So far the States, or a necessary amount of them, have fallen in line without any problem. They run elections? OK, so they will “run them” as they are told. People can vote all they want. As I said, the hoi polloi can be “handled” as they have been. If they protest? Well, that’s what the police are for. Those politicos will keep their jobs. That’s what this whole thing has been about.
But I will allow you might be on to something. As I said, I’ll be glad to be wrong. This might be, in some strange undiscernable way, the death throes of toxic politics and not the rise of a new order. Two election cycles from now could be a brave new world. And I mean that in the good sense. We could just be watching the process.
We really old phartz remember the origin of the cherry pie standard. Mickey D’s was selling “cherry” pies that only had 2 1/2 cherries, the rest being filler.
What’s next? The standard that dictates how much actual dairy product needs to be included to call a product “ice cream”? We old phartz remember when Breyer’s “ice cream” was good. Now, some flavors of Breyer’s are so full of fillers and thickeners, that they no longer meet the minimum government standard to be “ice cream”. Now the cartons proclaim the contents “frozen dairy dessert”.
But, apparently, requiring “ice cream” to contain dairy products, or “cherry pie” to contain cherries, “burdens” the “JCs” too much. Because adulterated food is a “traditional American value”.
from Snopes
Breyer’s sells both ice cream and frozen dairy desserts. The difference between the two products is not due to proportion of air whipped into the product, but due to the percentage of milk fat used in it. Legally, in the United States, ice cream contains 10% or more milk fat — per the FDA — while frozen desserts contain less.
But, just like Mexican built cars, Breyer’s charges just as much for it’s “frozen dairy dessert” as it charges for actual ice cream.
According to the firm, the FAA had assured it that Starship would get the green light this month. It claims the rocket has been ready to fly since early August, an assertion CEO Elon Musk reiterated last week.
“Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware,” the firm said.
This is the story about most of these “burdensome” regulations. The fact that they were NEEDED. They weren’t just dreamt up by some government employee with too much time on their hands. They were not created in vacuum. And somehow some people just think that corporations will do the right thing if not required to do so. It is laughable.
Well, actually, seems people think the “JCs” should be allowed to do whatever they want, to maximize profit, including adulterating foods, and claiming foods are something they aren’t.
The eternal question - should you need evidence that the regulation is necessary, or evidence that it is not? Do you default to assuming that the regulation is serving some purpose (even if you don’t know what it is), or that it should be gotten rid of unless someone can tell you what the purpose is?
This is Chesterton’s Fence. G.K. Chesterton posited that if you see a fence, and you don’t know why it’s there, you should not tear down that fence until you do understand why it was built in the first place:
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
The lesson of Chesterton’s Fence is what already exists likely serves purposes that are not immediately obvious.
Fences don’t appear by accident. They are built by people who planned them and had a reason to believe they would benefit someone. Before we take an ax to a fence, we must first understand the reason behind its existence.
The original reason might not have been a good one, and even if it was, things might have changed, but we need to be aware of it. Otherwise, we risk unleashing unintended consequences that spread like ripples on a pond, causing damage for years.
AIUI, Musk does not take this approach. He believes in tearing down all the fences that can’t be justified, and then adding back in the ones that he discovers later were necessary after all. That’s something that can work in a manufacturing process that you 100% control and get immediate feedback on it - if you make a change and it doesn’t work out, you’ll find out quickly and have the unfettered ability to reverse the change. Those conditions don’t always apply to government regulations.
From CFPB website: We’re the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a U.S. government agency dedicated to making sure you are treated fairly by banks, lenders and other financial institutions.
And businesses don’t like that. They always talk about regulations and how they are intrusive and burdensome to businesses. How about the burdens placed on consumers by not having them? I sure hope people get wise.
Good point, but let’s look at real numbers. Full-time Federal civilian employees from 1970 to 2023. From 1.97M in 1974 to 2.3M in 2023. That’s a 18% increase.
Still a small increase compared to population and budget growth. Again, show me a private sector company that can increase in size like that with a much smaller increase in employees.
Interestingly, federal civilian employment declined significantly under Clinton (1993-2000) when Gore was in charge of the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. Those crazy liberals reduced the size of civilian government! Went from 2.1M in 1993 to 1.8M in 2001, a 14% reduction.
That reduction ended with Bush Jr where we see an increase in the number of federal employees throughout his term (2001-2008). This ends during the Obama administration (2008-2015) when the number of civilian employees returns to 1994 levels even with the addition Obamacare. Those crazy liberals did it again!
trump got elected in 2018. Look at the direction of the civilian government hiring curve during that administration.
It’s not “the same thing”. We live in a more complex society. We used to have radio waves for AM radio, and without regulation it was a mishmash. Now we have FM. TV. Garage door openers. Wi-Fi. Bluetooth. Police band. Avionics. Satellite relay. Microwave towers. Radio astronomy. Ham radio. RFID. Shortwave. Heart wave monitors. GPS. Radar. Satellite radio & TV. Two way radio. Pagers. And that’s probably 1/10th of the list.
Now that’s just “spectrum”, but you could do the same for, say “food”, including food safety, meat inspection, and yes, cherry pie regulation. We tried meat without those bothersome things, and then Upton Sinclair wrote a book, remember?
Or maybe we should go back to the patent medicine days when any quack could peddle a cancer cure without any sort of vetting? Or not have a CDC working on contagions and disease and vaccinations before they’re actually needed? You know, like the mRNA technologies that didn’t have any immediate commercial purpose but which helped Covid vaccines get produced in just weeks?
