Love Our British Bureaucratic Cousins

One of the pleasures of reading things from outside the U.S. is coming across turns of phrase. For example, I'm reading a report on the British equivalent of FSA and come across this, well buried within the bureaucratese:

"Changes have been made in the governance of RPA since this review was launched. The Ownership Board has been replaced by a Strategic Advisory Board and a separate, temporary Oversight Group established. The new arrangements are still bedding down but, with other arrangements in place in the agency itself, are aimed at clarifying responsibilities which had become blurred in the 05-06 period. [emphasis added]"

Arrangements are bedding down--love it. [I realize only a true-blue bureaucrat would get pleasure from such reading, and only a weirdo would appreciate the idiom, but that's me.]

Rules and Side Effects--Who's a Farmer

From the Farm and Ranch Guide:

Many farm management advisors and university experts have been advising farm operators to look at negotiating “flexible cash rental leases” with their landlords as an alternative to paying very high straight-out cash rental rates on rented land. This strategy seems to make a lot of sense, given the high volatility in the current grain markets, and the high degree of uncertainty relative to future crop revenues.

The article goes on to advise that such a strategy may run afoul of the FSA rules on division of payments--very briefly, if you share in the risk, you're eligible for subsidy payments. So any shift from a straight cash lease, where the operator takes all the risk, both of whether the crop will be good and what the price will be, to give some of the risk to the landowner is likely to cause problems, at least if the FSA bureaucrat is doing her job.

Notable Bureaucrats--Milton Friedman

Another in my occasional series of salutes to those bureaucrats, alive or dead, who have contributed to making this world what it is. Today we recognize Milton Friedman, the economist (and right winger) who's popularly believed to have invented income tax withholding when he served as a Treasury Department adviser during WWII. As Brad DeLong says:

"In the late 1930s he hooked up with the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Simon Kuznets and Arthur Burns, worked for the U.S. Treasury during World War II (where he was one of the designers of our current system of income-tax withholding), earned his Ph. D. from Columbia University in 1946, and finally landed on his feet at the University of Chicago.

And Ilya Somin:

Somewhat unfortunately, Friedman (at that time still a left-winger) also invented the idea of income tax withholding while working as an economist for the the Treasury Department during World War II. Although Friedman intended it to be a temporary wartime measure, it soon turned into a permanent expansion of government power - a result that the later, libertarian Friedman would surely have predicted:)

It seems Somin may give him too much credit, perhaps because the irony is so great--the great believer in free markets helping to finance government. This detailed (and very hostile) discussion of the advent of withholding only mentions Milton Friedman once, while an Elisha Friedman and Beardsley Ruml get more ink. It also turns out that withholding had been authorized for government employees in the Civil War statute, so it was not a new concept.

I'm now reading the memoirs of Milton and Rose Friedman. He says he was involved in the development of withholding for the U.S., but both the British and Germans were already doing it (i.e., collecting taxes at the source). However, they differed in whether the taxes were on current income or past, but shared the characteristic that the withholding was final. This differs from the U.S. system, which makes the final tax subject to adjustment by April 15.

Bottomline: Milton was one of the designers of the system, and as such qualifies for the notable bureaucrat honor.

Virginia Postrel Meet John Phipps

Earlier in the week I noted the John Phipps post about the new welding tools, which made it easy for him to do good welding. Then I ran across Virginia Postrel's discussion
of do-it-yourself design tools (Adobe Pagemaker, etc.). Similar messages, very different technologies.

Highbrow/Lowbrow

Finished the Lawrence Levine book, Highbrow/Lowbrow, which I mentioned earlier. He carried the thesis through opera, Shakespeare, and classical music: in all cases before the Civil War the audience was composed of a mixture of classes, was boisterous and participative (22 people died in the Astor Place riot, where class, religion, and nationality came together over an issue of Shakespearean acting). After the Civil War the arts became "sacralized"--treated more solemnly and religiously, with more exclusive audiences behaving more mannerly. Levine seems to say it was the elite and the purveyors who enforced this separation. In his epilogue he argues against Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, who was very much in favor of elite arts and for the idea that the arts should be more popular.

I think this is a limited interpretation. Using a different perspective, one of a growing economy with more ecological niches, after the Civil War the number of people in urban places grew, the number who had the leisure and the dollars to participate in recreational activities also grew. So I'd see more of a process of differentiation of a market. In other words, I suspect a number of different sports and recreations grew--professional baseball I know, horseracing, college sports. From Putnam's work, Bowling Alone, the number of local theater and opera groups also grew. So those people who enjoy participation, booing and cheering, found outlets. Those who liked to focus intently on a performance found their outlets.

(I write this as someone who was raised to treat "culture" with great respect so I'm obviously prejudiced. But I still think my thesis is better than Levine's, by explaining more.)

Transparency or NOt?

I remember when our IT guy in DC was working on the EWG's FOIA request for all farm program payment data. Part of the issue was whether the data was personal, and covered under the Privacy Act, or business, and not covered. (Part of the argument probably was that the data was all tied to the Social Security Number.) EWG (with I think the Washington Post) ultimately won their court case. Since that day more than 10 years ago EWG has put the data they got from ASCS/FSA/USDA on line. It's gotten a lot of use as people have become more aware of it.

Ken Cook's blog refers to this newspaper article discussing some of the results of this transparency. (The neighbors are jealous.) There are costs, to be sure, but I think transparency is warranted. As the government goes forward in implementing the Coburn/Obama bill calling for the same transparency for all funding, we need to remember what's been learned with this database.

Of course, I've never really figured out why a farmer's payment should be public when my pension amount is not.

Technology Obsoletes Skills

In the long learning curve that is human history, one constant is the incorporation of knowledge into technology (and the decorporation, much decried by Luddites and romantics, of the same knowledge from human bodies).

Here's another instance, as John Phipps, a jack of all trades as a farmer must be, discovers that new welding tools make him a better welder.

Culture and Shakespeare

Philip Kennicott, the Post's general purpose critic, whom I find a taste difficult to acquire, had an article today on a Shakespeare/America exhibit at the Folger Library, part of this year's DC Shakespeare festival. I mention it because I just started reading a book, "Highbrow, Lowbrow", on American culture, by Lawrence Levine. His first chapter is on Shakespeare in America, particularly the 19th century. Shakespeare was popular, and part of the "popular" culture as well as highbrow. (Though Levine's thesis here seems to be that culture wasn't subdivided into those categories, at least before the Civil War.) He has multiple quotes and cites--Walt Whitman of course. But also that U.S. Grant played Desdemona while waiting for action in the Mexican War. He cites a New Orleans paper, the Picayune, in 1840+ as observing the "playing going habits of our negro population" (that's close to verbatim); a striking quote on many levels--that New Orleans had theaters, that blacks went to the theater, that the paper would write on this, and finally that the language would be politically correct, 21 years or so before emancipation.

I hope the rest of the book is as good as the first 20 pages.

The Evil Ones

Shankar Vedantam in the Post has an article describing research on political partisans. It proves that my opponents are not well-informed, their conclusions are biased and self-serving, and their motives are totally malign. I, on the other hand, I am very well informed, I see clearly even when things aren't quite the way they ought to be, I form objective and soundly based conclusions, and have only the best of motives, wishing prosperity for all (except of course those evil enemies of mine).

Owning Land

John Phipps links Hernando De Soto (The Mystery of Capital) and the new Chinese initiative on land ownership. It's an important point. For example, in Ireland for generations most land holdings were rentals, very long term rentals but still. Only by coming to the U.S. (or Canada, Australia...) could an Irishman own the land he farmed.