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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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It’s a poor definition of the deep state. The deep state exists, but it’s not about undermining the elected government. The deep state is all of the agencies that the elected government has given the power, for all practical purposes, to create legislation to run the state rather than do so itself. So you have OSHA banning chemicals in the workplace or requiring safety equipment rather than making the legislators do it. Or they have the FDA declare pot schedule I and thus illegal rather than them doing so themselves. And so these agencies have taken on a life of their own governing the nation, but without pesky things like elections or balance of power or accountability to hold them back.

I would say the deep state is institutional inertia. It also just so happens that formal and informal barriers to changing direction disfavor one party.

Maybe my memory is faulty, but I thought Trump even encountered legal challenges to him firing employees that weren't effectively implementing his orders. Google and ChatGPT are both failing me, though.

The deep state used to be described by the DC phrase, "Band leaders come and band leaders go, but the band plays on."

The deep state is more than that, it's when a bureaucracy becomes so large and so ossified and so specialized that replacing people becomes impractical. Producing a kind of feudalism, where directors of departments can't be forced to implement policies they don't want to.

J. Edgar Hoover is the ne plus ultra American example. See also Obama stating that his efforts to pull out of Afghanistan were consistently thwarted by "The Generals" engaging in foot dragging or sabotage. Much of The Ferguson Effect can also be traced to localized Deep States, with cops collectively engaging in work slowdown at a scale where discipline or replacement becomes impractical.

You can't just fire bureaucrats without skilled replacements on hand, unless you want to destroy the entire governing apparatus. It turns reform into chicken, who will swerve first?

Which is why rather than reform the IRS, we should simply privatize it.

I modeled the Furguson Effect more as a work to rule union slow-down.

I'm not sure I can apply that to the deep state.

The deep-statey aspect is that no sizable city can just replace its police force. Not an option, not possible, not happening. So no matter what mayor you elect, or what police commissioner you elect, or what laws the state passes, if the police decide against you there is simply no practical way to enforce the decision.

To what end? Even the towns that would be small enough to fire all their police, would then have less control over policing by the subsequent agency until thw town reconstitutes its own force. Once you've lost so many of the police there are none to enforce the law you've also likely lost the consent of the governed or made the expectations and duties of the police untenable. I see the police more like firemen, garbagemen or water and power workers, infrastructure.

The deep state is more public private partnership.

What do you mean by pubic private partnership?

The police are a simple and clear model, but it applies equally to every department. You can't just fire the entire EPA, the entire DoD, the entire Treasury department. At a sufficient level of determination, bureaucrats can play chicken with the public: anarchy or the status quo. Elected officials, no matter how powerful, are stuck with the people they have.

I'd say that the deep state is probably best defined by asking two different questions:

Who is the Vice President of the United States?

Who is the Treasury Department employee in charge of NYC and thus the NYSE?

The one who's name I can't reasonably expect you to know is the deep state.

Who is the Treasury Department employee in charge of NYC and thus the NYSE

While thats not exactly how the Treasury is structured, its likely this guy:

https://home.treasury.gov/about/general-information/officials/josh-frost

"Before serving as Assistant Secretary, Josh was most recently the co-chair of the Liquidity Program for systemically important financial institution supervision at the New York Fed. Prior to this, he spent almost two decades in the New York Fed’s Markets Group in a variety of positions, including a role overseeing the two corporate credit facilities launched in response to the pandemic. Josh also served as the Director of Money Markets and Director of Treasury Markets, where his teams launched the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, conducted open market operations, and facilitated auctions of debt on behalf of the Treasury. Josh began his career at the New York Fed in 1998 as an analyst on the Central Bank and International Account Services team."

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