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Bureaucrats defend themselves against proposed reductions in what they believe they have coming to them by immediately threatening to close down the most popular and/or most vital service they provide. The US Park Service became famous for it and gave the phenomenon its name through its habit of immediately closing down the immensely popular Washington Monument whenever a government shutdown occurred or threatening to close it down when budget cuts were discussed. It’s a species of blackmail, simple to operate, but even simpler to shut down, if you understand it and have the guts and the foresight to prepare.

All government services provide various levels of benefit to the public, from essentials like police protection and national defense down to museums on the history of condiment and bridges to nowhere. At the same time they distort, to a greater or lesser degree the private sphere. Sometimes this is a net good (police departments distorting the private gang system) and other times it’s not so good (we’ve yet to recover from disruptive urban renewal bulldozing of black neighborhoods in the 20th century). All these activities have to be funded by some sort of tax or fee and the taxes too have various levels of pain and benefit associated with them. The taxes also distort the private sphere (sales taxes suppress consumption, inheritance taxes suppress thrift, luxury taxes shift buying yachts to Canada).

It’s perfectly possible for any individual and for our society in general to list out taxes and spending, from least justifiable to most in two lists. Politicians occasionally do this and try to reign in various forms of government stupidity. The Washington Monument Syndrome consists of bureaucrats taking threatened spending cuts and applying the cuts to the wrong end of the list at key moments before there is a popular consensus on cutting spending, disrupting spending control plans.

The solution to this syndrome is simple, ban it. Remove civil service protection from government workers who engage in the practice. Follow through by getting these blackmailers out of government service when they try their tricks anyway.

We need to change the sequence of events so that the consensus of what’s most valuable is arrived at first. Then when stark economic reality shows up and revenues aren’t there to cover expenses, we already know where all the cuts would land. Bureaucrats who significantly deviate off the list and purposefully pick painful targets for cuts will be exposed for what they have always been: saboteurs of the will of the people, emotional blackmail artists holding popular programs hostage.

Ideally you would develop the cut lists in good times as an exercise in civic responsibility and first execute the list in bad times so spending cuts do the least harm and tax cuts the most good. As a political reality, things are never that neat. Good and bad times are never universal. Probably the best time to do it is in the honeymoon phase of our next Democrat president, when the media’s in the tank and blowing kisses at the new administration. It gives the opposition something to do and answers the charge of “how to pay for” tax cuts. The people decide what they want and the government organizes and gives voice to their sometimes contradictory desires.

It also puts the shoe on the other foot in terms of government economic analysis. Static analysis of tax cuts, inaccurately taking into account their growth effects, would lead to steeper cuts in spending than necessary. Besides being economically illiterate (which it always was), that sort of analysis would become a politically perilous thing to do because it would lead to more people losing services.

Another follow on effect is an opportunity for privatization. Certain services will lose their secure funding, and become episodic. We’ll fund them in good times but they’ll repeatedly face the chopping block in bad times. Private philanthropy could step in and ensure steady funding through an endowment so the job gets done without this government spending yo-yo. This splits the actual “bleeding heart liberals” off the socialist coalition as it becomes clear that sometimes shrinking government is a better way to actually get something done for the poor and the powerless.

I work in a building with an in-elevator video system. This morning, a tale of russian cultists, 29 in all threatening to blow themselves up in their sealed cave if anyone interrupts them as they wait for the end of the world this spring. “Who cares” erupts loudly from the only other person in the elevator, a guy in a business suit. I was “It’s always good to talk them off the ledge” I replied and off I went to work.

You had to be there to catch the contempt, the utter disregard for the sanctity of life in his simple words. He was wondering why his life was being inconvenienced by these russian religious fanatics when he could be getting his stock news on his elevator ride. That was how little their lives meant to him. It was the culture of death in a nutshell. These 29 people (I later learned 4 were children, the youngest under 2 years old) were just meat to this guy and not only that, he had to share the sentiment so we could all join him in being unhappy at the inconvenience. We could have found out about the Dow 15 seconds earlier. And what about Britney? Don’t these Captivate Network guys have any sense of proportion?

The Culture of Death, where the rubber meets the road, will have a suit on more often than not, will be ‘respectable’ more often than not, and, more often than not, will insist on you joining in. That’s creepy, and not as theoretical as it was yesterday.

