Meme of the Day: Deep State At Work

The relevant article today is "How to Cut Through the New Gordian Knots" by Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker at The Brownstone Institute. Their thesis is that government has become so complex and so large that it is impossible to discern who is in control, let alone reform it. They write (bold added):

    The deep problem is that the sheer size and complexity of vast systems such as education, health, and defence make it impossible for any single person or work team to understand them in their totality. That insight is now known as the problem of embodied knowledge: just as a body can provide its own immune defence services without the mind knowing how it’s done, bureaucracies can produce valuable services (e.g., in education, defence, and public health) without any one person or team knowing how it’s done.

    Rather, each of hundreds of specialists understands a tiny part of the full picture, with the details of that picture changing constantly with the incomings and outgoings of personnel and technology.

    Because no one understands these systems, insiders are able to concoct emergencies and other excuses to expand them until populations are fed up with them, an insight emphasised by William Niskanen. We are now at the point that Niskanen, writing in the 1970s, predicted would arrive: bureaucracies have become so bloated that they are no longer a net benefit to their society. 

    Also, when no one truly understands a system in its totality, it is hard to know where the biggest problems are. How to deduce which bits are rotten and who is corrupt, when everything is so entangled? So many strings are being pulled that identifying the puppet masters, or whether they exist at all, is virtually impossible.

    Corruption in a very complex system arises in a way known to economists as ‘market discovery:’ over time, those who stand to benefit most from the corruption of particular parts of these mammoth systems are those who have found ways to corrupt them. By trial and error, top civil servants and cashed-up outsiders have identified the buttons that need to be pressed to get mutually beneficial results, and have organised themselves to control those buttons and obscure them from others. Many corruption buttons will not be widely known to exist. After all, the better hidden the corruption, the longer the relevant players can hope to enjoy the benefits of that corruption.

    One well-known corruption tactic is the revolving door. Thousands of civil servants now hail from particular parts of the private sector that benefit from corrupting them. For instance, Loyce Pace, the HHS’s Assistant Secretary for Global Affairs and the person responsible for selling the World Health Organisation on plans to institutionalise the profits of Big Pharma, came into that position from the job of executive director of a health-industry lobby organisation called the Global Health Council. 

    A fox turned keeper of the chicken coop, invited in by elected politicians. According to Open Secrets, a non-profit group that monitors the revolving door: “public servants switching to careers as lobbyists (and back again) come from agencies as varied as the Department of Defence, NASA and the Smithsonian Institution.”

    Relatedly, politicians have an incentive to vandalise independent self-analytical units inside the state bureaucracy, such as audit offices. They can sell that vandalism to their sponsors, and by avoiding scandals from being discovered, keep their public image immaculate. A typical example is that in Australia’s state of Queensland, the anti-corruption commission was neutered by politicians from both main political parties after the reform period of the 1980s, as noted bitterly by former judge Tony Fitzgerald who led those 1980s reforms. The playbook to corrupt self-critical units inside the state bureaucracy is to put one of the shady insiders in charge, reduce the mandate, reduce the funding, make legal what was previously illegal, and punish whistleblowers. 

The authors also explain:

    The problems are far worse than even this dismal depiction indicates. Not only have leaders in our state institutions been captured and made subservient to special interest groups, but the very fabric of operations of both politics and the bureaucracy has become captured, procedurally and technologically, by special interest groups. These mechanisms of capture are not fully seen by anyone, create consequences that reach decades into the future, and are virtually impossible to pick apart.

    Think of the thousands of international treaties to which the US is beholden that collectively bind the hands of future generations when it comes to the taxation and regulation of industries. On top of this, the US is estimated to enter into a further 200 international treaties every year, many written by special interest groups to secure their future profits at the expense of the public. 

    Think also of the use of privately-owned technology to run key infrastructure and weaponry, where continued functionality depends upon maintenance and upgrades. Think of the thousands of ‘public-private partnerships’ that are essentially written by private partners and pushed through by bought politicians, locking in future generations to excessively expensive toll roads, medicines, broadband, and so on.

