Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
See also the way that grants are now being distributed at NCI and NSF. Only very large grants for many many years, to reward those who are in the favored status, and kill those who are disfavored. Decision making is random and capricious, just be sure to bribe those at the top with whatever favors you can.
Not a guarantee either.. just a hope
EDIT: But, as someone will probably point out, convoluted laws / bureaucracy does obviously not automatically mean fascism or corruption. Lots of weird laws are there to cover all sorts of edge cases.
It was important for the nazis to keep businesses running, and have most people continue their lives without noticing major changes. Most people would not come into contact with the second system, and barely knew it existed. But if you entered the second system, you often would not come out alive.
I agree that the phrase is somewhat contradictory, but it is the best way to describe what was going on. As long as you were within the confines of the normative state, you experienced a rule of law. But as soon as you stepped into the prerogative state, anything could happen. So a "rule of law", except that it didn't apply to everybody, but only to most people. And importantly, the existence of the prerogative state is mostly hidden when you're in the normative state (so unlike a king)
FTFY. From the outside, people can easily see it.
The way to fix this is to reduce the power of the administrative state, not to just complain about Trump, but I have little hope of a real solution.
I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?
Congress. The courts have clumsily dismantled the administrative state. But there are more options than an unchecked executive and unaccountable unelecteds.
I don't agree. The division of power is most likely preferable. Otherwise the politician also become the beurocrat but way more arbitrary.
Under Chevron we had the opposite of that: bureaucrats who had ridiculously wide latitude to make their own rules.
What we actually need is for congress to take back control instead of passing all power and authority to the executive branch.
I don’t think it’s workable. At best it just swaps lobbyists for civil servants.
Just be upfront that you’re a libertarian and are allergic to government.
Of course, it's totally lost on the academic-bureaucratic class that the anti-intellectuals wouldn't hesitate to cut off their nose to spite their face by electing a president that would turn around and surprise pikachu the academics with the very machine they had helped build. Now that academics are losing their grips within the bureaucratic apparatus, suddenly they are deciding to rethink their strategy -- but it's not a coming to Jesus moment, but rather just a reactionary response.
If you actually believe this is true, I have some sad news for you. Does the term "regulatory capture" mean anything to you?
> those awful technocrats
If you actually believe the "technocrats" have the knowledge required to craft regulations that actually are a net benefit, again, I have some sad news for you.
There is another option, which is to not dictate rules at all, unless you absolutely have to in order to have a civil society in the first place. For example, we have laws against things like murder and theft and fraud, because you can't have a civil society if those things aren't deterred and punished.
But the vast majority of the laws and regulations we have in place now are not doing that. They're attempts to micromanage from the top something that fundamentally cannot be micromanaged from the top. Nobody has enough knowledge to do that. So we should stop doing it.
For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
Nor is it what I advocated.
> Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity
That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their markets.
> allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane.
Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened?
> Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
You're assuming that food and water providers would be able to do such things in a "free market". But doing such things is obviously bad for business, so providers would have a strong incentive not to do it in a free market, since in a free market, doing things that are bad for business makes you go out of business.
In our current regulatory environment, however, large corporations can do many things that are bad for business, as long as they can get government regulators to agree to let them. For an example from a few years ago, a major aicraft manufacturer got the FAA to approve a change to one of its oldest aircraft types that ended up killing two airplanes full of people. How? Because the FAA didn't even look at the change: the "regulation" had evolved to the point where the FAA just took the manufacturer's word for it that everything was OK.
In a free market, such an aircraft manufacturer would be out of business. But of course in our current regulatory environment that can't happen, because regulation has forced aircraft manufacturers to amalgamate to the point that neither of the two biggest ones can ever be allowed to go out of business--too many long chains of dominoes, including much of the US's military capability (and not just in airplanes), depend on them.
Tell me again how regulations make things better?
Even if you eliminated the immunity shield for corporate leadership so they couldn't skate after their company goes bankrupt, there would still be innumerable risk-takers willing to gamble with human lives to make more money.
> Sure. And humans somehow managed to obtain food and water that didn't have those things for thousands of years, even though there were no government regulations prohibiting them. How do you suppose that happened?
Ok, so you just don’t know history. Many people died. Fuck have you never even heard of the Jungle?
Upon Sinclair wasn’t even trying to get food regulations to improve the quality, he was trying to improve workers rights but the public was so disgusted with what food companies were doing to their food that we as a society demanded the government regulate it.
Or superfund sites?
Getting rid of government regulations in their entirety just cedes all the decision making power to corporations.
I am sick and tired of these libertarian types who either want to repeat experiments that have never succeeded in their utopian outcome or that want to convince us that the corporate boot tastes so much better than the government one.
Like for example the amount of water a toilet flush can has been federally regulated since the 90s. Sure, that might be important if you need to keep some schmucks in the desert from bickering over aquifer depletion and whatnot. But the majority of jurisdictions in the east "we take surface water and give it back to the same watershed" jurisdictions who can use all the water they want and only impact the required size of the hardware at the treatment plant. So why are we even regulating this? And any issue you look into there's a plethora of stuff like that. Theoretically it's all justifiable in abstract but that's like littering, it doesn't scale.
[1] via "states shall adopt in order to qualify for this grant" type rules which the states then roll downhill
Congress knew of that issue; for decades, Congress has delegated the nitty gritty to regulatory agencies, who employ said experts.
