Cultural Traps

During the European Age of Exploration, Westerners encountered many people who were capable individuals--but their societies were trapped into dysfunctional or corrupt political, religious and social structures.

Now, with the metastasis of the multicultural regulatory nanny state in the West, is the shoe on the other foot?

More Intellectual "Property" Insanity

Tax strategy patents:

A tax patent is a patent that discloses and claims a system or method for reducing or deferring taxes.

So if someone sets up a trust, foundation, or other mechanism for tax purposes, they can be sued.

This is a real intrusion of intellectual "property" on people's actual property.

How about landscaping patents, to be enforced via aerial or space-based imaging? How about interior decorating patents, to be enforced via bounties to deliverymen and the like? (Until, in their never-ending quest to protect creative people and grow the economy, Congress can mandate home monitoring.)

Hair style patents, to be enforced by accosting people in the street and requiring documentation that they have paid a licensing fee?

I try to stay optimistic as a matter of moral principle, but it is increasingly hard to avoid creating a label titled Let It Burn.

A Misconstrued Platitude

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. I've seen that attributed to Twain, Mencken and Einstein.

The saying does not claim that every simple and obvious solution is wrong, but it is often invoked to imply that--often by those who have a vested interest in complexity.

I have the size of the government in mind. The corruption and inefficiency would matter less if a smaller government had less power and demanded less money.

The WaPo Intelligence Investigation

The Post found that almost a million Americans have Top Secret security clearances: about 1 in 200 adults.

Amazing that, 35 years after publication, the lessons of The Mythical Man Month are so compeletely ignored.

Heckuva job, George. Again.

Immigration

For some time I've been thinking that reengineering the nightmarish legal immigration process should go hand in hand with securing the borders. For some time I've wondered if the toleration of illegal immigration is due, in part, to a tacit understanding that the government is no longer capable of implementing immigration competently.

Reason agrees.

Unfortunately, the high-skill people we need most will be disproportionately filtered out by our dysfunctional system.

(I've also read that the USA has the rudest border agents of any major country. Tourists said they enjoyed their visit but would not return because of how they were treated at the border.)

France Strikes Again

After the monumentally incompetent Bush administration and the possibly worse Obama, it's bad form for an American to gibe at the Europeans, but I can't resist. From the BBC:

The French government wants to take the controversial step of introducing a new law banning "psychological violence" between married couples or partners living together.

The law is expected to pass.

I don't expect this law to be applied uniformly, objectively or fairly. I do expect it to be extended beyond cohabitants.

Could 'psychological violence' be invoked to circumvent the USA's First Amendment? Look for the usual suspects to get interested.

Addendum 20100107. Chicks on the Right captures the insanity:

What are they going to ban next? The silent treatment?

Yours truly comments. Here too.

Addendum 20100117. According to Rasmussen, 32% of Americans favor such a law (40% opposed and 27% undecided).

A republic, if you can keep it. More and more of us are uninterested in keeping it.

Addendum 20100303. The French are on the verge of passing a law requiring electronic monitoring bracelets for husbands who have a restraining order to avoid their wives.

America Was Once Like This

From the Daily Mail:

Unveiled: China's 245mph train service is the world's fastest... and it was completed in just FOUR years

Look at the images.

In four years, I doubt you could even get regulatory approvals to break ground in the US.

My Evil Idea

Gene Healy on making criminals out of all Americans:

There are now more than 4,000 federal crimes, spread out through some 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code. Some years ago, analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offenses on the books, and gave up, lacking the resources to get the job done...

You can serve federal time for interstate transport of water hyacinths, trafficking in unlicensed dentures, or misappropriating the likeness of Woodsy Owl and his associated slogan, "Give a hoot, don't pollute."...Bills currently before Congress would send Americans to federal prison for eating horsemeat or selling goods falsely labeled as "Native American."

"Is that the system we have, that Congress can say, nobody shall do any bad things?" an exasperated Scalia asked (Deputy Solicitor General) Drebeen. The system we have comes pretty close, unfortunately. And a federal criminal code that covers everything delegates to prosecutors and the police the power to pick their targets at will, leaving everyone at risk.

(HT: Instapundit) So much for limited government in a free country. Note that the impetus is bipartisan. (Note also bipartisan legalization of things like intellectual-property banditry and expansive eminent domain.)

The law has become so complicated that Congressional researchers can't even enumerate the crimes that Congress has created? This is a job for...Artificial Intelligence!

Some public-spirited entrepreneur should create a software package that runs along the lines of a search engine. The enterprising prosecutor types in a target's behavior and the engine returns the crimes that are compatible with those actions.

In fact, every police department should have one! Initial versions might require an officer seeking a pretext for an arrest to call a dispatcher who will run the program and relay the options to the officer. Very quickly, however, voice recognition software can take the dispatcher out of the loop and automate the entire process.

(According to Healy's piece, Jim Webb is taking this issue on. Good for him. I'm glad I donated to his campaign against MacacAllen.)