    In such an environment, one cannot isolate a few corrupted parts of the state bureaucracy, excise them, and start afresh. The system has become entangled precisely to prevent such a solution: to do any serious reform ‘from the outside’ you would not merely have to axe all the major departments, including the army, but also the legal structures and the major businesses that have grown around the state bureaucracy. Even whispering about such matters would put one on the radar of the security apparatus and the propaganda machinery of both government and Big Business. Beware the fate of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.

    We can forget about seemingly simple fixes, like giving politicians the right to fire civil servants on the spot. Besides, giving clueless and corrupted politicians yet more power is not going to make matters better. Real reform will have to be dramatic, and it will come about only in dramatic circumstances.

The authors observe that, historically, this Gordian Knot of a bloated bureaucracy is dealt with through losing a war and the conquerors dissolving the government (e.g. Austria-Hungary) or outright government collapse (the Soviet Union). Their solution has six main point: (i) using small citizen committees (juries) to appoint bureaucrats; (ii) eliminating or walking away from the vast majority of laws, treaties, public-private partnerships, and so on; (iii) "unravel the influence of dead or blind money, such as that wielded by the huge philanthropic organisations that run much of science today (e.g., the Gates Foundation and the Ford Foundation); (iv) "we need to think about radical changes to our democracy and our legal system, including the use of referenda, citizens’ assemblies, and international arbiters"; (v) adopting different, simpler tax systems; and (vi) and reform journalism. 

    The problem I see with the proposed reforms is that they do not necessarily address the basic problem, which that "bureaucracies have become so bloated that they are no longer a net benefit to their society". I believe the simpler solution, at least in the United States, would be to repeal the 16th Amendment, which permitted the government to implement the income tax, and simply starve the federal government of its tax revenue. If the government didn't have so much money and influence, there would be no incentive to "game the system" or engage in much of the corruption. I suspect that with that change alone, much of the other problems would fall away. 

    Another point I want to make is that the phrase I bolded above--"bureaucracies have become so bloated that they are no longer a net benefit to their society"--reminds me of Joseph Tainter's work, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge Press, 1988). (You can see my review and commentary of Tainter's book at the following links: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6). Essentially, though, Tainter postulated that societies will collapse when they become too complex and too expensive to allow a society to respond to a crises. Or, as he otherwise expressed it, when the marginal increased cost of an additional bit of complexity exceeds the marginal benefit of that increased complexity. For instance, a new law that has a large cost and little or no benefit; or a new bureaucracy that costs much more than any harm it might prevent. 

    It should be noted that a collapse, as envisioned by Tainter, need not be a complete collapse of a society and loss of the rule of law (although it could be), but a shift from the more complex state to a simpler state. For instance, the United States dissolving into its separate member states. 

Related articles:

• "RFK Jr. Says CIA Is Connected to 2001 Anthrax Attacks"--The Gateway Pundit. The article notes that "[t]he attacks consisted of anthrax being sent through the United States Postal System via letters and delivered to several news organizations, Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Tom Daschle." Kennedy is claiming that the letters went to Leahy and Daschle's offices because the two were trying to stop passage of the Patriot Act in 2001. "The son of the late US Attorney General Robert Kennedy then captivated Dore’s listeners by sharing that the FBI discovered anthrax in the letters originally 'stemmed from a CIA lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland.'"
• "Sure enough, NewsGuard gets federal funding" -- American Thinker. NewsGuard is ostensibly an organization that tries to vet news organizations so that users can supposedly avoid disinformation. The article notes that NewsGuard has received funding from the Department of Defense. Another similar organization mentioned in the article is the U.K.-based Global Disinformation Index, which apparently received funding from the U.S. Department of State. Discussing some recent Congressional testimony on the topic:

    On Thursday, independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger appeared before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to testify about what they had discovered during a review of internal Twitter communications. An hour before the weird hearing began, Taibbi released the latest installment of the "Twitter Files."

