The Iron Law Of Bureaucracy

It's said that an Optimist believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but that a pessimist fears that this is indeed so.  Foseti brings the pessimism:

Solutions from the few people that are trying to address the problem of unaccountable regulatory agencies fall into two categories.

1) Kling suggests "radical Federalism or competitive government." The good news is that this proposal would actually solve the problem. The bad news is that it’s impossible. The problem that we’re trying to solve is that unaccountable regulatory agencies have taken control of the government of the US. Achieving Kling’s proposal would require these disparate agencies to band together to radically reduce or destroy their own power and existence. Nothing could be more unlikely (they’ll never band together, for one).

2) Yandle’s solution, which is basically for Congress to reassert its own power over these executive agencies, suffers from the inverse of the problem with Kling’s solution. It is theoretically possible for Congress to reassert control over the legislative function, however the result would not be better government. You may not like unaccountable regulators making decisions, but you really wouldn’t like Congress making decisions.

There's an awful lot of smart packed into that post.  And Isegoria shatters my faith in the one part of the Fed.Gov that actually seemed to work (for some value of the term "work"), the military:

William S. Lind discusses the inevitable corruption of institutional purpose that has spread even to the leanest branch of our armed forces:

When I first came to Washington in 1973 to join the staff of Senator Robert Taft, Jr. of Ohio, I assumed naïvely that our armed forces defined themselves in terms of winning battles, campaigns and wars. Senator Taft thought that is what they should be about, which is why working for him was both a pleasure and an honor. But I quickly discovered that for three of the four, victory was defined less in military than in bureaucratic and political terms. The Army, the Navy and the Air Force had already lost sight of their institutional purposes. What they were about, at senior levels, was selling programs and getting money from Congress. Whether the program had any relevance to war was not important, so long as it sold.

And the Iron Law applies to the elected bureaucracy as much as to the institutional one:

Everywhere, the gap between political spending commitments and revenue has been covered by borrowing. The entire system of redistributionism, in which the political class buys the consent of the governed with ever-increasing handouts, has come to depend on the assumption that the bond markets will always be there to be tapped for cash to fund next week’s bread and circuses.

That is the assumption that is now under threat. Greece must be bailed out in order to preserve the illusion that the borrowing can continue indefinitely, that the bill will somehow never come due. When the political class speaks of “contagion”, what they’re really worried about isn’t the solvency of German banks holding Greek paper, it’s a general flight of investors from the sovereign-debt markets.

Our political class, like the aristocrats of the French ancien regime, believes in nothing so firmly as its own indispensability. Après moi le déluge; but when the bond-investor flight happens – and it is now a matter of when, not if – the teetering Ponzi scheme that funds their self-importance will collapse.

Maybe this is a sign that the unelected bureaucracy is really in control of the elected one.  Timothy Geithner could not be reached for comment.

The only good thing is that Europe will fall faster - and harder - than we will.  But that fall will end any pretense of central control as the Way Of The Future.  But lots of folks will get hurt in that collapse, and a lot of them will be poor.

And the Elite that caused it is unlikely to swing from the lamp posts.  It will be interesting to see who takes their place.

Sigh.  Today, I seem to be channeling my inner Kevin Baker.