SCOTUS, on the other hand, are the idiots you seek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...
But I'm not dumb enough to think you'll believe my words, you'll only learn by experience.
Seriously, is there any other kind?
Just quoting Wiki since it's quite succinct and accurate on this: "[The Wolf Amendment] prohibits the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from using government funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government and China-affiliated organizations from its activities without explicit authorization from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress."
For another consequence of this law, when China relatively recently carried out a sample return from the Moon, they sought to share the resultant rocks/material with countries worldwide, much like NASA did in the 60s. Except Americans couldn't accept them, at least not without jumping through a million hoops first, due to this law. It's one of the ever more frequent 'I'm going to punch myself in the face because I don't like you' acts by governments.
If the enemy is the science happening then a lack of clarity is a highly effective tactic.
That's all being abandoned.
Just look at the (first) Gilded Age. It's pretty much you claim we didn't have in the past: Family dynasties and government sympathetic to the interests of wealthy business stakeholders. It took the better part of a century of hard fighting (including literal combat in some cases) to bring that to an end, and then we had what, 40 years? before the accumulated momentum of conservatism brought on the Reagan era.
And it's not a matter of just unions fighting it out in the textile mills and coal mines and railcar assembly plants either. After the Civil War the US Army was engaged in a widespread program of what would today be categorized as genocide, in service of business interests that thought they could make more money if you didn't have a pre-existing civilization in the Great Plains.
Go back a few decades further and you have the Civil War itself. Slavery was first and foremost profitable for cash crop plantation owners; everything follows from that.
Probably can't happen without huge changes to the tax code IMO.
That said, I think bringing the amount of research science we have under the umbrella of academia has been bad because it's basically introduced a plausible deniability and reputation laundering layer that furthers the 3-way revolving door between academia, government and industry.
IIUC, industry does get R&D tax credits- but that's probably not a good incentive system for basic research in industry.
What's happening now is that a small number of science-friendly rich people are making foundations/institutes that carry out basic research (Zuckerberg/Chan, Schmidt, and a few others) but it's unlikely those will completely supplant academic research at universities funded by NIH/NSF/DOE.
Lowering their taxes while burning everything to the ground benefits them now.
A less just, less stable society is far more likely to demonize and destroy billionaires. If you have such a high level of wealth the most rational action is charitability to insure the wealth of people who surround you to prevent instability and lower the chances you'll be the victim of a crime carried out due to desperation.
Allowing others to build wealth just makes society less stable from their point of view. Better to keep the poor poor.
Step 1. Exploit the commons.
Step 2. Shut the door.
I am reminded by this quote from an email exchange between Bret Taylor and Alan Kay, published in 2017:
“As I pointed out in a previous email, Engelbart couldn't get funding from the very people who made fortunes from his inventions.
“It strikes me that many of the tech billionaires have already gotten their "upside" many times over from people like Engelbart and other researchers who were supported by ARPA, Parc, ONR, etc. Why would they insist on more upside, and that their money should be an "investment"? That isn't how the great inventions and fundamental technologies were created that eventually gave rise to the wealth that they tapped into after the fact.
“It would be really worth the while of people who do want to make money -- they think in terms of millions and billions -- to understand how the trillions -- those 3 and 4 extra zeros came about that they have tapped into. And to support that process.”
https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/
The titans of industry not understanding the importance of science beyond its profitable applications doesn’t surprise me at all.
"science with outside helps the other side" - done.
Current administration sees US as losing its positions, so the main answer is to close the leaks that feed its opponents with US effort
It would also be beneficial even if he didn’t do that, but helped others do that.
- ethnic identity tying one to country of origin (Chinese people identify as Chinese and see their country of origin as their people, Americans rarely hold the same view)
- asymmetry (America is best for education and business)
- strong national government which pursues its interests
I'm not just referring to restrictions on collaborations with foreign researchers, although I frankly do not see how that meaningfully reduces the ability of opponents to benefit from US research unless we kill open publishing as well. I'm talking about the last year and a half of destroying the ability of every basic researcher I know to work in a stable and predictable environment.
2. Science trends toward meritocracy, which is bad if your goal is to promote a particular social hierarchy.
And 2020 further revealed that science is not immune from politics or its own religious ideals.
governments need influence, and yellow the truth,so as to manage the overall situation, thats a first assumption.
now we see a lot of actions that in the end seemlike footgunning, basically derailing the foundations of civilization.
perhaps this is not megalomania, greed, or sickness.
perhaps, as is often portrayed in popular scifi, we are all doomed to face a terrible challange, there are only few very closed mouth individuals that absolutely know. [remember this is a fringe conspiracy hypothesis]
we are being distracted and kept on the dark about impending catastrophe,so as to stave off absolute chaos,little hope of influencing anyone except by overwhelming show of force. perhaps "they" know its a matter of years, not decades until we experience that thing that suddenly, seemingly cyclically clears the board and the whole assembly begins again from square 2,or 3,not quite square one. [Re fringe;conspiracy]
"they" are behaving in an all bets are off manner, keeping thier hand hidden, playing an endgame rather than making a benign effort.
What is the purported legal authority they’re acting under? Some of the housekeeping in the next years will involve pulling those statutes.