Practice Trumps Theory

     Happy Cinco de Mayo to all you Mexicans out there among my Gentle Readers. To the rest: don’t go out for Mexican food tonight. Trust me on that.

     Now have a snippet of dialogue from an unnamed story:

"Why is there a herring duct-taped to the ground wire?"
"Sir, I don't question your methods."
"That's not a method, that's madness. Witchcraft."
"Look, sir. Do you want to be right, or do you want results?"
"Well, results, of course."
"Then don't touch the fucking fish."

     That made me howl with laughter, not just because of the exceptionally clever phrasing, but because I’ve been there.

     In my years in engineering, I was often responsible for meeting a tight, rigid deadline: one which allowed for no slip-ups. On a couple of occasions there was a large pot of money at stake. Once it was in the tens of millions of dollars. Defense engineering can be like that.

     No one in his right mind would commit to such a deadline without the certainty that he can meet it. In the world of military procurement, there are no second chances. If Company A fails to meet the time and budget targets, Company B will be ready to step forward.

     But once you’ve committed, the watchword becomes No Experimenting! You must insist on proven methods only. The development team leader must resist any attempt to insert an attractive but unproven method with immovable firmness. Yes, the attractive but unproven method might later be proved better, faster, cheaper, or some combination of the three. But you can’t risk it with all those bucks on the line.

     That’s akin to blasphemy to a bright young engineer, only a year or two out of college, who’s sure he has a silver bullet chambered and ready to fire. The team leader was educated in the Sixties or Seventies; he’s hopelessly out of touch with what’s been happening since then. And boy, can that bright young engineer pout! He’ll also talk to his colleagues about his old fuddy-duddy of a boss. “Isn’t engineering about doing things the best way?” he’ll protest.

     It’s a sad lesson, but it’s one that must be administered and driven home with as many hammerblows as necessary. No: engineering is not about doing things “the best way.” It’s about meeting the specification within the given constraints, especially the constraints of time and budget.

     Getting that across to subordinates has been among the toughest and most thankless tasks of my career. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

     But there’s worse: that bright young engineer might not be a subordinate. He might be a “compliance officer” assigned by the customer. Again, that’s common in defense engineering. You have to listen to him; he can throttle the money flow at his whim. And it’s amazing how intrusive and extensive his whims can be.

     There was one such occasion where a compliance officer wanted to have my team develop a very large program in a language none of us knew. I fought him off, but it was a memorable tussle. We delivered on time and within budget, but I never got another polite word out of him. Fortunately he was reassigned to another defense contractor after that.

     In such situations, when you have a love of knowledge and technology, the temptation to “go along to get along” is amplified by your own predilections. Here there be tygers! What a victory it would be, your subconscious whispers, to improve on the prevailing state of the art – even if no one knows you did it! Maybe the shiny new method will work!

     Well, yeah… but what if it doesn’t? What if you can’t get it debugged in time? You’re the point man; when you miss the deadline, the avalanche will fall on you. You won’t get to point at anyone else and say “Well, he said it would work.”

     So consider engraving this exquisitely concise and pointed motto on a nice piece of mahogany, inlaid with mother-of-pearl:

Don’t Touch The Fucking Fish.

     Hang it where all your people will look upon it daily. And do have a nice day.

The Problem Of Irrelevant Perspectives

     Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely – John Edward Emmerich Dalberg, a.k.a. Lord Acton

     The central problem of all political systems is the perverse distribution of decision-making authority. No matter what scheme is attempted – direct-democratic, federal, parliamentary, oligarchic, autocratic – authority will always come to rest with persons who, for whatever reason, won’t have to bear the consequences of their decisions.

     The great Robert Townsend, author of Further Up the Organization, was adamant that decision-making authority belongs with those to whom it will mean the most: i.e., those who would bear the consequences of the decision. A worker needs tools? Very well: give him a budget and let him select them. A supervisor needs another subordinate? Very well: Let him do the interviewing and hiring, and since his other subordinates will have to work with the new hire, encourage him to seek their input. It’s an entirely reasonable approach, and yet virtually no company actually uses it. Concerning political systems, the thing is quite literally impossible.

