Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Why is our government so incompetent? Short answer: because incompetence has been fully institutionalized in every branch, every agency and every nook and cranny of the state.
Though many may reckon the U.S. government (and its Deep State) are not so much incompetent as merely evil, I suggest incompetence sows the seeds of evil consequences.
It’s easy to lay the responsibility for the state’s incompetence on its staggering size and complexity, and there is much truth in the notion that no system of this scale and complexity can possibly be governable or accountable.
But I think we owe it to ourselves to dig a bit deeper than this to understand why our visible government (executive, Congress, regulatory agencies, the Federal Reserve, etc.) and the Deep State (everything that’s decided and run behind closed doors) is so monumentally incompetent.
The policies and decisions of the past 15 years can be reduced to three catastrophic blunders: the discretionary war in Iraq and “nation-building” in Afghanistan; allowing those responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown to become even more invulnerable and predatory, i.e. enabling a “too big to fail” banking sector, and Obamacare, the Orwellian-named Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Each of these policy decisions has been enormously destructive to the nation, and the opportunities lost in their wake are irreversible.
I have covered the systemic reasons for incompetence and failure many times.These boil down to the accumulating sclerosis of bureaucracy and the ratchet effect.
I have addressed The Lifecycle of Bureaucracy on a number of occasions:
Our Legacy Systems: Dysfunctional, Unreformable (July 1, 2013)
The Way Forward (April 25, 2013)
When Escape from a Previously Successful Model Is Impossible (November 29, 2012)
Complexity: Bureaucratic (Death Spiral) and Self-Organizing (Sustainable) (February 17, 2011)
The ratchet effect can also be visualized as a rising wedge, in which costs and inefficiencies continue rising until any slight decrease in funding collapses the organization.
Dislocations Ahead: The Ratchet Effect, Stick-Slip and QE3 (February 14, 2011)
The Ratchet Effect: Fiefdom Bloat and Resistance to Declining Incomes (August 23, 2010)
I think we can add a few other factors:
1. That which is cheap and abundant will be squandered until it is no longer cheap or abundant. Our default programming is to squander what is easily available and abundant. This is true not just of resources such as food and energy but of health, trust, power and all sorts of other intangibles.
For example, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. was left with an abundance of soft and hard power on the global stage. The natural response was to squander it on misadventures instead of investing it wisely.
When we’re young and healthy, we squander this reservoir of vitality rather than invest it wisely in habits that will maintain our health as we age.
There are countless examples of this dynamic. The irony of this dynamic is tragic: by the time we realize we’ve squandered an irreplaceable resource, it’s too late.
2. The prime directive of any bureaucracy is to eliminate all accountability. The raison d’etre of bureaucracy, the very reason for its existence, is not to manage complex affairs but to dissipate accountability into a formless cloud so that no member of the bureaucracy will ever face any consequences for his/her actions.
In other words, the prime directive of any bureaucracy is to enforce the perfection of moral hazard, i.e. those making decisions suffer no consequences when the decisions are disastrous.
The entire structure of a bureaucracy boils down to this: we followed the rules, and therefore we are blameless.
Obamacare and the Pentagon are both perfections of this purposeful loss of accountability. I recently saw a video clip of a journalist who had asked 12 different government functionaries who was in charge of implementing the Obamacare website before its flawed launch and he’d received 12 different answers.
In other words, accountability had already been extinguished well before the site was even launched.
3. Bureaucracies are intrinsically prone to group-think. The more closed the bureaucracy, the greater this tendency to eliminate skeptics, heretics, independent thinkers, etc.: Who Gets Thrown Under the Bus in the Next Financial Crisis? (March 3, 2014).
The foundational group-think concepts behind each of the three policy disasters listed above have all been discredited, but only after group-think insured the destruction of vital national interests: for example, the neo-conservative “failed-state” concept that guided a decade of foreign policy misadventures: The Rise and Fall of the Failed-State Paradigm: Requiem for a Decade of Distraction (Foreign Affairs).
4. As correspondent Lew G. has pointed out, bureaucracies are not designed to be fail-safe; their complexity and lack of accountability lead not to resilience but to fragility and vulnerability.
5. One systems-level consequence of tightly connected, interactive complex systems is that they generate routinely failures known as “normal accidents,” catastrophes that result from seemingly small miscalculations and miscues that cascade into systemic crises. When accountability has been lost, there are no feedback loops left to correct these “normal accidents,” so the damage piles up within the organization until it collapses in a supernova model of accumulated incompetence.
6. The moral-hazard-riddled leadership of bureaucracies will choose whatever short-term politically expedient fix reduces the immediate political pain (also known as “kicking the can down the road”) rather than risk shaking up the organization by imposing accountability and clearing out the deadwood. This dependence on short-term politically expedient “fixes” that ignore the real problems piles up more moral hazard, failed policies, ineffective deadwood and cost, increasing the system’s fragility and vulnerability to any shock that cannot be dissolved with another short-term can-kicking “fix.”
