Review of Barbara Kingsolver

John Phipps has his review of Barbara Kingsolver's book. I recommend it highly.

Canadian "Bureaucrats"

Our good neighbors to the north have a civil service system that seems to be modeled on the British one--at least they have a senior bureaucrat heading the service. He spoke, as follows:

"He listed his top myths and "misconceptions" about the public service -- which, left unchecked, will undermine the government's ability to recruit and retain talent in the face of the fiercest labour market in 35 years. Mr. Lynch took over the job two years ago and made "renewal" a priority, a promise cynically dismissed by many bureaucrats and observers as another reform plan that will go nowhere.

Mr. Lynch's list of the top eight misperceptions include:

- The public service is a pale shadow of its former self;

- There is nothing wrong with the public service, so we don't need renewal;

- The public service can't compete for talent anymore;

- The capacity to develop public policy is not what it used to be;

- Public servants are afraid to take risks;

- The public service isn't well managed;

- Public service reforms never accomplish anything;

- The public service is out of touch with Canadians."

Some of the items would apply in the U.S., as beliefs, and perhaps reality. (Consider the last--I can guarantee American civil servants are out of touch with Canadians.)

Those Damnable Advisers

One of the things that happens with complex government programs is that people set up businesses acting as advisers or intermediaries between the citizen and government. (Think H&R Block, etc.) That's true with US farm programs--I remember visiting the Fresno County FSA office in 1991 and finding one cotton/rice outfit had a person whose whole job was working with the FSA and Reclamation offices (water rights, supposedly limited to 960 acres were big, as well as the cotton and rice payments).

So too overseas, as described in this blog post at the CAP Health Check ("CAP" being the EU's farm program). The lesson being--when there's money to gain, people will work to gain it.

Wheat Allotments

I posted earlier on the possibility of reverting to permanent legislation, dismissing the idea. But a commenter says there may have been meetings on it. It's still hard for me to take the idea seriously, at least as we were approaching in the run-up to the 1985 and 1990 farm bill. Before we got away from wheat allotments and feed grain bases in the late 1970's, you needed three things to determine a farm's effective wheat allotment:

1. the Secretary's estimate of the wheat acreage we needed in the nation
2. the total of basic allotments
3. the farm's basic wheat allotment.

Say no. 2 was 62 million acres, and no. 1 was 31 million acres (i.e., we needed only 50 percent of the wheat we historically grew). Then the farm's effective allotment would be 50 percent of its basic allotment.

So, to revert back to the permanent legislation in 1985 and 1990 meant that we needed to carry the farm's basic allotment, as recorded in 1977, forward (i.e., "reconstitute it" for FSA types). But that's assuming something, that the way USDA had done allotments in the past was the only way to go. And assumptions, as I often say, get you in trouble. Looking at the permanent legislation in the 1938 act you might not have to reconstitute the basic allotments at all. Of course, it would take some lawyering, but the USDA lawyers are known for invention (witness the 1983 Payment-in-Kind program).

Anyhow, I'm no longer an expert, just an old kibitzer. I still think it's all a game of poker and USDA is trying to run a bluff. Of course, the best bluff is when you aren't. (Thomas Schelling famously observed of the game of "chicken" (the way teenagers in the 1950's got their thrills, two cars driving straight at each other, seeing who would swerve first)--you could win it if you could toss the steering wheel of your car out the window.

The Reverse of the "Perfect Storm" and Immigration

A year ago I would have predicted immigration would be a major issue in the 2008 elections. Instead, to my surprise, it's not. The Republicans have chosen as their candidate the man most friendly, or least adverse, to immigration (speaking loosely). What we may have this year is something that reaffirms the idea that God looks out for idiots and the United States: first, the housing bubble has popped, meaning construction is down, reducing an attraction for immigrants, legal and illegal. Second, the housing bubble has popped, meaning local governments will be strapped for money and won't want to fund anti-illegal immigrant drives and business people may start to miss the market immigrants provided. Third, it's probably in everyone's interest (Obama, Clinton, McCain) to soft peddle immigration as an issue--none of them can win on it.

