Angina Monologue 7

His Majesty was in rare good humor this morning.

Which means he waxed expansive.

I think he found the comics page particularly amusing. His favorite is Zits, but he is also fond of Pearls Before Swine. (Though perhaps not the way Pastis intended; Palpatine seems to be cackling as much at him as with him.) His Majesty sneers at Baby Blues, but every now and then I see an amused curl of the lip at the edge of his sneer.

It probably helped that I hid the front page. Seeing that two of the four keynote speakers at our local Martin Luther King Jr. rally were gay activists, and the third was a labor activist, would not have sat well with him. As a former polical leader in time of war, His Majesty has no use for racial discrimination; he would deprive no one of the opportunity to be cannon fodder over something as superficial as pigmentation.

I have been reflecting on this failure of contemporary Western civilization to do the necessary pruning of dysfunctional institutions, practices, and persons. There is so much that could be said on this topic, and I only touched on a few points yesterday.

The failure to replace dysfunctional politicians and even more dysfunctional bureaucrats: res ipsa loquitur. I think it was entirely predictable things would play out this way, but then I have the advantage of hindsight.

His Majesty can get quite crude at times, and he has sometimes defined “hindsight” as “staring out your a–“.

The U.S. Constitution was based on a thorough examination of classical government and a lot of shrewd guesswork about how incentive structures would play out, and it did remarkably well. I have little doubt that no one could have done better then, nor will anyone do better now — so I am content that the requirements for amendment have become impossibly onerous. The parable of new wine in old bottles applies, but even more the parable of new droids repairing old landspeeders.

Oh, I have no doubt that the unrest with things as they are will eventually reach the breaking point, but the revolution that follows will be a catastrophe.

Still. I have been reading essays by some historians of the Constitution. The Founders seem to have assumed that Presidents would be impeached and removed from office much more often than has actually taken place. (We’ve had two impeachments and a serious threat of a third, but, ironically, only the threatened one actually removed a President from office.) The Founders also seem to have assumed that the Electoral College would fail to elect a President more often than not, and the House of Representatives would usually choose the President instead. Neither has played out that way. However, the prestige of George Washington, the man who would not be king, made it unacceptable for a President to serve more than two terms, at least until a President assumed office who was as invested in his own historical significance as Mr. Roosevelt. But then that was the age of dictators. The fault was repaired with the 22nd Amendment.

Senators were always expected to serve a long time, but at the will of a state legislature. There was this deliciously mistaken assumption that state legislators would take this appointment very seriously and actually choose the finest of their fellow citizens. Nonetheless, Senators do tend to be a better cut than Congressmen.

Representatives were to be elected so often — every two years — and in such a populist manner that the Founders were confident there would be constant turnover. The Founders failed to anticipate the importance of name recognition, the franking privilege, the ability of Congressmen to “do favors” for constituents (they certainly anticipated corruption, but the other way) and the overall political inertia of a large Republic.

Nevertheless, I find risible the suggestion that politicians are not an accurate reflection of their constituency. Voters hate Congress, but never in the person of their own Congressman. Presidential approval ratings are low, but never quite in the toilet; and when it comes time for these Presidents to stand for reelection, they are very often successful, which I think shows that pollsters are routinely lied to. But the public disagreement with judges and bureaucrats is both genuine and widespread.

The Founders gave judges lifetime tenure, of course, but on the assumption that the judiciary would be the least dangerous branch. After all, the role of judges was severely fixed and limited by tradition. It’s really quite remarkable the extent to which a group of revolutionaries relied on tradition.

And the judiciary and the bureaucracy are in symbiotic relationship. The judiciary has been successful at vastly increasing the scope of its powers by interpreting the enumerated powers of the federal government in the broadest possible manner. These broad powers engendered a vast bureaucracy, which in turn became subject to sweeping judicial oversight. In every sense, the bureaucracy is a creature of the judiciary. The result is that you cannot prune the bureaucracy without pruning the judiciary, and vice versa, but the two standing together are powerful enough to defy the other branches and even the electorate.

We complain loudest about what we have the least power to change. Don’t like your Congressman? You can elect a new one in two years. No, really. The 98% retention rate of Congressmen reflects less the powerlessness of the voters than the skill with which politicians can fine-tune their platform and performance to please the voters. Which means that that part of the system is actually working pretty much as expected.

Once you have a powerful judiciary and bureaucracy, the growth of the welfare state is inevitable. It serves to give every voter a stake in the bureaucratic status quo.I could go on at length on the number of government bureaus that have long outlived their original purpose, but that has been done very well by others elsewhere.