Megan McArdle on the Complexity Bubble

Here:

...Every so often I'll read some description of a project out of the olden days--the battle against malaria in Panama, the handling of the Great Mississippi Flood, or the creation of the WPA--and just marvel at how fast everything used to be. The WPA was authorized in April of 1935. By December, it was employing 3.5 million people. The Hoover Dam took 16 years from the time it was first proposed, to completion; eight years, if you start counting from the time it passed Congress.

Contrast this with a current, comparatively trivial project: it has been seventeen years since the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor was established by USDOT, and we should have a Record of Decision on the Tier II environmental impact statement no later than 2010. This for something that runs along existing rail rights of way, and in fact, uses currently operating track in many places.

Would we have won the Cold War if not for our technology? Technology includes the atom bomb which perhaps prevented the Red Army from sweeping across Europe after WW2, and the 1980s military upgrades which the Soviets could not afford to match.

What if the government still operated at 1930s efficiency with today's technology?

Have the parasite classes learned how to coopt technology? (For example, the thousand-page special-interest laws that Congress does not read could not even have been printed a century ago.)

Just because technological innovation saved us from decline and fall in the past, it may not necessarily do so in the future.

The More Incompetent They Become, the More Power They Demand

I emailed that line to Instapundit and he used it.

Is society getting so complex that unintended consequences randomize the effects of policy initiatives?

"For the Children"

When budgets and bureaucratic turf are involved, it can be necessary to endanger children in order to protect them. Instapundit reports (boldface mine):

AND DON’T LET US CATCH YOU BEING NEIGHBORLY AGAIN: State bureaucrats threaten to fine, jail a Michigan woman for watching her neighbors’ kids. If people are neighborly, they need the state less. This cannot be permitted.

Glenn has unwittingly provided every "social-service" bureaucracy with a slogan to be posted prominently in parts of the building where the public is not allowed.

This is how Michigan spends taxpayer money while the state is undergoing an economic cataclysm.

Addendum. After I emailed him, Reynolds added the slogan above to his post.

To the Slammer with You, Tom Edison!

An inventor working on fuel cells was criminally prosecuted for not putting a sticker on an otherwise legal UPS package. When he was acquitted, another pretext to jail him was fabricated. See here, here, here, and here.

Before you try to do something for the body politic, you have to get permission from each of multiple parasites.

Addendum 20091007. The Washington Times has taken notice. Apparently there will be follow-up to the Congressional hearings cited by the original post.

Parasitical Complexity

Why do we suddenly need an academic whiz in charge of things? What changed?

Core principles are essential. Competence is essential. Ideas are essential. Pedigrees are not essential.

We don't need an academic whiz, but we need someone who understands that our society has been deliberately impaired by complexity that special interests have introduced for their own purposes. The metastasized system of laws and government regulations is the biggest example, but there are others.

Obviously, a technology-based civilization involves complexity. My point is that the parasitical complexity has been deliberately intermingled with constructive complexity so one can't be removed without disrupting the other. (Not to mention unintended consequences.) This threatens to bring the nation to stagnation or even collapse. We don't need academic whizzes as leaders, but we do need people who understand how a.w.'s operate: people who will undo the harm facilitated by a.w.'s and preserve & cultivate the benefits.

I'd love to see a leader who has an ordinary background and demonstrates a core understanding of the Founders, Hayek, Friedman, etc. A core understanding: this isn't 1960, let alone 1790.

The Complexity Bubble: It Keeps Growing and Growing...

Live free or die, my ***:

Ban on Feet-Nibbling Fish Leaves Nail Salons on the Hook
Mr. Ho's Import From China Caught On, But Some State Pedicure Inspectors Object

The U.S. Agency for International Development distributes condoms overseas. It is switching from American-made condoms to offshore ones:

"Of course, we considered how many U.S. jobs would be affected by this move,” said a USAID official who spoke on the condition that he would not be named. But he said the reasons for the change included lower prices (2 cents versus more than 5 cents for U.S.-made condoms) and the fact that Congress dropped “buy American language” in a recent appropriations bill.

I'm all for free trade, but I wonder why Congress dropped the buy American language during a serious recession[1].
---------------
[1] Note the scare headline: "U.S. to buy Chinese condoms, ending Alabama jobs." In the text:

In a move expected to cost 300 American jobs, the government is switching to cheaper off-shore condoms, including some made in China. [emphasis mine]

In fairness, there's this from the USAID spokesman:

Besides, he said, the sole U.S. supplier — an Alabama company called Alatech — had previous delivery problems under the program. (p)It's clear that Alatech's problems over the years, which apparently have been resolved, may have driven U.S. officials to seek much less expensive foreign-made condoms in the first place.

Parasitic(?) Lawyers

There's been a kerfuffle in the blogosphere about the social value of lawyers. Ward Farnsworth's guest post at the Volokh site apparently started it, Classical Values and others joined in, and Instapundit linked.

Nowhere in my (unthorough) scanning of these posts and comments did I notice a reference to Warren Burger's warning:

We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated.

I gather that Burger is not regarded as an eminent Chief Justice, but you'd think that his position alone would give his comment classic status among anti-lawyer critics.

Maybe Burger is anathema to Republicans because he presided over Roe v. Wade, and anathema to Democrats because he was a Republican.

Addendum 20091127. The Time cover about lawyers is here; the cover story is here.