Why is our government so incompetent? Short answer: because incompetence has been fully institutionalized in every branch, every agency and every nook and cranny of both the visible state and the Deep State.
I realize he directed this toward government, but as I read it, I couldn’t help but think it applies to big corporations, too.
Peter Principle = in an organizational hierarchy, every employee will rise or get promoted to his or her level of incompetence.
Regarding government, the “level of incompetence” is reached THE MOMENT A PERSON RUNS FOR OFFICE.
Liars, those who compromise, leeches, lazy fucks, narcissistic, authoritarian, career bureaucrats, ego driven goons make up 98% of all politicians. There’s your problem.
http://www.systemsthinker.com/interests/mind/intj.shtml
Challenges for an INTJ:
Unwillingness or Inability to Conform within Inefficient Hierarchies – In an environment marked by secure leaders who are open to new ideas and improvements, the INTJ will be trusted with autonomy and their innovative thinking and willingness to challenge norms will be welcomed. In such a setting, the INTJ may thrive and help generate meaningful optimizations to the system. However, in strongly hierarchical environments, insecure leaders may micromanage, asserting their authority to pressure the INTJ to submit to a system in which they do not believe. Forced to conform to inefficient procedures, go through the often wasteful motions of unnecessary meetings or sacrifice authenticity for political correctness, the INTJ, in such an environment, may encounter great frustration.
This frustration may be amplified further by the fact that the INTJ can clearly, and often accurately, envision feasible strategies through which more constructive, efficient operations could be generated, but be unable to implement them due to “irrational” features of the system, such as the self-interested reluctance of those in power to change. Irreverent, skeptical and unwilling to authentically respect the power of undeserving leaders, in such a situation, the INTJ, despite their actual desire to improve the functioning of the system for all, may instead be viewed merely as a threat to the status quo, leading to conflict.
Confronted with these circumstances, the INTJ, content to play a background role when in a more effective structure, may feel driven to take on greater leadership within the system. If allowed to do so, the INTJ may offer valuable insight and guidance in creating a more integrated, efficient system. However, within today’s hierarchical power structures, stricken by the Peter Principle and in which leadership positions are often pursued and assigned based on concerns of social status rather than actual coordination skills, the INTJ may find him or herself unable to attain an office of adequate power from which to effect the deep changes that they vividly imagine would improve the situation. Being trapped in an unnecessarily inefficient, ineffective system designed to serve the whims of those in unmerited power and being unable to make the changes they envision is one of the most frustrating situations in which an INTJ can find him or herself. Resigning him or herself to such circumstances can be disheartening for an INTJ. Yet, in a hierarchical culture such as ours, this is a common occurrence.
<<<<<<<<<<
I'm pretty sure my true home is with a small organization of 30-60 people. But while those used to employ 75% of the workforce, now they only employ 40%. It is indeed disheartening.
Most people who are productive go into private economy and people who have very little to offer private industry go into government.Maybe a little simplistic but I thing that’s at the heart of the problem.
The Charles Hughes Smith chart reminds me of ‘Parkinson’s law,’ written by a British professor who served in the RAF in World War Two. It is written tongue-in-cheek but makes the same valid point – that bights and staffing expand in inverse relation to mission. His examples included the Colonial office, which had more staff after the Empire was largely dismantled than it did during the meridian splendor of British power, when ‘the sun never set on the British flag.’ When collapse comes, I hope it is of the quiet variety that let life go on for ordinary Britons without harm or loss of anything except prestige. As we have no special relationship with an ally of kindred culture to backstop us in our decline, failure to reboot our system means we’re more likely to end with a bang than a whimper.
If we do reboot, it may be along the lines of Diocletian – the Roman Empire remained the same in name only after being re-formed along the lines of an oriental despotism that itself gave way to creeping feudalism.
Years ago the late Mike Royko wrote a column in which he compared each Government employee to a grain of sand in a barrel. If you stuck your dry index finger in up to the first knuckle and withdrew it the number of grains of sand sticking to your finger represented the number of government employees fired each year. Ignoring the fact that most of what government does is unnecessary there are people who need to keep the illusion or charade that their function is necessary. Since they can’t fire the dead wood that would expose the fraud they use what Dr. Peter called Percussive Sublimation, a pseudo-promotion with a Title but nothing do to that can expose their incompetence.
The above described situation evolved from Civil Service replacing the old Patronage system where after an election all government jobs were given to the election winners supporters. This allowed for replacing incompetence with new incompetence but at least stopping a build up of incompetents. The top positions are still filled by Patronage.
My daughter supervises 70 unionized government bean counters and was telling me some of her problems to which I replied she should handle them the way the Military did. Her reply was the Military is not unionized, end of conversation. Allowing of government wage recipients to unionize was by far the worst thing JFK did. Pennsylvania was the first to allow unionization of government employees and Philadelphia had the first Police in 1851. Now you know why the Liberty Bell is cracked and will never ring again.
