Jun
29
2024

A Debate-Free Post, I Promise

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A bit of good news: As the NR editors say, the Supreme Court Puts The Administrative State Back in Its Constitutional Place.

Scarcely anything was more central to the people who framed our Constitution than the separation of powers. John Adams, in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, wrote that it was designed “to the end it may be a government of laws, and not of men.” It was a topic upon which the men who gathered at Philadelphia in 1787 were effectively unanimous, having already incorporated it in the constitutions of their several states. Even more so than federalism, individual rights, or enumerated and limited powers, it was the separation of lawmaking, law-enforcing, and law-interpreting powers that they saw as the safeguard against the erosion of all the other elements of the constitutional system. And at the tip of the spear of the law, they placed the jury system, giving a share of the judicial power to ordinary citizens.

This system has always had its critics. The framers of the Confederate constitution of 1861 watered it down in their own version. Woodrow Wilson and other Prussian-inspired intellectuals thought it was old-fashioned, inefficient, and an obstacle to rule by modern experts. Wilson’s heirs to this day defend the bureaucratic administrative state, which interprets its own laws, runs its own courts, and is insulated from removal by the executive.

Americans in many walks of life have found themselves ensnared in these institutions, which are frequently immune to elections and unconstrained by written law. That includes the fishermen in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, who found themselves saddled with the cost of regulatory monitors traveling on their fishing boats — even though Congress never passed a law making them pay that cost.

Oddly enough, the folks who prattle on about "democracy" most often seem to be perfectly fine with unaccountable bureaucrats making up their own laws. For example, Senator Amy:

Or Senator Liz and the AP:

The AP is probably hopeless, but just tell your Senators and CongressCritters: you need to pass better laws. Do your job instead of punting to the executive branch.

Also of note:

  • Because they first have to decide what shade of red their red tape should be. Joe Lancaster asks: Why Has Biden's $42 Billion Broadband Program Not Connected One Single Household?

    "In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans," Brendan Carr, the senior Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) this month. "Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest."

    BEAD is administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the Department of Commerce. NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson told lawmakers in May, "with BEAD, this is really a 2025, 2026, shovels in the ground project."

    Carr blames the delay on "the addition of a substantive wish list of progressive ideas" to the approval process. In an April 2023 letter to Davidson, 11 Republican U.S. senators warned that "NTIA's bureaucratic red tape and far-left mandates undermine Congress' intent and would discourage participation from broadband providers while increasing the overall cost of building out broadband networks."

    The article quotes a tweet (reposted by Elon Musk) that "for $42 billion they could have bought Starlink dishes for 140 million people."

    But that would require a lot less bureaucracy. Can't have that!

  • I'm a sucker for a Hayek shout-out. John O. McGinnis spies some infrastructure you'll be required to drive on, and it's called Predistribution: The New Road to Serfdom. And (we seem to have a theme today) it's a full-employment program for bureaucrats:

    “Predistribution” is enjoying a surge of interest on the left. Unlike the more conventional idea of redistribution, or reallocating wealth through taxes, predistribution aims to reshape the income landscape by way of regulation before taxes even come into play. The approach seeks to transform earnings distribution right at their market source.

    Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker has been an academic proponent of the approach. Former Fed Vice Chair Alan Binder has given it recent publicity in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. President Biden’s revision of the executive order on regulatory review provides a legal example by including an authorization for OMB to consider the distributional consequences of regulations to advance equity.

    What are the problems? Well, they are many, but screwing up free market signals in pursuit of "equity" is characteristic of them all. Bottom line:

    In contrast, predistribution has no logical stopping point, because it is neither aimed at externalities nor the needy. Instead, it is a relentless engine of interference with private action, stifling the spontaneous order that guides true human progress. While it may not immediately lead to the fascism or socialism that Hayek feared—thanks to America’s robust constitutional liberty—it would undoubtedly produce a society that is more stagnant and more conflict-ridden. Citizens would become government supplicants, lobbying for a piece of the surplus rather than free individuals fostering growth and innovation themselves.

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    I'm fine with it. Greg Lukianoff is working on the paperback edition of The Canceling of the American Mind (Amazon pre-order link at your right). And he'd like our ideas about the tactics we right-wingers use to avoid dealing with inconvenient arguments from our opponents: Is the Efficient Rhetorical Fortress insufficient? You tell us!

    As readers of “Canceling” will note, there’s one very big difference between the left’s rhetorical fortress and the right’s: Where the left’s Perfect Rhetorical Fortress is convoluted and labyrinthine, the right’s is lean, mean, and incredibly effective despite its lack of bells and whistles. That’s why Rikki and I called it the Efficient Rhetorical Fortress: it’s…well…efficient.

    And as we mention in the book, the reasons for this have to do with each fortress’ origins. The left’s originated in academia and was developed on campus, where barricade after barricade was added through constant iteration. Every identity category was incorporated into the Demographic Funnel (which, thanks to a reader suggestion, we may rebrand as the Demographic Sieve. This is the kind of great feedback we’re looking for!), expanding it with specific approaches to identity categories in order to disqualify nearly everyone on Earth with the “wrong” opinion: race, sex, sexuality, cis- or trans-identification. Then come the layers where one’s character, relationships, and perceived behavior can be weaponized against them.

    Meanwhile, the Efficient Rhetorical Fortress arose from everyday politics, talk radio, cable news, and social media. It is rooted in the right’s distrust of authority, antipathy towards “elites,” and vilification of the left or “liberals” as a whole. The whole thing is built upon three simple rules:

    Components of the ERF (further descriptions at the link):

    1. You don’t have to listen to liberals (and anyone can be labeled “liberal” if they have the “wrong” opinion).
    2. You don’t have to listen to experts (even conservative experts, if they have the “wrong” opinion).
    3. You don’t have to listen to journalists (even conservative journalists if they have the “wrong” opinion).
    4. You don’t need to listen to anyone who isn’t sufficiently pro-Trump.

    As a sometime commenter at GraniteGrok… yeah, I think I've seen all of those.

  • A self-described Marxist gets this right. Freddie deBoer points out an inconvenient fact, that Elite Education Journalism: Still Ideology at Its Purest. It's long, here's just a taste:

    What you get a lot of, these days, is education researchers assembling very complex (and thus opaque) models that seem designed specifically to arrive at the conclusion that school funding can fix education, whatever that means. On the other side, you have, well, reality. Reality is not kind to this idea. We live in a reality where New York annually spends the most on school funding per pupil while barely outperforming Utah, which spends the least; where the United States, a very rich country, spends around eight times as much per pupil as Vietnam, a very poor country, and yet is essentially at parity in international educational comparisons; where the United Kingdom spends dramatically more on education than South Korea but does dramatically worse. We’ve been regressing expenditures on outcomes for a long time and getting the same result - money doesn’t determine student performance. And, really… why would it?

    The great unexamined myth is that any social problem can be "solved" by throwing more taxpayer money at it.

    What, did that not work? Well, clearly, there was not enough money thrown! We gotta throw more!

    And above all: "We've gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!"