Priest: Christ is Risen
People: Truly He is Risen

The ancient rythms of eastern apostolic christianity rang out once more in Chicago just like every year but this year, somebody was missing. Josefa wasn’t around adding her cracked byelorussian voice to our romanian chants, her rolling gait was missing from the traditional procession 3 times around the church. The rock that so much of the practical life of our little church was missing and nobody had a clue. She’d been sick the week before “in the hospital” people in the know would mention to the curious just like people would mention her real story to those who asked but nobody who had not asked ever found out about the true story of the rough gem in our midst. In short, Josefa Tarasewicz was a martyr.

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You might notice (if it hasn’t been pushed off the front page yet) a Chicago fire story at the Drudge Report. I work on the 20th floor of that building. So here are a few short observations of my first real building evacuation.

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A new scam is running around. A bank account is cracked, real checks are printed, sent out in large numbers, the checks are deposited by people thinking they are for payment of “taxes” for a lottery and the “tax payment” is sent via Western Union / Moneygram to the “tax agent”, in other words, the scam artist. The name, bank information, routing number, security features on the check are all entirely legitimate. This way the group gets money sent to them without ever actually having to touch the bank.

I just got the 2nd one of these in a month and it’s ticking me off. My local police are too lazy to follow up on reporting this sort of scam (the route I took in the first case) so I’m throwing this out for a bit of international justice. Is there a coalition of the willing out there willing to bust scammers?

The “agent” gives a number of 011-491-60-91-92-39-92 which seems to be Germany. If anybody could trace this to a locality and get the police to act, I will press charges.

Shannon Love’s recent effort on the cultural struggle between the pro-life ethic and those who belittle “breeders” seems to have gone far afield in comments.

I haven’t seen anybody actively angry with those who are biologically incapable of having children, yet several comments seem to accuse Shannon of doing exactly that when he says that childless couples are selfish. But it’s absurd to think that there’s only one type of childlessness. A little charity in reading would reduce the temperature of the conversation quite a bit. Instead of looking toward the personal, it might be much better to examine the problem through the lens of infrastructure.

Societies undertake tremendous expenditures in water, sewer, electricity, lighting, and transport in the expectation that a certain number of people are going to be around to use these systems for the long haul. If you wrong-size sewer lines and a town’s population shrinks below the effective minimum, you have to redo the entire sewer system’s piping or effectively lose public sanitation as there’s just not enough flow to keep things moving. The massive water tunnels of New York City were not built to last over a century without maintenance in order to satisfy the needs of the generation that built and paid for them.

Put simply, all that existing infrastructure represents the accumulated sacrifices of the generations that have come before us. It’s a sort of group project, a shared social contract that should not be thrown away, willy nilly based on a temporary fashion. In short, it’s the physical, enduring manifestation of our society.

Now there are other, softer, multi-generational institutions that are a bit more controversial. Social Security and other old-age pension schemes are largely inter-generational capital transfers that depend on having a certain birthrate to maintain sustainability. Were we all living in libertarian paradise, these sorts of political programs would not exist. Wake me up when we get to libertopia. In the real world, inter-generational transfer schemes are likely to be with us for a long time. They’re too reliable a way to assemble durable electoral coalitions for them to not be used again and again by ambitious politicians.

Now there have always been people who could not or would not participate in the creation of the next generation. The sterile, the ill, those who were incapable of the work of parenting, those called to specialty functions incompatible with child rearing generally contributed what they could to the raising and protecting of other people’s children and aided to the limits of their abilities society in its fight to progress and not regress across the generations.

Historically rarer was the happy to be childless who purposefully avoided being the helpful uncle, the adoptive mother, the spinster schoolteacher who educated the whole village or some other like role that may have been personally childless. Such people had historically been looked down on as wastrels, hedonists only looking toward their own pleasures. It’s a pretty recent phenomenon that such purposeful wallflowers in the multi-generational struggle to maintain and improve society hit a critical mass sufficient to create their own society with its own mores and prejudices, mores and prejudices that are actively hostile to the great project of keeping society alive into the next generation.

I have to say that I’m not at all fond of this new ideal, this dismissal of “breeders” as social inferiors who don’t appreciate the finer things in life and who supposedly whine for “subsidies” for children. The truth is that some economic goods have not been successfully monetized and payment for them remains collective and nonmonetary. The foresight to create physical infrastructure that you don’t personally have to pay to recreate each generation comes out of a multi-generational ethic that is incompatible with what I call wallflowers and Shannon called free riders. The benefits of that ethic are taking advantage of the artifacts of our forefathers. The cost is to repeat the process in our own generation. This is enforced via social pressure for the most part though the tax man and the law code do have their roles.