The growth of the welfare state is debilitating.  It is a constant drain on productivity, in taxes, distorted economic incentives, and increased unemployment. But the most serious debilitation is the spiritual debilitation of making most choices less consequential.

Health and safety regulations, however laudable in intent and occasionally in practice, eliminate the option of doing dangerous things. When the dangerous thing is working with asbestos without a HEP filter, it’s hard to argue that the option ought to be there. Other cases, though, are less clear. And in every case, there is the so-called crutch effect: People become more careless when they think the safety net is in place. It’s a kind of moral hazard.

We see this with welfare. When you are guaranteed several months of subsistence if you lose your job, you will be more careless about losing your job. You will be less productive when you are working and you will be less motivated to acquire new skills. You will be subsidized in not changing anything about your life.

Mormon welfare, as I understand it, was intended to offer a very different model. If your condition was a brief setback, you received equally brief and limited assistance. If your condition was more lasting, you were expected to change your life, with assistance serving the role of keeping body and soul together long enough to effect the necessary changes. This is the right model, but it has not worked out in practice.

I remind the reader that His Majesty is not a believer. One need not assume that his assessment is either correct or fair.

It comes back to this matter of pruning. There is nothing harder than pruning your own habits. For example, the Mormon model calls for a family in financial distress to immediately prune their expenses. Increasing their income is not unimportant, but it is accepted that this will likely come more slowly. The bishop is expected to require the family to draw on their own reserves, then those of their extended family, before providing assistance, which brings to bear powerful incentives to keep the period of assistance as brief and as limited as possible.

I will concede that the Mormon system has probably worked better than other systems, but that’s damning with faint praise, especially when the other systems with which it is being compared are government systems. And I will also concede that the failures are not entirely within the Mormon system itself.

One obvious problem is the very existence of a competing government system. Given the choice between a system that offers limited benefits for a short period in return for wrenching personal changes, and a system that gives guaranteed benefits for a generous period of time with no requirements for any meaningful personal change, and it’s a marvel the first system can compete at all. That the Mormon church still bothers reflects the commitment of the Saints, as they are flattered to style themselves, to the specious demands of charity Gibbons so amusingly spoke of in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The system also still occasionally functions for the rare case of a Latter-day Saint who genuinely abhors the dole, and will prefer the Mormon approach out of a sense of self-respect. Such people are not all that rare; what is rare is for someone with that much character to find himself in financial straits in a nation that offers as many economic opportunities as the United States, even during recessions as deep as the present one.

It’s not just the market competition, either. The government is not interested in a fair competition, and I was very interested in the story you once related, Lord Vader, of the older disabled sister who was threatened with loss of her Social Security by the government because she was receiving Church assistance paying her rent. This is entirely to be expected. You made the comment then that the biggest obstacle to making the Mormon welfare program work the way it was intended to was the federal government, and you were absolutely right.

But some of the damage is nevertheless self-inflicted.

Any system run in a legalistic manner, that is, according to a fixed set of rules over which the manager of the system has little control, is going to be gamed. This is practically a daily ritual for participants in government assistance programs. The Mormons are remarkable for giving broad discretion to their local leaders, their bishops, on what assistance to give or withhold. There is no practical limit on the amount of assistance, nor any requirement that any assistance be given at all if the bishop doesn’t feel good about it; there are only auditing requirements that assistance be properly documented, which I often heard you grumble about when you were preparing for your regular audit, back when your church had you working as a financial clerk. You had anything to complain about! My audits are much stronger tea; none of this “findings” to be “corrected” nonsense. My solution to hyperventilating minions is the obvious one. As was yours, once, before you went soft.

This broad discretion ought to prevent gaming of the Mormon system. You have no one to blame but yourselves for the fact that the system is still regularly gamed.

The other problem is that there is too much tenderheartedness. The prospect of making wrenching personal changes is genuinely distressing; and too many of your bishops, witnessing this genuine distress, go all soft and end up going the easy route of subsidizing continuing dysfunction rather than subsidizing wrenching but ultimately beneficial personal change. That really shouldn’t be an option.

His Majesty talks a lot about how choices should be consequential, but then insists on compelling people to make the choices with the right consequences. I have refrained to pointing this out too openly, because that would be a choice with some serious consequences of its own.

The notion that they will not care how much you know until they know how much you care is one that, I think, has never entered his mind.