     In a quasi-parliamentary system such as ours, legislative authority rests with legislators (surprise, surprise) most of whom can exempt themselves from the consequences of their enactments. Their principal considerations are electoral: How would this affect my prospects in the upcoming election? Among those, the most prominent ones are the special interests who purport to command substantial funds and blocs of votes. Those who captain the special interests are often wealthy enough, influential enough, or both to avert the consequences of the legislation they lobby for. Then there’s the rest of us, who have virtually no recourse when our tax rates rise, our medical insurance is perverted, or our neighborhoods are flooded with Third Worlders who have no interest in assimilating to American norms and standards of conduct.

     To the legislator, our perspectives on such things are nearly irrelevant. If asked, we would express the same view of his perspective...but we have little capability for changing the distribution of decision making power.

     So it is, and so it will always be.

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     It is said the ancient Greeks used a simple method to stop the multiplication of "laws." Perhaps we should try it on our Congress. Anyone wishing to propose a new law had to do so while standing on a platform with a rope around his neck. If the law was passed, the rope was removed. If the law was voted down, the platform was removed. – “John Galt,” Dreams Come Due: Government and Economics As If Freedom Mattered, First Edition.

     The problem is insoluble. Even the mechanism suggested in the semi-facetious quote above would fail. Only in the complete absence of government is it completely absent...but as I’ve written before, anarchy is as unstable as government. Every anarchy eventually births a State, through the same process that gives rise to the problem of irrelevant perspectives: delegation.

     Let there be an anarchic society that enacts a law in some fashion. Let it be one upon which every decent person would agree: perhaps a law against murder. Very well: we outlaw murder, fix a punishment for it, and deem ourselves done and well done. The problem is that we aren’t:

• Who is to decide when a murder might have been committed?
• Who is to pursue the alleged murderer?
• Who is to determine whether he will be punished?
• Who is to arrange for and carry out the punishment?

     The impulse to delegate each of those functions is irresistible. Though we might insist that the authority actually inheres in the law itself – the de jure authority certainly does – we have granted the de facto authority to particular persons. Those persons have acquired, willy-nilly on our part, an automatic and irremediable discretion over their realms of authority.

     Perhaps our delegates will exercise their authority responsibly for a time. But all men are mortal, all men grow weary, and so in the fullness of time they will be replaced. By whom? Who is likely to want those authorities? Among them, who is most likely to succeed in acquiring them?

     I’ve written about this before. So has Friedrich Hayek, most particularly in the chapter “Why The Worst Get On Top.”

     Strain as we might, over six millennia of recorded history we’ve found no escape route. The impulse to delegate the arduous and unpleasant tasks attached to any law whatsoever has never been successfully resisted. The dynamic that takes over at that point is inexorable. It’s why I maintain that just as every government eventually decays to an unsustainable absolutism and collapses, every anarchism eventually gives birth to a government.

     God grant that I’m wrong...but I don’t think I am.

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     In the Foreword to Freedom’s Fury, I wrote:

     I shan’t attempt to deceive or misdirect you: I’m horrified by politics and all its fruits. I consider the use of coercive force against innocent men the greatest of all the evils we know. But I try, most sincerely, to be realistic about the world around us. In that world, peopled by men such as ourselves, anarchism—the complete abjuration and avoidance of the State—is unstable. In time, it will always give way to politics. Hammer it to the earth as many times as you may, you will never succeed in killing it permanently. The State will rise again.

     However, as we’ve learned to our sorrow these past few centuries, the State is unstable, too. It always deteriorates and falls, though not always swiftly. What follows it varies from place to place and era to era.

     As one who passionately loves freedom, I’ve striven to understand the processes involved, and to unearth a path to a stable free society. I’ve failed to find one.

     I haven’t ceased to look. Nor will I say a priori that one cannot be found. But the central problem is the process of delegation, which embeds the automatic production of perverse incentives via the creation of irrelevant perspectives. Averting the delegation of authority and responsibility is the key...but who has proposed a way to do that?

     I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.

Legitimizations

     Once more, with feeling:

Opinions Are Like Assholes:
Everyone’s Gotta Have One.

