Category: Political Science

Jason asks:

What are some examples of successful government bureaucracies?

Wars aside, here is a short and very incomplete list: the NIH, the Manhattan Project, U.C. Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Fairfax County, the World Trade Organization, the urban planners of postwar Germany, some of the Victorian public works and public health commissions, most of what goes on in Singapore, anywhere that J.S. Bach worked.

The European Union has been very good for eastern Europe.  I'll leave aside the health care issue because we've debated that plenty already.  The real question is what all these examples have in common.

Isn't it only fair that if companies can bribe and threaten politicians
(by contribution to them or their opponents), politicians should be
able to bribe and threaten companies?

The source is here, from comments on the last post.  Arnold Kling comments on related matters.

The EU, Canada, and Japan are in the aggregate much more significant trade partners than China/Mexico/Brazil. And the case for them charging us carbon tariffs seems about as good as the case for us charging the Chinese.

That is Matt Yglesias.  Here is more, including a good chart on which countries are our largest trading partners.

David Axelrod spoke:

“I’d like to believe that winning the Nobel Peace Prize is not a political liability,” said David Axelrod,
a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “But this isn’t something I gave a
moment of thought to until today. Hopefully people will receive it with
some sense of pride. But I don’t know; it’s uncharted waters.”

Putting aside domestic responses, can holding a Peace Prize make it harder to bring about peace?  I believe the answer is yes.  The positive scenario is that holding the Prize signals strength and induces other bargainers to jump aboard your winning bandwagon, for fear of being locked out of an eventual agreement.  The more negative scenario arises when the Prize holder is expected to pressure Country X, Ruritania.  If the Prize holder secretly wishes to favor Ruritania in negotiations, a President without a Prize can to some extent feign or credibly signal weak bargaining power: "I'm sorry, Ruritania just won't budge; you'll have to move closer to their position."  It's harder for the Prize holder to send this same signal, since everyone expects him to get Ruritania to budge (if not, the Prize holder also doesn't have any bargaining advantages either).  The Prize holder may find it harder to deal with truly intransigient nations; fortunately we don't have many of those in the world right now. 

Related arguments are that a Prize can make it harder to practice strategies of "creative ambiguity" or "low expectations."

David Frum suggests the Prize makes it harder for Obama to be hawkish. 

Today's Financial Times writes about the Central Organization Department of China:

To glean a sense of the dimensions of the organization department's job, conjure up a parallel body in Washington.  The imaginary department would oversee the appointments of US state governors and their deputies; the mayors of big cities; heads of federal regulatory agencies; the chief executives of General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, Walmart and 50-odd of the remaining largest companies; justices on the Supreme Court; the editors of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post; the bosses of the television networks and cable stations; the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities and the heads of think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation.

All equivalent positions in China are filled by people appointed by the party through the organization department.

I would not want to be on the bad side of the Central Organization Department.  The full article, which is interesting throughout, is here.  It's also related to why I don't see China just evolving into a normal democracy.

France is finding is hard to pass a stiff carbon tax, though of course they already use lots of (non-carbon) nuclear power:

Details are finally emerging about the country’s planned “carbon tax,” to be put in place next year. And the idea is anything but popular.

The center-right French government wants to levy a tax of 14 euros per ton of carbon dioxide starting in 2010; carbon taxes are popular with many economists and business leaders because they are seen as easier to implement than carbon-trading plans, which France also belongs to.

In reality, France’s carbon tax is basically just a gasoline tax–and a tiny one at that. The electricity sector, overwhelmingly powered by emissions-free nuclear power, isn’t part of the plan [TC: Duh!], Prime Minister Francois Fillon told Le Figaro. The tax will basically fall on liquid fuels–raising pump prices 3 euro cents a liter (that’s roughly 15 U.S. cents a gallon).

In theory it will be revenue-neutral but most French voters are nonetheless opposed to the measure.  Here is further information:

Large CO2 emitters, such as oil refiners and steel makers, will be exempted from paying the new tax. The government will propose special compensations for fishermen, farmers and truckers…

I've already done What is Progressivism? so here is another installment.  This isn't what conservatives today necessarily believe, it's a retranslation of a mishmash of conservatism into a language which I can understand and, in part, present to others.  Here goes:

1. Evil is real and there exist evil nations in the world; the relatively virtuous Western powers require strong states to fend off such evils.  This distinct from "big government" in the sense advocated by modern liberals. 

2. In international affairs, in the twentieth century, the United
States in particular has been unselfish to a remarkable degree.  We
therefore should trust the United States with unprecedented power.  In
fact we have no alternative.  Some cultures really are better than
others.

3. The spread of nuclear weapons, and other forms of WMD, to irrational, evil and undeterrable
powers is the number one foreign policy issue.  It runs the risk of
equalizing the balance of power between virtuous and evil agents in the
world.

4. On the domestic front, education is the keystone issue.  Societies succeed if strong family structures support an emphasis on learning and acculturation.  While this does not rule out public sector education, if public sector education works the credit is not to be found in the public sector.

5. When in doubt, side with the laws and customs that have, over time,
been associated with the Western powers and their growth into powerful
and durable societies.  It's hard to judge a lot of customs using pure,
unadulterated reason, as Oakeshott and Hayek have suggested.  Defending traditional values is an enterprise which itself requires a mix of law and custom.  If you're focused mainly on "policy proposals," you are missing the point.

7. We do not have either the resources or the norms to remake society in the direction of a fully-comfortable-for-everyone social democracy.  We do need welfare states to keep a polity in running order, but we should be modest about what such regimes can accomplish.  They cannot overcome a fundamental lack of proper values as found in many poor or disadvantaged communities.