Bottom line, we may have a breathing space this year and next during which people of good will may be able to find a compromise.


Or maybe I'm as wrong now as I was a year ago--seeing as Prince William County just raided their reserve fund to set up an anti-illegal immigration program.
theadverse neighborhoods may miss their absence, creating a countervailing influence to the

Farm Bill Status

Still up in the air--these links provide updates: Keith Good at Farm Policy and
Congressional Quarterly here.

The issue is how much more money to spend over "baseline" (i.e, what would be spent assuming extension of current provisions) and, under the pay-as-you-go rules the Dems reinstated, how to find the money for the increase (i.e., what games to play and what taxes to raise).

Immigration and Langley Park

The Post had an interesting article on Latino immigration to Langley Park, MD. (Not Takoma Park, the lefty granola crunching Berkeley east, but Langley. ) It's an interesting contrast to my area of Reston, and to Manassas Park where my mother-in-law lives. Housing prices appear to have followed a similar trajectory, but so far they haven't fallen as far as in VA.

One issue that came up in comments on my letter to the Post--"tipping points". The economist Thomas Schelling won a Nobel, partially for his analysis of how a neighborhood can change from white to black (the issue in 1970) simply because of a small, but wide-spread preference for neighbors similar to yourself. Reading between the lines, rental units will tip much faster and easier than owned units, which makes sense. People like me, who resist change in their personal lives, don't have to be that tolerant or liberal; they just have to be sticks-in-the-mud to slow the tipping process, or even make it stop.

Arthur Schlesinger and Journal

Just completed reading Arthur Schlesinger's Journals, 1952-2000. I'd recommend the book for anyone who lived through the period with an interest in politics, at least liberal politics, or in the American social/political establishment.

As a country boy, I'm amazed by the extent to which social and political circles overlapped, often through the beds of the "pretty girls" for whom Schlesinger had a weakness. Shocking. A handful of reflections sparked by the book:

• some women attack Hillary Clinton for staying with her errant husband. This book reminds one that Happy Rockefeller stayed with Nelson, Lady Bird with Lyndon, Eleanor with FDR, Jackie with JFK, etc.
• speaking of Hillary--Arthur is very impressed with her, intelligence, charm, and humor, finding the humor unexpected. Of course the book ends when she had just won the Senate seat, but she, and Kay Bailey Hutcheson, are the two women politicians he praises.
• while a liberal, civil rights wasn't high on his mind in the 50's. The politician for whom he wrote many speeches, Adlai Stevenson, is quoted as arguing the Negroes should be quiet and not demonstrate.
• he has some self-knowledge, enough to be interesting, but he remained a Kennedy die-hard, without any real reflection on the dynamics of the dynasty.
  
• his reflections on the relationship between history and reality are interesting, but too few. Towards the end he takes a rather cynical tack, saying people use history to justify what they want to do.

Most of all, it's the gossip that's interesting, and often frightening when you remember that these are people of power.

French Aren't Human--Withholding Taxes

Someone, I think Milton Friedman, wrote that his worst mistake was helping the IRS to switch to income tax withholding during WWII. The theory was that humans mind big bites--pay your taxes yearly and you'll resist the growth of government. Take it out of each pay check and the left can cheerily persuade humans to agree to higher and higher taxes.

However, according to this post, apparently the theory doesn't work with the French, who are notoriously highly-taxed (as well as highly-sexed), so either they aren't human or the economics has a flaw.

Security Clearance Process

If I remember correctly, Al Gore was proud of his efforts on security clearances. Of course, the Bushies are even more proud. This Government Executive article describes the results of 14 years of reengineering and improvement.

Though I often have some sympathy for failures in government, I don't have much for this. The point is that, once the process was consolidated (which I think Gore's effort did--in DOD), whoever manages it should have the users by the short hairs. All you need is agreement from the President--by date X only security clearances processed the way I want are effective. So you ought to be able to force all the agencies to use your process. That's a big big hurdle jumped. The other problem is getting a process that works, but if you do something incremental, that can be done.