     Trouble is, there are...persons who think – if that’s the right word – that their opinions entitle them to suppress others’ opinions, by whatever means are expedient. And quite a few of them have been, shall we say, acting out on the streets of our larger cities.

     I’m sure all my Gentle Readers are aware of the unruly and disruptive protests, some amounting to open riots, that have occurred in the wake of the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Given the intensity of hatred the Left has exhibited toward anyone who might dare to oppose it, and further given the willingness of Leftist strategists and financiers to encourage that hatred all the way to its foreseeable consequences, I must sadly state that those events were to be expected.

     A Martian who had just arrived on Earth might view the tumult and wonder whose baby had been raped and dismembered in Macy’s Times Square window. Surely so much hatred and destruction couldn’t be about losing an election. Elections are supposed to obviate violence: as the old saying goes, to exchange bullets for ballots. That was the original point.

     Well, it appears that particular lesson in civics hasn’t sunk into the minds of a lot of younger folks. Their behavior wouldn’t be acceptable from a three year old, but in their sacred opinion, it’s wholly justified by not getting their way.

     It’s getting worse by the minute, too – because the supposed forces of order, by their inaction in the face of so much lawbreaking, are legitimizing it.

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     A behavior deemed generally unacceptable, if permitted to continue without being redressed, thereby becomes legitimate. Not approved, mind you; just moved outside the scope of the law and the operations of law enforcement. We might call this a precedental effect: “He got away with it, so you can’t punish me!” Unfortunately, quite a lot of people “reason” that way.

     There are all manner of problems in the law regarding what we glibly call “public property.” In point of fact, there can be no such thing. There are only two kinds of property: that which some individual or entity owns, and that which “resides in the common.” The differentiating characteristic is called excludability.

     In the simplest terms, he who possesses the power, de facto, to exclude others from accessing or using an item is the current owner of that item. It is his property, for as long as he can maintain excludability at his whim. Whether the item is “real” – i.e., land – or “movable” – anything that’s not land – what matters is who possesses the power to exclude others from its use.

     When contemporary notions about ownership were formalized in the law, the de facto considerations mentioned above were backed by de jure ones. Thereafter, the law would lend its force to the recognized owner in maintaining the excludability of his property. Over time, the law assumed the power of forcible exclusion wholly to itself and away from the property owner. In other words, it was no longer the man sitting on his porch, shotgun across his knees, who maintained the property status of his plot; it was the police precinct he would call to evict a trespasser.

     This has important implications for what we call “public property.”

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     As I said above, there’s really no such thing as “public property,” for “the public” possesses no power to exclude others – and who would those be, anyway? – from “public property.” That power resides in whichever governmental unit is conceded jurisdiction over the item of “public property” at issue. Thus, though we call a street or a government building “public property,” in reality it’s government property, and the government that owns it will make damned sure you understand that.

     In most cases of “public property,” there are specific conditions under which members of “the public” can access the property. In the matter of public streets, those conditions are partially explicit and partially implicit. For example, an organization that wants to hold some public event on Main Street, during which the customary flow of traffic would be impeded, must apply to the relevant governmental unit for a permit to do so. If the permit is denied, the event in question would be illegal, and those who might participate in it subject to arrest.

     The demonstrations and riots that have followed the election have not been conducted under permit from the municipalities in which they’re occurring. They’re blatantly illegal. But as far as I can tell, municipal police forces have done far too little to curb them. (That’s undeniably the case in those cities where violence against passers-by and nearby private properties have occurred.) Thus, the de jure maintenance of excludability of unapproved users – trespassers, in the conventional phrase – by the relevant governments has failed.

     This constitutes a legitimization – i.e., a legal concession – of the demonstrations and the actions of the participants. It is they who now hold the power, according to their whim, to exclude. As a practical matter entirely outside the purview of the law, the demonstrators and rioters currently own the streets.

     And that’s not the end of the story.

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     A legitimization cannot be one-sided. Once de facto control displaces de jure control, whoever possesses the greatest and most effectively asserted force owns the contested item. Nor is any particular assertion the final verdict on the matter.

