie Chart

Standard neo-con blather always boils down to the same thing: military good, social services bad. Why social security is supposed to be incompetent (when it's overhead is about 4%) because it's a government department and the pentagon is not is just one of the mysteries of life...

What the neo-cons fail to realize is that they will get old and sick one day too. What will the pentagon do for them then?

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Daily Landscape

Campesino, the head of FEMA itself and any agency of its size is always going to be a political appointee. But Witt actually got Clinton's agreement to convert 10 top political posts in his agency to one that would be manned by career staff. That's pretty much unprecedented and proved to be effective. Why don't you read chapter 14 of the report of the Collins-Lieberman Committee, which has all kinds if juicy tidbits about FEMA's decline since 2001, and then get back to us.--Greg

Republicans view government as a way for their friends to make more money. The "defense" portion of government is the biggest cash cow ever devised by mankind, so it is a favorite of the Republicans. If they had left it at that the world would today be a better place, but they didn't. They were dissatisfied with the output from the cash cow, so they artificially stimulated it, by invading Iraq, by selling us on the false premise that we are at war, by conflating a few highly motivated, but psychotic "terrorists" with a vast worldwide Moslem conspiracy, which doesn't even exist. Now the cash cow yields a return they appreciate much more.

By contrast there is little or no money to be made by their friends from the Social Security program, and there was little to be made off of Medicare. The Medicare "problem" was fixed with the Part D Prescription Drug Drug Industry Welfare Plan. Never forget, the Republican Party is about nothing else so much as $$$ for the wealthy.

Hoppy in Sacramento

It is a freebee for GOP Representatives to disagree. Standard politics, nothing more. It cost the GOP Reps nothing and may get them some cover for their other out-rageous stands on their pet corporate welform laws.

Make them pay.

Got posted to wrong article.

Demand the Truth for America

I don't see how the Republicans can make the case that Americans are better off now than they were before Republicans gained control of Congress and the White House.

Democrats have a myriad of issues to attack Republicans with: corruption, cronyism, incompetence, more corruption, the war in Iraq, the economy, health care, gas prices, the environment, the Constitution, etc.

But I thought Democrats should have won in '04. They could have made a strong progressive argument back then, they just didn't make it.

After seeing Pelosi's performance on Meet the Press last Sunday, I'm not so confident the Democrats are capable of leveraging the dismal Republican record to pull off a retake of Congress this year or the White House in '08.

We shall see.

Apparently all of the good progressives have died; replaced with these strange Republican-esque pseudo-progressives.

There's no passion for the progressive agenda, which I guess is because there is no progressive agenda.

What is the Democratic platform this year? I think its, "We would have done everything Bush did, but we would have done it differently."

It has a nice ring to it.

Of course he was a political appointee, but the point is he was one with a background that qualified him for the job. Lets see ran a construction business and spent 4 years running basically the state version of FEMA.

Contrast that with "lawyer for the Arabian Horse Assoc."

There ARE progressives out there. John Conyers, for example, and the wonderful Bernie Sanders from Vermont (soon to be Vermont's next senator). Russ Feingold is another excellent example.

The difference is that liberalism has been so demonized, both in general society and in the Democratic Party, that the progressive voices that once might have been heralded as leaders are now systemically and totally marginalized, both by the Democrats and by the "traditional media".

The Iron Triangle of the mass media, the DLCers and the Republican party have made the progressives in the Democratic party lone voices in the woods. It will take a massive political shakeup to change that.

What the neo-cons fail to realize is that they will get old and sick one day too. What will the pentagon do for them then?

By then, draft them to fight in Iraq?  (At least it's three squares a day.) 