Yeah, mostly. Oh sure, there are places that are outdated, unnecessary. Ethanol price supports, for instance, but I doubt we’ll touch those, eh? But most of the criticism is from people who don’t understand that GOVERNMENT IS DIFFERENT than business.
We don’t run an Army to be profitable. Nor the Veteran’s Administration. Nor the courts. Nor libraries, the FBI, or National Parks. The government serves an entirely different purpose and does things the private sector can’t - or won’t. Imagine having bake sales so we can have public education or roads. Imagine criticizing Oprah because she isn’t a comedian. These things are different , and mostly government works pretty well.
The biggest screw ups are in Pentagon procurement (which is off limits, apparently) and LACK of policy coordination and basic science/R&D, for which China is cleaning our clock with its coordinated industrial policy.
Can I add back in the increase in VA employment? From 200,000 to almost 400,000. But it might be worth noting that the GDP, in other words the number of businesses and volume of business has gone up by gigantic factors more than your “28%”. I’m not saying it should be a one-for-one coorelation, but you would be hard pressed to convince me that it should stay at zero increase, either. More people. More products. More imports. More consumption. More chemicals. More waste. More pollution. More travel. More everything, yeah, I expect an increase. I can’t imagine any sane person doesn’t.
While certainly a humorous situation (though not for the cherry pie companies), shouldn’t there be SOME standard by which every pie (cherry or otherwise) must meet in order for a company to legally claim something as X fruit pie? I don’t profess to know what that standard would be but I would think a cherry pie should have a quantifiable amount of cherry fruit in it, don’t you?
Seems like there would logically be a regulation that governs such.
I certainly would not want to buy an apple pie only to find out it only contained 1% apples and the rest was bananas.
I think we go through this every time we discuss this issue, every year or three. I know it is not the “same thing”. That’s why I don’t use nominal numbers when I discuss it. The point I keep making is that government is growing FASTER than everything else (“GDP”) is growing. The “same thing” grows by 20% and government grows by 22%. And it keeps happening, for over 100 years, with very few short periods of respite.
One of my pet theories is that empires decline and fall primarily because their governments get larger and larger and larger* until the people, and not even the people, the very system itself, “decides” (not actively, just in the sense of historical movement of a society) that it just isn’t worth it anymore. That the resources spent on governing are just so high in return to what the governing gives you (“you” in the sense of the governed, not the individual “you”), that you are willing to let it all go and suffer the consequences. And every time the consequences are grave indeed. Then the whole thing unravels, you get a period of massive calamity, and then it starts all over again.
* Along with the government of an empire getting larger and larger usually (but not always) comes excessive warring, because they desperately need to capture other resources to keep themselves growing larger.
It is much more likely that after a few months of seeing the immense momentum of government, and the near immutability of most of it, Elon will leave in a fit of pique and say “well, I tried but they wouldn’t let me do anything worthwhile.”
One way to fix the problem is to raise tax rates to the level they were when American had consistent budget surpluses.
From 1998-2001 the US had four consecutive years of budget surpluses, reducing the debt by over $400B. The corporate tax rate during those years was 35%.
It is currently at 21%.
We have empirical proof the sustained budget surpluses are possible at a corporate tax of 35%. We have seven years of data indicating that surpluses are nowhere close to being possible at a 21% rate.
It is easy to create a list of things to cut that has a lot of items on it, and is therefore long.
It is nearly impossible to create a list of things to cut that covers a lot of money, and is therefore relevant to the problem. That is, if the list does not include cutting the military, social security, or Medicare/Medicaid. Which the President has said will not be cut.
The government does a gazillion things - but nearly all of those things constitute a very tiny fraction of what the government spends money on. Instead, the government spends nearly all its money on a few big things. The federal government is essentially an insurance company with an army. The President has said he will not cut the insurance functions or the military functions. What’s left over isn’t big enough to affect the size of our interest payments over any relevant time frame.
The size of government can be substantially reduced if done intelligently.
Both in numbers:
President Clinton asked Vice President Gore to head the National Performance Review aimed at making government work better for less. The Vice President’s Reinventing Government Initiative has resulted in 377,000 fewer civilian employees in the federal government — the lowest level since the Kennedy Administration — and reduced federal spending as a share of the economy from 22.2 percent in 1992 to a projected 18.5 percent in 2000, the lowest since 1966. The Clinton Presidency: Timeline of Major Actions
and Spending relative to GDP, look at the performance of Clinton and Obama.
“(President Ronald) Reagan took the deficit from 70 billion to 175 billion.” This is more or less accurate. The federal deficit went from about $78.9 billion at the beginning of Reagan’s presidency to $152.6 billion at the end of it. At points between 1983 and 1986, the deficit was actually more than $175 billion.
“(George H.W.) Bush 41 took it to 300 billion.” Close, but not exactly. The number was around $255 billion at the end of Bush’s term. The deficit spiked at around $290.3 billion the year before he left office.
“(Bill) Clinton got it to zero.” This is true. During his presidency, Clinton managed to zero out the deficit and end his term with a $128.2 billion surplus.
“(George W.) Bush 43 took it from 0 to 1.2 trillion.” This is in the ballpark. Ignoring the fact that he actually started his presidency with a surplus, Bush left office in 2009 with a federal deficit of roughly $1.41 trillion.
But now the numbers don’t add up. 2.3M civilians plus 1.3 active military equals 3.6 million. Which is not equal to the originally stated 3.0 million federal government employees.