     In this, I think, lies our greatest danger. One spate of disorder does not, by itself, mean that the de jure order is gone for good. As matters stand, there is still time for law enforcement to reassert control of the streets and insist upon the re-establishment of order. But should the apparent willingness of the authorities to scamp their responsibilities by tolerating these disorders persist for too long, they will lose their authority. The de facto legitimization of the demonstrations will provoke counteraction by opposed persons and organizations. Naked force, and not the law, will determine whatever kind and degree of order prevails. The language of war will overpower the language of law.

     It does not matter that the Left “has it coming to them.”
     It does not matter that the Right is better armed and trained.
     It does not matter that we would enter the fray on the side of law and order.

     This is not “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Remember how many bodies littered the stage at the end of Hamlet.

“Them”

     [Another oldie from Palace of Reason days. This one comes to mind because of this story from Washington D.C. I’m sure you’ll see the relevance. -- FWP]

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     "States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude, and their decay." -- Walter S. Landor.

     Why do nations, which, being composed entirely of ideas, are potentially immortal, age, stumble, and collapse? There are many causal threads to follow. Today I will explore "them".

     Who's responsible for the poor condition of the roads, the axle-breaking potholes, the piles of detritus that offend the eye and nose? Not you nor I, but "them." But getting "them" to deal with any of it is like pulling teeth, whereas none of us have the time or wherewithal; we're all too busy earning enough to pay our taxes. That's just the way things are.

     Who's responsible for that elderly widow down the block, the one who can't really get around any more and should get a visit about three times a day to make sure she's all right? Not you nor I, but "them." And "they" haven't been doing such a good job of it, or she wouldn't have broken both hips in six months' time. But "they" took the job, and it's not ours to question their performance now that we've surrendered it to "them." That's just the way things are.

     Who's responsible for dealing with the gang that claims to "own" this block, that's committed one mugging after another for years but never seems to be taken in hand? Not you nor I, but "them." "They" claim to own all the police powers, though they exercise them quite selectively, and only when it suits their mood. "They" forbade us our own means of defense, too; for us to own and carry guns is far too dangerous to the public peace. What public peace, you say? Well, yes. But we can't seem to get our guns or our authority as citizens back, so we have to hide behind the double-locked doors of our homes and leave the streets to animals that walk upright. That's just the way things are.

     Why is it the way things are? Because at various times and on various grounds, "they" persuaded us to transfer our responsibilities to them. It's not clear why we did it. After all, "they" hadn't been doing that well with the jobs we'd previously assigned "them." But we did it, perhaps out of wishful thinking, perhaps out of laziness. And there seems to have been a ratchet involved, for, much as we'd like to, we can't seem to transfer the responsibilities back into our own hands.

     Can the ratchet be undone? I don't know. I think it would require far too many men willing to court danger and possible death to wrest back the police powers, however unwisely they were delegated. We'll get our guns back only by armed insurrection. As for the sweeping transfer of civil responsibility and public property back into the hands of common citizens, that's almost as unlikely. They require tax revolts and organized resistance to the seizure of property through condemnation, which, though guaranteed successful if enough people participate, are as rare as snowballs in July. The wrath of the State is terrible toward those who deny its power to tax and confiscate, and everyone fears to step forward in defiance only to find himself alone.

     We should have known better. We probably did.

The Ultimate Manifesto, Part 2: Legislative Irresponsibility

     We saw one inducement to it in Florida, in the chaos after the 2000 presidential balloting. The state legislature had made it a requirement that election returns be certified no later than seven days after the balloting. The Florida state supreme court ruled that seventeen days must be allowed...and the legislature did nothing.

     We saw an egregious case of it in the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, a darling of the odious John McCain that purported to reduce the influence of “big money” on elections. The proponents could not have failed to know that their bill was unConstitutional. For that matter, President George W. Bush, who signed it, said as much but signed it anyway. It was left to the Supreme Court to strike it down. Its legislative proponents merely shrugged and continued onward.

