The Burden We Bear

I read today that less than 1 of a 1,000 federal employees were denied raises due to poor job performance. The problem is that they judge themselves and, further, that they judge themselves by the standard of, uh, themselves. Yeah, that's right, they have to measure up to themselves. Kafkaesque, eh-no?

 

Bureaucracy is eternal and unchangeable in its ways. Public unions merely accentuate the negative. Since improved bureaucratic performance violates the laws of human nature and human social organization--the only way to ameliorate the pathology is to reduce the quantity of bureaucrats. Reduced quantity means less harm from low quality.

The Left's Dance with Eugenics

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-eugenics-is-bad-and-anti-eugenics.html A good historical analysis of eugenics, with some note of its relation to religion. I'm not quite so transcendentalist as the author and there are a few points to which I take exception, but there are some fine sequences of thought here and a happy grasp of the Orwellian inversions and perversions perpetrated under cover of political correctness. My exceptions: I doubt that all pre-modern societies were as eugenic as he supposed. In most places, the great majority were rural farmers with similar reproductive success regardless of the finer differences in fitness. Also, cities were places where the elites gathered, but also places with the highest mortality rates by a substantial margin. Still, the overall trend was probably slightly eugenic. I read a paper on this subject that looked at pre-modern England and found good evidence for eugenic effects. I also disagree that PC opposition to eugenics stems from the PC elite's fear of being themselves, as high IQ people, forced by government to have more children. I think, instead, that their opposition is another case of reality-denial: they refuse to believe in human biodiversity, they are committed unequivocally to belief in human equality. And the commitment is unequivocal because it is a moral commitment, utterly divorced from any scientific facts. Charlton gives them too much credit for rationality. They are ideologues, for whom inconvenient facts are matters to be ignored or lied about.

Par for the Course

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/nyregion/13homes.html?_r=1&hp I wish I could say this report surprised me. But, when you put a unionized bureaucracy in charge of disabled people, most of whom have been abandoned by their families, this is exactly what I would expect to find: incompetent, unaccountable bureaucrats plus brutal, moronic employees and abused residents. And it's nice to see that the state government sat on its hands for decades to cater to the union. At least the NY Times gives the guilty organizations a fair public thwacking--credit's due--though they will never connect the dots and reveal to their readers that such a bureaucratized/unionized structure always gives rise to bad outcomes of one sort or another. Bad outcomes are what happen in the absence of transparency and accountability.

The Most Powerful Special Interest Group

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/260830/upending-our-caste-system-kevin-d-williamson?page=1

Overall, a solid article with a very important, widely misunderstood point: it is the corrupting political power of unions that is their most dangerous characteristic. Collective bargaining is, comparatively, a minor and subordinate issue--which, I suspect, only really becomes a major issue as a result of the political influence public sector unions exert.

However, I think he may misinterpret cause and effect in some areas: 

 “As the union share increases, a state tends to have a higher government debt load. . . . The correlation is likely caused by the fact that unionized government workers are powerful lobby groups that push for higher government-worker compensation and higher government spending in general.”

It may instead be that left wing states, whose electorates want high spending, end up with more unionized workers and government spending.

Excellent summary:

The problem is not the public-sector unions, but the public sector, full stop. So long as we are a democratic society, a large public sector will have the power to impose its will on the political establishment, even if the unions are dissolved or their organized political activity is repressed. One of the great strengths of the United States is that many of our most important decisions are made at the state and local level, but government at that level is especially vulnerable to capture by rent-seeking public-sector unions. The public sector has relatively less clout at the national level (though it has a great deal) because its influence is diluted in a sea of other influences. But when it comes to state government or local bond issues — two titanic problems in our public finances — the public sector and its unions dominate, and will continue to dominate unless we either severely reduce its members’ numbers or enact very strong formal barriers to their voting themselves money out of the nation’s treasuries.

I do not know what kind of "formal barriers" would be effective. The governments need to be squeezed and forced to outsource more work to private contractors--phase out of the public education system, facilitated by school vouchers, would be the single most effective step in this direction. Also, the unionization of the public sector certainly makes it more dangerous because of the power generated and strategically focused by the unions. A public sector comprising 30% of the economy may conceivably be less dangerous than one comprising 20% of the economy, if the former is non-union and the latter is unionized. I think both the absolute size and the degree of unionization play a major role in the capture of government policy by the "civil servant" class. The distinction he makes between the effects of unions on state and local governments versus that on the federal government strikes home.

Spot the Bias

Let us compare these two sources to discover flagrant mendacity by omission: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1364163/18-men-boys-charged-gang-rape-11-year-old-girl-mobile-home-Cleveland-Texas.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html?hpw

Of course, in Africa, this sort of thing is so common that it's not newsworthy. But, in a sense, blacks are always in Africa. The NY Times, being the principal national organ for defining political correctness, cannot bear to report the facts of this horrific case. The doctrine of PC inculcates black victimology and rejects black criminality as an illusion created by an unjust, racist society. Beholden to this item in their catechism, mention of the black facts is verboten--particularly that it was a large group of black, and only black, men and boys who repeatedly raped this 11 year old Mexican girl over the course of 10 weeks, keeping her silent with threats of violence. But, the NY Times does go deeply into the problems of the families of the rapists, and tacitly agrees with them that their rapist family members were engaged in consensual intercourse with a "slutty" girl who deliberately tempted them. Is there an award for worst journalism? Like the Razzies for acting? These reporters ought to be, not only fired, but run out of the profession. I have never paid a dime for the privilege of reading the NY Times. I never will.

Slaying Another Sacred Cow

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/the-minds-of-the-south/ This was a dose of history and reasoning that caused considerable upset among the mental defectives at the NY Times website. It is well to keep two things in mind: first, slavery was Constitiutional and, second, the secession of the South was no more a crime than the secession of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain 85 years earlier. But, in the later war the tyrants triumphed, a major defeat that accelerated the long slow decline of liberty in America. The states had been conceived by the Framers as a major balancing power against the central government. The War of Northern Aggression ended that system of balance and made way for the tyrannical control the feds exercise today. Had war been averted, the slave system would probably have lasted another 20-30 years. Had the South prevailed, slavery would not have held out much longer. The entire world was moving away from that institution--there's no reason to believe America would have evaded the trend. Instead of these counterfactuals, though, half a million men died, at least half a million civilians died in the war and its immediate aftermath, the South's economy was damaged for generations, and the freed slaves were little, if any, better off economically than they had been under the old dispensation. Oh, and a terrible precedent was set for authoritarian, arbitrary central government in America. To me, Lincoln was a talented man, but no hero.