Daniel, You raise good points, but I think a lot of progress has been made in developing strategies for effectively managing government agencies. While some aspects of public sector management differ in significant ways from private sector management, as you suggest, at the end of the day in both realms supervisors who set clear goals and hold their workers accountable for achieving those goals do better than the majority of managers who don't. What has always bothered me is this ridiculous dichotomy perpetuated by popular culture and the Right that civil servants are inherently lazy, incompetent, self-centered, etc., and private sector employees are invariably energetic, creative, and attentive to the customer's needs. From my experience, there's a lot of bad management and incompetence in both the private and public sectors. No question the challenges are exacerbated in the government, particularly by some of the archaic civil service rules and the competing constituencies involved (as well as the relatively lousy pay in government). But the pervasive belief that the private sector aligns everyone's interests in ways that yield self-evidently better performance is something belied by everyday experience, at least in my own life. In any case, no theories I've read convincingly explain what might be meaningful distinctions. --Greg

I couldn't agree more.  (Though I've always assumed that it's ignorance of small details like math, in my case.)  For economic predictions over consumer behavior, for instance, inasmuch as the operating causal mechanisms at work are minds, then doesn't economics rest on psychology in something like the way that chemistry rests on physics?  And if so, isn't a law of economics by definition only as good as a law of psychology (i.e. not very good)?

Exactly my point. Sure you can point to a couple progressives here and there, but that ain't a movement. There is NO political party for progressives. There is NO liberal voice.

Devon & Matt, about those gas stations. If I am going east on a busy city street and the gas on the east side is higher than at a station on the west side, I would buy gas on the east side. So would many others, at least in Atlanta.

Greg might know, but weren't there some French students that rebelled at that whole line of economic rational thinking?

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Anyone who has dealt with Oxford Health or Con Ed can hardly make a serious argument that private enterprise is always more efficient than government. Albert O. Hirschman's great book "Exit Voice Loyalty" points that that monopolists don't always seek to maximize profit but use their position to provide slovenly serive.

In contrast to the above the IRS is a remarkablly efficient organization. Isn't the Republican's case against the IRS that they are precisely too skilled at what they do? The Social Security Administration and Medicare are also well run. Federal agencies that largely deal with the collection of money and the cutting of checks are as efficient as almost any private business. It is often the regulatory and anti-fraud provisions that makes dealing with the Federal government a problem. You must acknowledge that many congressmen get re-elected almost soley on the strength of their overcoming the problems their constitutents have with the bureaucracy.

However, in dealing with local bureaucracies, at least in New York City, it is rather clear that literal decimation would improve them. I often thought that Gringrinch's real genious was to focus the anger that many people feel toward their local agencies on the Federal government even though most people never deal with the Federal government.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

[duplicate deleted]

The reasoning is that those little things are essentially noise when you aggregate the data - half the time you're on the side of the street with cheaper gas anyway, the guy selling more expensive gas may also be an argumentative jerk to other people, etc. Where rational choice models go wrong is when very broad segments of the population deviate from it in the same direction - ex. a roulette wheel has came up black 8 times in a row - it must be "due" for a red. Simplifying assumptions like rational choice are ubiquitous in both social and hard sciences and modeling complex systems would be impossible without them. That's why the models need to be tested empirically to verify that you didn't assume away something important.

For example, most of the time, you can use Hooke's Law to model a compressed column of material, but when you expect the material to undergo plastic deformation or if the material doesn't exhibit a linear relation between stress and strain, you can't. Like rational choice, the model is still useful, but your ability to get accurate results from it depends on an understanding of its limitations.

It's been pretty much obvious for decades that much of DoD is a workfare program for a certain chunk of the middle class. Perhaps some of the billions of hours spent on research, development and construction of fancy new weapons systems actually improve the security of the US. They definitely improve the security of people who work for defense contractors (and yes, they do work hard, most of them, but they don't necessarily produce anything useful).

Even better from the point of view of creating a privatized entitlements program, people who work for defense contractors generally don't have to worry so much that their jobs will be outsourced to low-wage countries, because pretty much anything important requires a clearance which in turn requires US citizenship.

And, of course, working at a contractor to "defend America" also promotesa fairly limited set of political and personal views that just happen to be mostly congruent with GOP voting.

It is precisely the politicization of government, by undercutting the capacity of experienced and knowledgeable professionals to effectively carry out the laws, programs, and activities mandated by Congress, that has impinged on our freedoms and security.