The wallflowers take the benefits of the multi-generational ethic without complaint and whine about the cost of continuing the project into the next generation, propagandizing and agitating for the project to end with their generation being the great winner, all gain with no pain. It’s selfish and ultimately destructive for our society to adopt that course but the wallflowers don’t care.

[ed note: Shannon's a guy. I think I used to know that. I'm very sorry, gender corrected where appropriate]

There was a time when I actually believed that there was a functioning free market in US medical services. Experience has taught me that this is by no means the case.

I may have mentioned before that my wife is opening a primary care practice in Bolingbrook. It’s been a long haul but we’re finally open for business. One of the key matters in any business is setting prices. Here’s how it’s done these days in our “free market” us medical system.

1. Look up your Medicare geographic zone (set by the US Government)
2. Download the price list for that zone
3. Enter those prices in your billing software

There are all sorts of restrictions on price flexibility. Even if you don’t accept Medicare, even if you don’t accept Medicare assignment (ie, you’re not part of the program and the patient gets Medicare reimbursement at home after you’ve taken their money at the office), you still have a “limiting charge” that you’re not allowed to exceed if your patient is a Medicare participant.

You’re also not permitted to discount your prices under certain circumstances. If you accept insurance, cash patients are pretty much forced to pay the highest rates for your services even though they are your most preferred payers (you get your money quickest and with the least cost and fuss).

Clearly, if you can’t set your own prices but are largely cutting and pasting in numbers from a government provided spreadsheet, this situation is not a free market. Yet it’s also not socialized medicine. So what is it?

On Tuesday, the Senate passed a resolution calling for regular reports and pushing for a handover to Iraqi primacy. The vote was 79-19. The argument on the right was that this would send a terrible signal to Iraq that we’re going to cut and run. On Thursday Rep. Murtha proposed immediate withdrawal. On Friday, the House voted on an immediate withdrawal resolution sponsored by the GOP that was stark in its simplicity “the deployment of United States forces be terminated immediately.” The measure failed 403-3.

Amazingly nobody, not the left or the right, seems to be analyzing this in terms of what this message sends to the people of Iraq. It’s all inside baseball, chickenhawk v cut & run, and US patriotism. Where concerns about what they’ll think in Iraq are brought up at all, it’s about our own troops in Iraq and how they’ll react. This doesn’t scan, not in the least.

What we should be worried about is the guy on the bubble, torn between joining up for the police or the Iraqi army and staying on the sideline. What will he make of these events? Did the Senate action dismay him? Did the House action buoy his spirits? Will the new week see him decide to join the long line of applicants or not? We should deeply care about that. Our chattering classes seem to have abdicated the only real, serious question that matters. Inside baseball, for them, is so much more entertaining.

“Good Government” groups seem to have it in for free speech. On the federal level, this has led to the passage of the execrable BCRA nee McCain Feingold law limiting various forms of political expression and especially expending money to distribute your opinions.

Illinois seems to have local forces bent on the same evil ends. Of course it’s all dressed up in nice, nonpartisan language claiming to be a good government initiative. Most of these infringements on free speech sport the language of the little guy standing up to moneyed interests but the reality is that the big guys always do know how to get around any restrictions (see the emergence of once obscure 527 committees into 2004 election powerhouses for a real world example).

Who, in reality gets hit? The small guys who are scared to even open their mouths are the biggest losers. Their more courageous compatriots who can’t afford competent legal help are also unduly burdened in their free speech distribution rights. It’s just a mess for everybody but the guys who can buy exceptions in the law and can hire very good lawyers to work around any restrictions. 

We can already see the mess that is being made at the national level with BCRA/McCain Feingold. We don’t need to replicate it in Illinois. But people will try, yes they will try. For them BCRA’s free speech suppression isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

My wife and I were tooling around Bolingbrook, IL looking for a place for her new medical practice (to open shortly after a space is leased, more about that later) when we saw him. He was a government worker, pulling down christmas tree lights that had been put up on the corner of I-55 & IL-53 and with us stuck at a red light, he was our temporary entertainment.

Yank those lights! Rip that branch! One string that was serpentined across the front came down. A second string proved more challenging for our public servant as it was actually wrapped around the tree. After a brutal tug shook the entire tree, confirming that he would have to circle around the tree to take it off, he proved his membership in the vast collective of New Socialist Man. Rather than walk around the tree, he cut the wires.

My wife and I looked at each other in shared disgust. We didn’t have to say it. Our mutual look said it all. We talked about it anyway.

