USA

Defeating the Washington Monument Syndrome

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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.

Jimmy Hoffa in Chattanooga

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Great article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press about the trial in which Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa, after several mistrials on other charges, was found guilty of jury tampering in 1964. This trial was the beginning of the end for Hoffa, who was subsequently convicted again, for pension fraud, and imprisoned (and later pardoned by Nixon and disappeared, presumably murdered). The article discusses Hoffa’s background, includes audio interviews with the surviving juror and other trial participants, and brings up some differences of opinion about the trial and the government’s campaign to get Hoffa. Worth a look.

The Sun is Not Setting II: Unfurl the Old Banners …

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In this earlier post, I should have linked to this piece by Fareed Zakaria, which is the first chapter of his new book. It is very much worth reading.

I like this Zakaria piece because he seems to be in broad agreement with me. Ha. We all like it when that happens. Also, his little capsule summary of the British Empire as our predecessor is nicely done. However, as I have complained to anyone who will listen, even Zakaria fails to understand how different the British Empire was from all its land-based predecessors. The one current writer to who “gets it” on this issue is Walter Russell Mead. Mead, in his excellent recent book God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World discusses the “maritime order” founded in recent centuries by the Dutch, then handed off to the British, then the Trident was passed to the USA. This is exactly correct.

Read more

Academia’s Jihad Against Military History

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If American military historians had fur, fangs or feathers it is a safe bet that they would have a place of honor on the Endangered Species List:

Two of the last five Pulitzer Prizes in history were awarded to books about the American military. Four of the five Oscar nominees for best documentary this year were about warfare. Business, for military historians, is good.Except, strangely enough, in academia. On college campuses, historians who study military institutions and the practice of war are watching their classrooms overflow and their books climb bestseller lists — but many say they are still struggling, as they have been for years, to win the respect of their fellow scholars. John Lynn, a professor of history at the University of Illinois, first described this paradox in a 1997 essay called “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History.”
 
….”While military history dominates the airwaves…its academic footprint continues to shrink, and it has largely vanished from the curriculum of many of our elite universities.”The field that inspired the work of writers from Thucydides to Winston Churchill is, today, only a shell of its former self. The number of high-profile military history experts in the Ivy League can be counted on one hand. Of the more than 150 colleges and universities that offer a Ph.D. in history, only a dozen offer full-fledged military history programs. Most military historians are scattered across a collection of Midwestern and southern schools, from Kansas State to Southern Mississippi.
 
“Each of us is pretty much a one-man shop,” says Carol Reardon, a professor of military history at Penn State University and the current president of the Society for Military History. The vast majority of colleges and universities do not have a trained military historian on staff.
 
….More than a decade ago, the University of Wisconsin received $250,000 to endow a military history chair from none other than Stephen Ambrose, the author of “Band of Brothers” and one of the field’s most popular figures. Ambrose donated another $250,000 before he died in 2002, but the school has yet to fill the position.
 
….And while some believe the profession is being purposefully purged by a generation of new-wave historians of gender, labor and ethnic studies, whose antiwar views blind them to the virtues of military history, most insist that nothing so insidious is happening.“I don’t think there’s been a deliberate policy of killing these positions,” says Wayne Lee, an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
 
Instead, most of the historians interviewed by U.S. News believe the study of war, like several other, more traditional historical disciplines such as political and diplomatic history, has simply been de-emphasized as the field has expanded since the 1960s. ”

Read the rest here.

It’s true that military history is not being targeted per se, though the field gets caught up in leftist faculty attitudes toward ROTC, American foreign policy and dead white guys. Economic and diplomatic history programs are faring little better and with history departments being squeezed in general, even labor and social historians are finding tight job markets. No, it’s simply a herd mentality in action, responding to the PC fetishes of academic administrative culture. It’s more important for the key decision makers in universities, colleges and departments on campuses with active women’s and ethnic studies programs to make certain that the History department is redundantly stacked with tenure track positions in these same subdisciplinary areas two or three deep.

All is not lost. It is true that students at universities are being cheated out of the opportunity to receive educations that are less slanted in terms of discipline, methodology or politics but that is a problem far larger than just the field of history. It’s a systemic and generational issue that will be remediated when alumni donors, state legislatures and Federal agencies giving grants demand greater responsibility, accountability and service from universities for the money they are given; and when the tenured radical boomers thin out with retirement and death.

Specific to military historians, things are not as bleak as they seem. To an extent, the university is a legacy institution that while important, lacks the prestige or centrality in American intellectual life it once commanded. Military history should have a place at any decent sized college or university but if making a difference is what matters, as opposed to having a sinecure to pay the bills, academia is not the end all, be all anymore.

As the article makes clear, well written military history – and a lot of it is quite good compared to other subfields -is in demand everywhere else. The Department of Defense runs it’s own service academies and postgraduate institutions as well as having staff analyst positions ranging from OSD to DIA. Think Tanks, from premier outfits like RAND to smaller foundations, will need military historians and strategic studies people if they hope to be ” in the game” influencing policy or public opinion (the tanks are coasting now, often times with “experts” who have far less knowledge of military affairs than do I – and I’m not a military historian by any stretch of the imagination!). All of this is far more important work, with real world implications, than playing fantasy land academic games. Then there’s writing books that the normal, intelligent, reading public actually want to read and having an audience larger than, say, fifty people.

History that does not get disseminated, debated and understood is not history at all.

Cross-posted at Zenpundit

“What The Clintons Did For Feminism”

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Rand Simberg has a good post on this topic.

The Clintons did a lot of damage to the country by their relentless personal attacks on their political adversaries. I don’t blame them for all of the nasty polarization that now exists, yet it seems to me that they bear significant blame. How much more civil and thoughtful might our public life now be if, instead of fanning and exploiting public divisions for their own ends, the Clintons had made some effort to buffer group animosities? To note that they were nice to some people and groups is to miss the point. The Clintons treated conservatives and libertarians as class enemies and abused the power of the State against individuals of all backgrounds who made trouble for them. We shouldn’t forget.