To understand why the collectivization (unionization) of government wage recipients will eventually lead to collapse you have to understand the mathematical impossibility of continuous growth, there is a limit. The parasites will eventually kill the host.
Anytime you have more than two people working on the same thing you have a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies follow the Laws of Nature, 1. survival 2. propagation. Bureaucracies propagate much like plants spread seeds which sprout new plants and/or send out runners which take root and establish new plants, wash, rinse and repeat. There are limits to any type of growth.
Survival is dependent on growth and maintaining the illusion they are “‘doing something”. Parkinson’s Law comes into play, “Work expands. so as to fill the time available”. This is true for the private sector but takes a revision in the public sector IAW Roy’s Law, “Government activity expands to fill the void created by the actions of incompetent Government wage recipients”. This works out for the members of a parasitical hierarchical organization. The more underlings you can get under you the higher you advance in a hierarchy.
Hopefully this missive which few will read will help explain our current predicament where we have reached the limits of growth due to peak fossil fuels and more and more productive people being replaced by non-productive parasites. Non-productive and counter productive endeavors pay better than productive activity. Almost everything government does is unnecessary, unproductive and over manned.
One example is immigration which creates a clientele for various government programs of distribution of stolen goods.
.
.
The Mike Royko article Roy references:
Civil Service Keeps Incompetents Stuck to Their Desks
September 28, 1990|By Mike Royko | Mike Royko,Tribune Media Services
THINKING I MIGHT have missed something while on vacation, I asked a co-worker if there had been a big story out of Washington about hundreds of federal bureaucrats being fired.
“No,” he said, “I don’t recall seeing anything like that.”
How about dozens? Or even a half dozen? Maybe one?
“Uh-uh, nothing of the kind. I’m sure I would have noticed.”
How strange, if you think about it.
First we had the S&L scandal, with a final bill to the taxpayers that will be more than $500 billion.
Now we’re told that we’re going to be stuck with the tab for at least $12 billion in unpaid student loans, farm loans and other federally backed IOUs. And that’s just the early estimate. Remember, when the S&L debacle first surfaced, they were talking about $50 billion or less. So nobody really knows what the cost will be to cover the latest round of frauds and deadbeats.
And maybe we’ll never know. One federal agency said that it’s impossible to tell how many loans are unpaid because the records are in such a shambles that they can’t be audited.
Think about that. What if you ran a corporation and your accounting firm told you: “You are losing money but we aren’t sure how much because your widget-making division has screwed up their books and records so badly, we can’t even audit them.” What would your reaction be?
I mean, besides trying to strangle somebody.
Of course, you’d march into the widget-making division and fire the people who caused the mess.
But that’s not the way the federal government works. We have agencies and agencies, and even more agencies. And their jobs are to keep an eye on the various industries that make federally insured loans.
If they had done their work, we wouldn’t have the massive S&L scandal, the biggest financial mess in this country’s history.
Nor would we be waiting for the next muddy shoe to drop. And the next and the next. We wouldn’t be hearing the incredible statement that some loan records are so hopelessly confused that they defy audit.
But is anyone being fired? Has anyone been told: “Say, John, I hate to disturb your nap, but we’re talking billions here. What have you and your people been doing?”
Of course not. It’s as if there is a large wall around the federal bureaucracy. And what goes on within that wall is their business, not ours, even though we have to pay their salaries and cover for their blunders.
And there is such a wall. You can’t see it, but it is as thick and impenetrable as anything Brink’s could conceive. It’s called “civil service.”
Some years ago, I gathered numbers on how many federal bureaucrats exist and how many are fired in an average year.
I don’t remember the exact results. But think of it this way: Take a bucket of sand. Remove one or two grains of sand. That’s about it.
That meant one of two things: Federal employees were remarkably diligent and efficient. Or they were invulnerable.
As the S&L mess has shown us — and other massive blunders will soon be telling us — diligence and efficiency aren’t running rampant.
So that leaves invulnerability. And that’s what the civil service system provides. Once they are in their jobs for a while, it’s as if they are bonded to their office chairs with Krazy Glue.
The federal civil service system provides so many safeguards for the bureaucrat that it would be easier to convict one of them of high treason than of being a bumbler. There are hearings and more hearings. Then appeals and more appeals. To fire one, you have to clear more hurdles than an Olympic champion.
So there they remain, stuck to their Krazy Glue chairs, till death or retirement do them part.
When I was young and idealistic, I thought that the old patronage system, with political bosses handing out jobs to the party workers, was evil and corrupt. And, no question, it did lead to considerable profiteering and waste.
But it had one major advantage over civil service. If a political hack goofed up bad enough, there was a simple procedure for getting rid of him. His boss walked in and said: “You’re fired.”
That’s the way it works in most of the real world of employment. And that’s the way it should work in Washington.
But, then, whoever said Washington was the real world?
A number of users are keen to watch comic video clips, however I like to watch terrible video clips on YouTube.
Amazing things here. I’m very glad to peer your post.
Thank you so much and I am looking ahead to touch you.
Will you kindly drop me a e-mail?