8. Fiscal conservatism is part and parcel of conservatism per se.  A state wrecked by debt is a state due to perish or fall into decay.  This is a lesson from history.  States must "save up their powder" for true crises and it is a kind of narcissistic arrogation to think that the personal failures of particular individuals — often those with weak values — meet this standard.

9. For conservatism, small government is a means, not an end.  It is a means to the values which lie behind Western civilization and it is a means toward the prosperity we need to live well and defend ourselves.  Capitalism is important but capitalism itself relies upon particular values held by the citizenry.

10. Responsibility is a more important value than either liberty or equality.

Here is Julian Sanchez on what such exercises might mean.  I don't know exactly what they mean.  For me they are a means of thinking through ideas.

Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.

A loyal MR reader writes to me:

I love when you think through counterfactuals, so here’s
one that’s been on my mind.  Imagine John Kerry wins in 2004.  What are
the implications for the 2006 midterms and more importantly the 2008
presidential election?  We probably pull out of Iraq without ever attempting the
surge, and leave the country in chaos.  But more importantly, the housing
bubble collapses on a Democrat's watch, not [a] Republican's.  Regardless of what
anyone says, the housing bubble was going to burst.  Maybe the collapse takes a
different path under Kerry than Bush, but it still happens, leaving his administration
to deal with it.  Does he win re-election?  Is McCain still the Republican
candidate?  And what becomes of a little known back bencher named Barack Obama?

I am sorry to disappoint such an excellent reader but I genuinely do not know what would have happened, if say Kerry had been more personally appealing to more voters (that counterfactual more or less holds constant other factors which are more directly political).  I do know this is a reason why I think it is very hard to forecast the net impact of a single election.  Do you remember the furor and then the agony from 2004?

My hunch is that consciously or subconsciously, the urban residents of
China are not thrilled by the idea of a pure democracy that would
effectively turn the country over to the rural poor.

That's Scott Sumner and the post is interesting throughout.

This has been a fruitful dialog.  Two days ago Matt Yglesias made a list of how progressives should respond to the public choice critique of big government:

– This is why it’s important to be a civil libertarian and to be much
more skeptical than the political/media mainstream is of the idea that
what’s at stake in these debates is really a “balance” between a
“security” imperative and some airy “values.” It is overwhelmingly
likely that various secret police powers are simply going to be abused,
rather than put to some productive-but-liberty-infringing use.

– This is also a reason to be skeptical of ideas about discretionary regulatory fine-tuning. You always could
improve outcomes by abandoning rigid rules (with “do what you want”
counting as a rigid rule) but in practice you probably won’t.

– I think this also counts on a reason to prefer systems that rely more on career civil servants
and less on political appointees. Bureaucrats have their own
distinctive psychopathologies, but they’re different, and it’s helpful
to have them in more tension and balance than exists in the United
States.

– It’s also important to have in place systems for effective
monitoring of elected officials. A Canadian voter elects one federal
official–a Member of Parliament. An American elects four–a President,
two Senators, and one Representative. Americans don’t have four times
as much time as Canadians to pay attention to what politicians are
doing or to learn the issues; our politicians are just being monitored
less. When you consider the proliferation of things like independently
elected school boards, district attorneys, sheriffs, etc. keep in mind
that this diffusion of responsibility is a good way for the egomaniacal
to evade responsibility.

– If that leaves us with too few veto points, the thing to do is not to have additional houses of legislature, but Swiss-style (as opposed to California-style) direct democracy, where the actions of a unicameral legislature can be checked by the voters.

I agree with much of the list (for one thing, however, I think voting for a fewer number of politicians will have a very small beneficial effect in terms of voter attention); the question is what should be added to it.  "Smaller government" is a question-begging answer even if you favor that outcome.  It's a list of what will get you to better governmental outcomes, whatever you think those might be.

Matt Yglesias writes:

At the same time, I’ve come to be increasingly baffled by the high degree [of] cynicism and immorality
displayed in big-time politics. For example, Senators who genuinely do
believe that carbon dioxide emissions are contributing to a global
climate crisis seem to think nothing of nevertheless taking actions
that endanger the welfare of billions of people on the grounds that
acting otherwise would be politically problematic in their state. In
other words, they don’t want to do the right thing because their
self-interest points them toward doing something bad. But it’s
impossible to imagine these same Senators stabbing a homeless person in
a dark DC alley to steal his shoes. And what’s more, the entire
political class would be (rightly!) shocked and appalled by
the specter of a Senator murdering someone for personal gain. Yet it’s
actually taken for granted that “my selfish desires dictate that I do
x” constitutes a legitimate reason to do the wrong thing on important
legislation.

Making it all the odder, the level of self-interest at stake isn’t
all that high. Selling the public good down the river to bolster your
re-election chances isn’t like stealing a loaf of bread to feed your
starving children. The welfare rolls are hardly stocked with the names
of former members of congress. Indeed, it’s not even clear that voting
“the wrong way” poses particularly serious threats to one’s
re-election. But even if it did, one might assume that people who
bother to dedicating their lives to securing vast political power did
so because they actually wanted to accomplish something and get in the history books, perhaps, as one of the big heroes of their era.

I don't intend any particular point about cap and trade, but viewed more generally it's stunning how true this is.  (In fairness, note that the title of this post is my framing, not necessarily Matt's.)  Many people — especially those who become politicians — really do want fame and power and it is amazing what they will talk themselves into to get there and to stay there.  They don't even want fame in the sense of being recognized, in the longer run, for having done the right thing.  They want more personal influence and power now.