Any East European admiration for efficient US government is entirely misplaced. It really is true that there is zero difference among government workers across the world. They’re all New Socialist Men, at least on the job. Waste is their watchword, sloth is their middle name, and carelessness with other people’s money is their reality.

I’m violating something of a rule of mine to post here as this isn’t a Chicago issue but a few posts on the blog regarding the recent tsunami drive me to put my own two cents in here.

First, I believe that in a perfect world, government action in areas struck by natural disaster should be limited to applying violence to criminals in areas where the rule of law is entirely absent or has significantly broken down. If you’re stealing rice or other disaster aid to make a buck and letting others die, I’m all in favor of having the US marines (or whoever is handy) put a bullet in you.

Governments do violence very well and that, ultimately is their proper job. They do it so well that an entire class of thieves has arisen who insinuate themselves in these organizations and their creatures (such as the UN) to steal while being protected by sufficient force and the custom of sovereignty that they can do so with impunity.

Still living in that ideal world, it would be best if private groups did the actual job of providing aid to bypass those government thieves. Private aid groups, at their best, are the most efficient providers of humanitarian assistance. Where failures occur, private groups are punished without much fuss as their donors simply turn elsewhere.

Moving to the real world, we would have needed to radically remake things decades ago for private aid to rule the roost in ameliorating the recent tsunami catastrophe. Since we haven’t, we go with what we’ve got and do the best we can as human beings, doctrine be damned.

Still, we do see some short term adjustments like the US’ coordinating council move to ensure that the UN’s pack of thieves don’t shift from Iraq’s oil for food to the Indian Ocean disaster relief effort. This is as it should be. Those who wish to actually influence disaster relief efforts for next time and tilt them toward fewer thieves feeding on aid and minimizing wasted overhead have two areas to concentrate on:

1. Promoting private aid starts by first counting it in the “aid totals” used as scorecards. By only counting government to government aid, private contributions are given 2nd class status. The hierarchy needs to be reversed.
2. Demanding criminal accountability for government thieves who take commissions to let aid get through, who steal out of aid warehouses, etc. Hunt down the thieves and put them in the dock. It’s not like the big scale thefts are much of a secret.

Disaster recovery is never going to run entirely smoothly. It’s always going to have some breaks in the system. The Chicago School has always had a great deal of practicality to it. We should always make it clear that critiques are for preparation for next time, that efficiency arguments are there to save lives, and that the wolves in sheep’s clothing should never have a free shot at our wallets, no matter what the circumstances.

You might want to steer clear of federal plaza today (11/3). The less restrained portion of the Kerry coalition will be protesting the Iraq war at 5 pm. This is part of a 30 city protest tour today. Chicago festivities will continue with a two day protest against bankers, Thursday and Friday. Hopefully the violence will be kept to a minimum.

(crossposted on Flit(TM))

The Gap, or more formally the Non-Integrating Gap, is a concept at the core of Dr. Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. But what is the Gap? This question comes to me every time I read a libertarian critic of the concept.

Gap countries are, by definition disconnected from the global rulesets that manage the Core, those states where a disturbingly large proportion of the world wants to get into. I say disturbingly because, all things being equal, there is really no reason for people socially acculturated and biologically specialized to warm climes to make their way in large numbers to nordic nations, but they do. Something pretty special must be attracting them while simultaneously repelling them from their ancient homelands. That something is clear after a bit of investigation, huge waves of horrifying violence interspersed with a daily brutality of individual denigration and lack of the normal rights to live out their lives in control of their own destiny.
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The Mrs. finally bit the bullet today and let her boss know that she will be opening up her own medical practice. This is a Chicago story because we’re swimming against the tide, moving from NW Indiana to Illinois while the big story is the tide of doctors going the other direction. So is it possible for a doctor to open up a brand new (no existing patients) practice in a state in a malpractice insurance crisis? We’re going to find out and I’ll be chronicling the story here and in my individual blog Flit(TM).

I just got an email from Steve Sandvoss and just finished chatting with him on Illinois electoral law. It turns out that there is some provision for electors being unable to do their duty. It’s all laid out at 10 ILCS 5/21-5. Here’s the text:

Sec. 21-5.
In case any person duly elected an elector of President and Vice?President of the United States shall fail to attend at the Capitol on the day on which his vote is required to be given, it shall be the duty of the elector or electors of President and Vice-President, attending at the time and place, to appoint a person or persons to fill such vacancy; provided, that should the person or persons chosen, as in this Article provided, in the foregoing sections, arrive at the place aforesaid before the votes for President and Vice-President are actually given, the person or persons appointed to fill such vacancy shall not act as elector of President and Vice-President.
(Source: Laws 1943, vol. 2, p. 1.)