     We saw an eruption of it in New York State’s Orwellian “SAFE Act.” That act, as written, outlaws the use of detachable rifle or pistol magazines that hold more than seven rounds. Many supposed defenders of the right to keep and bear arms voted for that bill...realizing only afterward that it criminalizes the use of virtually every firearm owned by anyone in the state, as no magazines that small are available for most such rifles. Yet the legislature did nothing, instead allowing Andrew Cuomo to decree, by “executive order,” that the ban would not be enforced just yet.

     We saw a major explosion of it in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), as legislators openly voted to pass a bill of whose contents they were utterly ignorant. When it developed that a key provision of the Act, expressly designed to induce the states to erect “health care exchanges” by the open admission of one of its chief architects, failed to produce the desired conformity among the states, not one of the bill’s legislative proponents stepped forward to say “Yes, we meant it to operate this way.” Instead they allowed John Roberts et alii to claim telepathic powers and rule on what they “intended.”

     Congressmen and United States Senators take oaths to the Constitution, which defines their offices. State legislators take similar oaths to their states’ constitutions or charters. Then they proceed to violate those oaths, serene in the knowledge that nothing will be done to them for doing so. As icing on this distasteful cake, they routinely pass bills that delegate, de facto, lawmaking power to unelected bureaucrats: persons who can’t even be turned out of office electorally.

     Federal legislators receive salaries of $175,000 per year for their “labors.” That’s apart from their franking privileges, travel privileges, office budgets, the salaries of their staffs, and so forth, which easily total to eight figures once all the bills are paid. State legislators are remunerated less opulently -- $79,500 per year in New York, exclusive of expenses – but still well above the average salaries of their constituents. At those prices, you’d think that you have a right to hold them accountable for their performances.

     You’d be wrong.

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     It is the case, apparently immune to “wave elections” or similar upheavals among Us the People, that a legislator, once elected, can reasonably expect to remain in “his position” until he chooses to retire. They’re harder to get rid of than an infestation of roaches, a species with which they share more characteristics than that one alone.

     I hardly need comment on the many documented cases of felonious behavior among legislators. Those tend to make headlines, at least in certain fora. The ones that involve sexual misconduct are especially salacious, but the ones that involve sale of access and influence have far more serious impact upon our notions of governmental integrity. After all, we can’t help but wonder: For every one we catch, how many others do we miss?

     Ferdinand Lundberg put it most memorably:

     ...it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures -- state, county, and municipal -- are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade, and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff, or what the police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving." Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the race track, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights....

     As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non-Mafians.

     Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures -- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois -- and the impression is thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone, and not many in the local populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere -- no state excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves.

     [The Rich and the Super-Rich, 1968]

     Somehow I doubt that Lundberg, were he still among the living, would continue to except the United States Congress, especially considering how gaining a seat in that body seems guaranteed to make its occupant wealthy. Rare is the U.S. legislator whose net worth is less than $5 million; I cannot name one whose net worth is less than $1 million. The usual derisive dismissal is to comment that “we have the best legislators money can buy.” Whose payrolls they occupy is left to the hearer’s imagination.

     Now that the courts, both state and federal, appear willing to rewrite their laws for them, what more can we expect? Considering that they normally continue in office despite any and all departures from integrity – does anyone else remember the censure of Charlie Rangel, long a ranking member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means committee, for not paying his taxes? – what prospect is there of compelling them to walk the line?

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     When irresponsibility among those with authority goes unpunished, it tends to increase. It’s certainly increased among “our elected representatives” in the decades since World War II. So has the average tenure in office of those...persons, a phenomenon for which We the People bear the odium. After all, isn’t “turning the rascals out” our responsibility?

     Of course, there is what H. L. Mencken said:

     The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government. They have only talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good only by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage and every election is a sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

     At each election we vote in a new set of politicians, insanely assuming that they are better than the set turned out. And at each election we are, as they say in Motherland, done in.

     How about it, Gentle Reader? Do you still think your vote matters? Do you still believe that “elections have consequences” – consequences of the sort you would favor? Would you still vote to return “your” Congressman or Senator to office on the grounds that “he’s better than the other guy” or that “we can’t afford to lose his seniority?”

     More anon.