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Thursday, December 06, 2007
Your Curmudgeon’s Latest Quixotic Crusade
Though he's always been just a bit reticent about it, your Curmudgeon has long believed that a bureaucracy of any sort, no matter what rationale it's founded on, will eventually become a focus of evil. The great Cyril Northcote Parkinson illuminated some of the reasons; while Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman and Public Choice theorists James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock elucidated some of the others. But it took a true master intellect, perhaps the loftiest thinker ever to write in English, to combine these components into the ultimately damning synthesis demanded for our time.
(Would anyone like to start a pool on how much hate mail your Curmudgeon will get because of those last three links? One can always count on the humorlessness of the sanctimonious liberal.)
However, a recent disclosure at a favorite blog has resulted in its proprietress, the beauteous Pamela Geller Oshry, taking up the idea for her own, at least in a topical fashion:
Who is in charge? The NIE report on Iran's cessation of their nuclear program is a thinly veiled attempt to change the direction (if there is one) on how we handle Iran's nukes. And that has clearly succeeded.Foreign officers at the Director on National Intelligence were not elected by the people of this great nation but they are imposing foreign policy agenda on this country? This is unheard of. But clearly the danger of the permanent bureaucracy so frighteningly (but presciently) described in John Bolton's Surrender is not An Option. There should be no permanent diplomatic institution, even at the federal level. They're too readily converted into bastions for America's enemies.
...so perhaps your Curmudgeon needn't be so shy after all.
The State Department is one of the original Cabinet departments, created by President George Washington early in his first term of office. Back then, no doubt it seemed reasonable to create an office dedicated to treating with other nations. After all, every other nation on Earth had foreign ministers, ambassadors, and whatnot, so surely we should have some, too. But were an American patriot to evaluate the foreign-dealings apparatus of these United States strictly on their behavior since World War II, would he adjudge their operations to be supportive of America's interests, or to the detriment thereof?
The last forty years have been particularly painful. Our "diplomats" have all too frequently acted as if pleasing the governments of other countries were more important than upholding the American national interest. The CIA has been affected by this tendency as well, through careerism, irregular purges, and a regular exchange of personnel with the State Department in those times when one was penurious and the other was flush. Farces like the 1994 "treaty" with North Korea, the regular payment of blood money to Arab/Muslim hellholes and Palestinian terrorist groups, the recently concluded Annapolis "peace conference," and the just-issued "national intelligence estimate" that attempts to lull us back to sleep over Iranian nuclear skullduggery are the result.
Governments and their minions often seem to be acting irrationally. When one looks more closely, through the lens of institutional and personal incentives, the irrationality almost always proves to obscure a frightening design.
So:
...is your Curmudgeon's new motto for the coming year.
Conservative politicians have often vied for the Oval Office with promises to abolish the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or the National Endowment for the Arts. But these are predictable gambits, ho-hum material for a conservative audience. We've heard them so often, and have seen them dissolve into the post-election mist so regularly, that we no longer put stock in them.
But a promise to abolish the State Department...!
After all, who'd miss it? Couldn't you live without it? Your Curmudgeon certainly could.
Of course the Democrats would be against your Curmudgeon's proposal. Quite a few Republicans would be, too, if only out of institutional inertia. But your Curmudgeon would bet the rent that you won't hear any candidate propose anything as original, as dramatic, and as potentially reforming of America's international fortunes as you've just read here. They're professional cowards who'd never dream of posing a credible threat to the federal civil-service unions. Which is part of the reason they spend so much of their time attacking one another, of course. And a bigger part of the reason no one can muster much interest in the lot of them.
When popular lack of interest in the candidates and boredom with the torturously elongated campaign cause participation in the 2008 national elections to dip below 50% of registered voters, remember the above. Remember that you saw it here first.
Comments
I was going to note that you are taking a far too conservative position here: there needs to be a near-total separation of Government from State, but the summary of my argument was over 7000 words, a bit long for the comment section. I believe I feel a post coming on. More anon.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 12/06/2007 at 09:06 PMI must demur. Just as is also the case with the IRS, if the State Department didn’t exist, we would need to invent it. It is a core function of government that a nation state be capable of treating with foreign governments.