A quick read will show that this is perfectly adequate for a heart attack, no shows, or mistaken appointments (where the elector isn’t actually qualified to serve). This is important because ~0.5% of electors had to be replaced in 2000 and no doubt a similar percentage are replaced every election.

What this doesn’t help at all for is cases where the whole college is taken out prior to voting and transmitting their votes. There’s a war on and the state legislature has the duty to tighten up the laws so an attack would not imperil Illinois’ votes for the presidency due to enemy attack.

Again, this isn’t rocket science here. A fair procedure to throw it back to the legislature in case of incapacity of the entire college should neither take much of the legislature’s time, nor would either party be likely to object to a quick electoral procedure reform to fix the hole.

Will the legislature act? Who knows?

For anybody politically active, there is a little nagging worry about what would happen in case Al Queda and Co. strike in order to disrupt the election of our next president. Outside The Beltway has a nice round up of issues facing November but what about the December elections? Elections for president and vice president are indirect after all and it’s the Electoral College that has the final say.

In Illinois, that’s 21 people trudging down to Springfield one fine December day to meet, conduct their vote, make sure the paperwork is in order, and go home. But what if on arrival, their meeting place were bombed and all 21 were killed? What then? Even if it weren’t some nefarious plot but just blocked arteries or the proverbial bus coming out from nowhere, surely there is some law setting the procedure for handling a tragedy and ensuring that come January 21 votes from Illinois are counted for President.

The federal law is clear. Electoral College member selection is a matter for each individual state legislature. So what procedure has Illinois set up? I ended up talking to Steve Sandvoss, a very helpful fellow down at the state board of elections. After consultation with a colleague, the answer came back that the legislature hasn’t acted at all in the area but that presumably the party that nominated them would meet, appoint any needed replacements, and the votes would be cast the way that the people wanted them to be cast.

This isn’t a bad guess at where the political process would eventually force the Governor (who has to certify the electors to the federal archivist) and the legislature (who, according to federal law, has the right to select them however they please) to end up at but flying by the seat of your pants is not something you want to do. Clear rules are very much preferable as we all found out on 9/11. There’s plenty of time to think this sort of thing through and push through a bipartisan procedure that will fill this void in state law. Let’s hope it doesn’t take a tragedy to fill this legislative void.

One temptation, of course, would be for the legislature dominated by one party to replace the electors of another party to a slate that would vote differently. Another temptation would be for the Governor to not certify the new name(s). A third temptation would be for a Senator and a Representative to try to get the new elector(s) votes nullified on the grounds that they were improperly selected. In a very close election, who knows who will yield to temptation when the law itself is mute?

Call to Action has an optional celibacy campaign. Considering that this is a Chicago based organization, I thought it might fit here. Of course if they contacted Most Reverend Michael Wiwchar who has offices a measly 3.7 miles (thanks, yahoo maps) away, they would find that anybody who was married and wished to enter the priesthood would be able to go to the good Bishop and become a Catholic priest. Anybody who wanted more churches with married priests would be able to support the diocese (and the many other dioceses headed by bishops who permit married priests) with their presence and their funds.

There is no need for lobbying, campaigns, petitions, or anything. If the people want it, they merely have to go where it is offered, as it has been since the beginning, in the Catholic Church.

For anybody from Call to Action who might be reading this, step out of HQ on W. Roscoe and walk towards lake Michigan for 0.2 miles. Turn right on N. Damen Ave and take a brisk 3.2 mile constitutional. Turn right on W. Rice St. and go about 3 blocks to number 2245.

Along the way, they can wrap their heads around this specifically:

These individual Churches, whether of the East or the West, although they differ somewhat among themselves in rite (to use the current phrase), that is, in liturgy, ecclesiastical discipline, and spiritual heritage, are, nevertheless, each as much as the others, entrusted to the pastoral government of the Roman Pontiff, the divinely appointed successor of St. Peter in primacy over the universal Church. They are consequently of equal dignity, so that none of them is superior to the others as regards rite and they enjoy the same rights and are under the same obligations, also in respect of preaching the Gospel to the whole world (cf. Mark 16, 15) under the guidance of the Roman Pontiff.

Three point seven miles away from their solution and these guys won’t take a walk to solve their desire for married priests.

The Catholic Church is a thing of man