Friday, 15 November 2013

Rants

Unconstitutional? So what?


Eugene Kontrovich:

...Here, Obama is apparently suspending the enforcement of a law for a year – simply to head off actual legislation not to his liking...

[But]... the fix goes far beyond ‘‘non-enforcement’’ because it requires insurers to certain new action to enjoy the delay.  This is thus not simply a delay, but a new law.

The ‘‘fix’’ amounts to new legislation – but enacted without Congress.  The President has no constitutional authority to rewrite statutes, especially in ways that impose new obligations on people, and that is what the fix seems to entail.

Yeah, so who’s going to do anything about it...?

The Democrats?  Too busy running for cover, and besides, Obama’s their guy.
The RINOs?  Gotta help bail out their buddies across the aisle.
The conservatives?  ‘‘R-a-a-a-a-cist!’’  Also ‘‘wreckers and looters.’’
The press?  Not a chance; he’s a Democrat:
On NPR this morning, they were debating whether this change was incredible or merely really good.  The subject of legality never came up.
Oh, and George Bush was Really, Really Bad.
The Supreme Court?  Justice Roberts?  Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
The Justice Department?  Eric Holder?  Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!
Mr. Average Citizen?  ‘‘Shut up, there’s no standing for you!’’ (see Supreme Court, above).
The insurance industry?  ‘‘Nice business you got there.  Wouldn’t want it to be another AIG, would you?’’
The states?  ‘‘Hey, nobody here but us chickens!’’
The voters?  ‘‘We got our Obamaphones!’’

Welcome to Chicago-style government by decree.

And isn’t it a tragedy that, in our entire rotten government-political establishment, there’s not one honest man?

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 18:53:23 GMT | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 253 words, total size 5 kb.

Thursday, 07 November 2013

Rants

Bring on the mandarins!


Francis Fukuyama finds our federal bureaucracy wanting:

I find it amazing how far much of the US federal bureaucracy has fallen from the standard of a professional, impersonal, merit-based Weberian organization since the first efforts to do this were made under the 1883 Pendleton Act.  For example, in recent years fully half of all new entrants into the federal civil service have been veterans, and of these, a large number are disabled veterans.  There is nothing wrong with hiring disabled veterans, but this Congressionally-mandated veterans preference was not designed with the aim of producing the highest possible quality government.  It is akin to the mandates imposed on federal procurement for small-, women-owned, or minority business contracting...
(We interrupt this quotation to remove two sentences.  Reason why, below.

Meanwhile, continuing...)
Recruitment and promotion tend to value experience over capacity, and therefore reinforce a status-quo bias among federal employees.  What we end up with is a screwed-up set of incentives for federal workers that does not reward innovation, risk-taking, or high levels of qualification.
Problem stated.  And now, his solution, in those two sentences:
What the contemporary civil service fails to do is to attract smart, highly qualified young people out of elite universities in the manner of the classic French, German, or British services.  In fact, the government is very good at putting a large number of obstacles in front of any ambitious young person who might want to sign up, like voluminous disclosure rules in the current employment regulations.
So:  One of our public intellectuals wants to fix failure in government by replacing the bureaucracy’s protected-class incompetents with ‘‘elite university’’ mandarins.  (You know, like in France!)

How... unsurprising.


Via: Glenn Reynolds, who notes:
...The fact [is] that the civil service has been colonized by a single political party, and that career officials who are supposed to be nonpartisan have been acting as partisan political operatives...  I don’t think that Fukuyama’s proposed reforms would do anything about this problem.
Indeed.  More likely exacerbate it.

Posted by: Old Grouch in Rants at 18:04:52 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 330 words, total size 3 kb.

<< Page 1 of 1 >>
74kb generated in CPU 0.4153, elapsed 0.4618 seconds.
51 queries taking 0.321 seconds, 162 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.