    Halfway through his thread, titled "The Censorship-Industrial Complex," Taibbi wrote: "Some NGOs, like the GEC-funded Global Disinformation Index or the DOD-funded NewsGuard, not only see content moderation but apply subjective 'risk' or 'reliability' scores to media outlets, which can result in a reduction in revenue." Embedded in the post was a picture of a nearly $750,000 award from the Department of Defense to NewsGuard, an organization the independent journalists characterized as a "government-funded" entity implicated in the Censorship Complex.

• "Pentagon Developing Deepfakes To Deceive the Public"--Truth11. 

    United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is “gearing up to conduct internet propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake videos,” according to contracts with the federal government reviewed by The Intercept.

    In what many would attribute to the likely behavior of rogue regimes targeting the United States, the activities that SOCOM is carrying on overseas include “hacking internet-connected devices to eavesdrop in order to assess foreign populations’ susceptibility to propaganda,” the Intercept article reports.

    The information revealed in the report is taken from a procurement document published by the Department of Defense, a sort of wish list of technological tools the Pentagon is looking to secretly deploy throughout the world.

• "Whistleblower: FBI Agents Colluded To Illegally Intercept Proud Boy Defendant’s Communications With HIS OWN Attorney" – enVolve. The FBI was intercepting communications between the Proud Boy defendant and his attorney to learn their trial strategy and then passing that information on to prosecutors. 
• "The Persecution of Ricky Vaughn"--Vox Popoli. Vox quotes from an article discussing the fact that the government's case against Doug Mackey (aka Ricky Vaughn) is partly reliant on a confidential witness (CW), but the government refuses to name the CW. Per the quoted article:

In its filings, the government declines to say what CW’s current role with the government is, except that he is “presently engaged in proactive investigations, working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and may engage in additional investigations in the future.” Based on that statement, the government is asking that CW’s identity be kept secret, and that Mackey’s defense team be barred from asking any questions about CW’s current work.

The same article indicates that typically a CW's identity will only be protected if there is a current, specific and credible threat of harm. In this case, the DOJ claims that the threat is that the CW might be harassed on the Internet. Vox Day adds:

    This particular federal informant is widely rumored to be none other than “Baked Alaska”. But that’s not what is interesting, at least to me. What I believe to be more significant is this observation from AC [Anonymous Conservative]:

Notice, Ricky had an informant before he had any hint of anything prosecutors might try to charge him with, going on around him. He was just a a squeaky clean, preppy guy, posting funny memes on Twitter. With an informant sent in. Which means an FBI/intelligence agent assigned to him.

So one guy posting on Twitter had an informant sent in and an intelligence operation dedicated to him on nothing more than the basis of his rhetorically-effective memes. What this means is that literally everyone with more than 200+ followers on any social media platform is being targeted, tracked, and infiltrated. 

• "DHS Just Turned 20. It's Time To Abolish It."--Reason. One of those agencies whose costs, both direct and indirect, far exceed any benefit it provides.
• "CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US" -- Activist Post. The company in question is Gabriel which, according to the article, "offers a suite of surveillance products for 'security and safety' incidents at 'so-called soft targets and communal spaces, including schools, community centers, synagogues and churches.'" Also:

Gabriel, since its founding, has been backed by “an impressive group of leaders,” mainly “former leaders of Mossad, Shin Bet [Israel’s domestic intelligence agency], FBI and CIA.” In recent years, even more former leaders of Israeli and American intelligence agencies have found their way onto Gabriel’s advisory board and have promoted the company’s products.

But adoption of its products were languishing in the U.S. until "an 'anonymous philanthropist' gave the company $1 million to begin installing its products throughout schools, houses of worship and community centers throughout the country." The same philanthropist "has promised to recruit others to match his donation, with the ultimate goal of installing Gabriel’s system in 'every single synagogue, school and campus community in the country.'"