Clearly, a proper justification for that claim would have to be given at enormous length, and it would have to involve all sorts of ideologically charged issues. But to try to put it in a nutshell, the government has been meddling in an ever increasing range of things, and this meddling is mostly guided by a mix of bureaucratic perverse incentives and straight-out ideological delusions, each operating in a frightful positive feedback loop with the other. (Mind you, this isn’t a statement of some libertarian principle that government meddling is always bad, but purely a factual statement that destructive meddling has been increasing.) At the same time, even the basic and uncontroversial functions of government have been increasingly corrupted by these ever worsening perverse incentives and ideological delusions.
Or to put it another way, what we’ve been seeing for several generations is a move from government based on custom and precedent to an ideological bureaucratic state. The former was indeed bad in all sorts of ways, but at least it had a decent grip on reality in essential things, as long-standing customs and precedents usually do. The latter, however, is driven by ideology and bureaucratic incentives into constant and ever more severe clashes with reality.
I wouldn’t call that first paragraph a degradation in quality. I’d call that too much government. I thought you meant politicians were getting dumber or more corrupt.
I wouldn’t call that first paragraph a degradation in quality. I’d call that too much government. I thought you meant politicians were getting dumber or more corrupt.
The point is that we’re having too much (and increasingly more) bad government, this aside from the question of whether one accepts the libertarian principle that more government is always worse. As for politicians (in the sense of people running for elective offices), they are only one relatively small element within the government, and nowadays certainly not the most significant one.
I don’t understand the second paragraph.
Try to imagine some real-life examples of getting things done in a straightforward, commonsensical, and customary way, where people’s personal incentives and personal responsibilities are more or less aligned with the desired goal—the way things are normally done in private life and well-run business. This may turn out to be inefficient, unfair, wasteful, irrational, etc. in many ways if scrutinized rigorously from an idealistic perspective, but it’s still fundamentally sound and effective. Then try to imagine attempts to get things done by large faceless bureaucracies lacking any locus of personal responsibility, or by people driven by ideology that for them trumps reality whenever there is any conflict. (Or by some diabolical mixture of the two.)
Basically, my thesis is roughly that the way government works in the English-speaking world has been steadily drifting from the former to the latter way of doing things for a very long time. (Which then influences both the scope of things it attempts to do and the quality of work at whatever it undertakes.)
Why do you think there’s been a degradation in the quality of government?
Clearly, a proper justification for that claim would have to be given at enormous length, and it would have to involve all sorts of ideologically charged issues. But to try to put it in a nutshell, the government has been meddling in an ever increasing range of things, and this meddling is mostly guided by a mix of bureaucratic perverse incentives and straight-out ideological delusions, each operating in a frightful positive feedback loop with the other. (Mind you, this isn’t a statement of some libertarian principle that government meddling is always bad, but purely a factual statement that destructive meddling has been increasing.) At the same time, even the basic and uncontroversial functions of government have been increasingly corrupted by these ever worsening perverse incentives and ideological delusions.
Or to put it another way, what we’ve been seeing for several generations is a move from government based on custom and precedent to an ideological bureaucratic state. The former was indeed bad in all sorts of ways, but at least it had a decent grip on reality in essential things, as long-standing customs and precedents usually do. The latter, however, is driven by ideology and bureaucratic incentives into constant and ever more severe clashes with reality.
I wouldn’t call that first paragraph a degradation in quality. I’d call that too much government. I thought you meant politicians were getting dumber or more corrupt.
I don’t understand the second paragraph.
The point is that we’re having too much (and increasingly more) bad government, this aside from the question of whether one accepts the libertarian principle that more government is always worse. As for politicians (in the sense of people running for elective offices), they are only one relatively small element within the government, and nowadays certainly not the most significant one.
Try to imagine some real-life examples of getting things done in a straightforward, commonsensical, and customary way, where people’s personal incentives and personal responsibilities are more or less aligned with the desired goal—the way things are normally done in private life and well-run business. This may turn out to be inefficient, unfair, wasteful, irrational, etc. in many ways if scrutinized rigorously from an idealistic perspective, but it’s still fundamentally sound and effective. Then try to imagine attempts to get things done by large faceless bureaucracies lacking any locus of personal responsibility, or by people driven by ideology that for them trumps reality whenever there is any conflict. (Or by some diabolical mixture of the two.)
Basically, my thesis is roughly that the way government works in the English-speaking world has been steadily drifting from the former to the latter way of doing things for a very long time. (Which then influences both the scope of things it attempts to do and the quality of work at whatever it undertakes.)