No. The problem isn’t in the existence of a department of state, per se, it is the existence of a class of bureaucrats who are insubordinate toward the elected national command authority and appear to get away with it. This is due to the fact that they hold their jobs across the divides between administrations and can fulminate secure in the knowledge they cannot be fired.
No. The institution that needs to be razed to the ground, rooted out, and the earth sown with salt is the civil service. The entire executive branch must serve at the pleasure—even the whim—of the president.
Bring back the spoils system!
M
Posted by Mark Alger on 12/06/2007 at 09:31 PMConsidering your mission if you are not getting hate mail then you are not doing it right.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/07/2007 at 03:38 AMYou are completely off-base. It’s obvious you’re trying to usurp the position of Dr. Gene Ray, the wisest human ever.
Posted by Liquid Egg Product on 12/07/2007 at 08:33 AMThanks, Liquid Egg Product, my IQ dropped half a dozen points in the first few “paragraphs”. Does anyone else remember “High Weirdness by Mail”? Maybe it’s time to revive that for the Internet age.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 12/07/2007 at 10:31 AMWhen the “press gang” recruited us colleagues to serve aboard this hell ship, the prospect of titillating hate mail was dangled before us. Was that just another empty political promise by the curmudgeon and his furry accomplice? Alas, we have been denied that visceral reward.
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 12/07/2007 at 03:48 PMExcellent idea, Fran. Actually, I think we could abolish most of the Cabinet departments. Certainly HEW could go, and Homeland Security could go (we have been much less secure since its creation than before).
Mark Alger really had something in his recommendation:
The institution that needs to be razed to the ground, rooted out, and the earth sown with salt is the civil service. The entire executive branch must serve at the pleasure—even the whim—of the president. (or maybe make that the presidents girl friend?)
The continuing civil service is both an essential aspect of government (continuity from one administration to the next is vitally important—somebody has to know where the paper clips are kept), but it is utterly corrupt and inefficient. I spent seven long, long years in this miserable system, and I have never seen anything to approach its level of waste and corruption. Every manager that I encountered was a living example of the Peter Principle, every last one of them. Competence was severely punished because it tended to embarrass everyone around. Productivity was even worse because it had to be explained away. The entire civil service really has to go!
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/07/2007 at 06:35 PMIf you want to indulge yourself in some real depression on the State Department and Saudi Arabia read The Scandal of U.S.-Saudi Relations by Daniel Pipes, National Interest, Winter 2002/03.
On the issue of the farce of the recent NIE volte-face, I found a brief article in Johnson’s Russia List (12/5/07) reporting the views of a Russian “military expert” on the wily ways of Americans:
“The USA is lowering its assessment of the threat from Iran because it is not ready at the moment for military action against that country, and it needs a pretext to postpone them. This view was expressed today by military expert Lt-Gen Leonid Sazhin in an interview with ITAR-TASS, commenting on the publication of a report by the US National Intelligence that the Iranian programme for creating nuclear weapons was halted as long ago as autumn 2003.”
“Not ready” could simply mean that Mr. Bush has decided that dealing with Iran appropriately at this time (e.g., wiping out the Revolutionary Guard and the Iranian Air Force) is something left to the next president, assuming yet more eons and epochs before the Iranians will “be ready” to build a nuclear weapon. (Yale pron. “nucyuluhr.”)
It could also mean, I suppose, that the Republican candidates in the forthcoming election implored Mr. Bush not to do anything to complicate matters for them.
Posted by Colonel B. Bunny on 12/07/2007 at 06:38 PMTime Cube? Time Cube??
And this…person once lectured at MIT?
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 12/07/2007 at 09:37 PMAnd this…person once lectured at MIT?
Noam Chomsky has been at MIT over half a century.Amalek (God hater) may arise in the best of houses.
Posted by Pascal (the derivative) on 12/08/2007 at 01:24 AMWatch it, Mark, us civil servants will protect our phony baloney jobs come hell or high taxes. Dont think we cant find you and drown you in a sea of paper and red tape. You have been warned, smart guy.
Posted by Akaky on 12/08/2007 at 05:46 PM
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