The farmer is the man who feeds us all, as the saying goes. If you make an exception for fishermen, the odd forager and hunter, this is a 100% true statement, but what do bureaucrats do? George Orwell told us in his classic satire Animal Farm: They “had to expend enormous labours every day upon […]
In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
― Hannah Arendt, On Violence
The repeated and ongoing attempts to take down Donald Trump have led to claims that he is a victim of something called the Deep State. There are two extreme positions regarding this narrative. The first is that Trump is indeed the victim of a massive conspiracy. The second is that this conspiracy is so massive that the only place it can exist is in the mind’s of “conspiracy theorists” and that any and all attempts to overthrow Trump are justified.
Poverty is a big deal – it affects about 41 million people in the United States every year – yet the federal government spends a huge amount of money to end poverty. How can this be? And how do we even measure poverty in the first place? This week on Words and Numbers, Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan answer these questions and delve into what can be done to help the poor.
President Trump and congressional Republicans have a second chance to take a whack at the Obamacare piñata – and the beauty of it is that this time, Democrats may want to take a swing at it, too. “It” being the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). As soon as the actuary for Medicare/Medicaid Services issues a report – already overdue for 2017 – that the "targets" have been exceeded, the IPAB automatically rises to life – in order to dispense death.
There can be no denying that theft of any manner is morally reprehensible, but when comparing the hackers' crime against the routine criminal acts committed by the state, there is hardly a difference between the two: except that hackers at least make the process of submitting to extortion as easy as possible.
It is vain to advocate a bureaucratic reform through the appointment of businessmen as heads of various departments. The quality of being an entrepreneur is not inherent in the personality of the entrepreneur; it is inherent in the position which he occupies in the framework of market society. A former entrepreneur who is given charge of a government bureau is in this capacity no longer a businessman but a bureaucrat.
In April 2013, Mats Jarlstrom's wife received a ticket for going through a red light after driving her car through an intersection. She paid the fine, but the timing of the traffic lights at the intersection piqued Jarlstrom’s interest, so he decided to look into a formula created in 1959 to calculate the length of yellow lights. The result was a $500 for practicing engineering without a license.
The federal budget has expanded and so have the number of people with taxpayer-financed jobs.
Basically, US citizens are paying more taxes to have a bunch of international bureaucrats urge that we get hit with even higher taxes. And to add insult to injury, OECD bureaucrats are exempt from paying taxes!