The Republican Revolution promised the elimination of the Regulatory State put into place by the Democrats in the 1970s -- EPA, OSHA, NHSTA, etc. -- and the eunuching of New Deal programs designed to protect the people and their bank accounts from the depredations of corporations -- NLRB, FDA, FCC, SEC, etc.

But the Republicans were well aware that the American people support those regulatory regimes, in general; and they knew they couldn't eliminate or hamstring these administrative organizations, overtly.

Realizing that for all its failings the MSM does cover the Congress, Republicans early deemed the legislative route to be right out, because their real intent would become known to voters. But the MSM, for budgetary reasons, does not cover the federal departments and bureaus. Thus, appointing conservative ideologues to purposefully "mis-run" the agencies was the quickest and surest -- and most covert -- way of accomplishing the goal.

I doubt any of us yet recognizes fully what we've lost.

Anyone who has dealt with Oxford Health or Con Ed can hardly make a serious argument that private enterprise is always more efficient than government.

Until you have dealt with Microsoft. Then all bets are off.:-)

Part of the problem I have with your argument is using the same standard of measure, efficiency, to measure both sectors.

It seems like the private sector would aim for efficiency and the public for effective. Again, take Microsoft. I will argue forever that they may be efficient, which includes their bottom line, but are about as effective as dirt. Now take Fema under Clinton. They were very effective with their service delivery, and they promoted effective preventive policies, which did affect the public's bottom line, but not their own.

So how do you compare the two sectors with one measurement?

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"The way we think involves various shortcuts and approximations rather than rigorous logic, probably because the shortcuts were easier to evolve off of existing mental processes." A fairly recent study revealed that people do extensive research before purchasing, say, a $15.00 toaster, and the one they ultimately purchase fits their needs quite well. In purchasing a house, even though they research the myriads of ins-and-outs, the actual purchase often meets none or few of their original criteria. In other words, the final purchase is determined by the non-reasoning side of the brain. The researchers found that because everything that can be known about a toaster is available, the buyer is assured of making a wise decision so he sticks to his original criteria. In purchasing a house, however, everything cannot be known and he knows it so he chucks it all and ends up making his purchase on a whim. Given the ultimate import of the two decisions, it would seem more logical to buy the toaster because you like the color and the house because it met your original criteria.

Flavius, I don't really agree with your point, though it's true that top salaries in government are far below those in the private sector. Back in 2001, many, many Republicans with strong credentials in emergency services -- fire chiefs, state emergency office heads, whatever -- would have jumped at the opportunity to run the lead federal emergency response office at the salary level at that time. But the Bush administration chose campaign manager Joe Allbaugh, who had no such experience, because he was a reliable conservative ideologue and because they wanted to place people like him in patronage jobs. He then set out to pursue the classic right-wing agenda by cutting successful programs, shedding responsibilities to states and localities, and privatizing services. That set in motion an exodus of experienced staff from the agency, which accelerated after it was dumped into DHS.

This whole sad story is mainly about conservative ideology, not about the difficulty of finding good people at lousy salaries. Of course, lately they recognized the need to get someone who is qualified but no one bit. The reason is that the place is now such a mess that no one wants to go there, not because of the salaries.--Greg

[When] everything cannot be known and he knows it so he chucks it all and ends up making his purchase on a whim.

Politics for the Swing Voter is no different. Knowing he hasn't a snowball's chance in hell of figuring out which policy will accomplish which goal, the Swing Voter throws up his hands and votes for the most attractive candidate. See, James J. Kroeger before he was just plain James Kroeger.

So do you have lots of personal experience doing anything at all?

I agree about Allbaugh. Brownie was a bad illustration of my point which continues to be that competence matters . And that businesspeople who are paid more than $200K (by now $100K doesn't signify much) get that after climbing several levels of a pyramid by doing better than the other candidates. (And BTW learn management in the process.)And that that skill is largely transferrable to the government.

Just as an acknowledgement-not an appeal
to authority- much of what I'm saying appeared in an article I read recently- probably in the Nation .

I think Greg Anrig's argument is right on, except he's off by 100 years. The Bush Administration, the Heritage Foundation, and others on the extreme right have been working to undo the reforms started by Theodore Roosevelt.

I have a fair amount working with FEMA