Whenever I read the words “bloated federal bureaucracy”, as in this article at Washington Times, I want to poke my eyes out. It completely misstates the problems in government and makes reform that much harder.

Consider the graph at the top of the page. That red horizontal line depicts the growth in federal employees over the last 70 years. Yes, that’s right. Not only has the growth in the number of federal employees over the last 70 years been negligible, over that period the U. S. population has nearly tripled. That means that the number of federal employees per 100,000 U. S. population has declined sharply.

Government at all levels is in desperate need of reform but that reform should consist neither of minimizing government nor maximizing it but rightsizing it and changing the way it operates to suit the needs of the 21st century rather than those of the mid-20th century. but to understand the actual challenges of reforming government you’ve got to understand the twin transformations in government that have taken place over the last 70 years.

Seventy years ago federal employees actually used to perform most of the services provided by the federal government, from building nuclear power plants or building ships to inspecting beef. Now they only provide a fraction of those services. Most of the services are provided by the federal government are performed by contractors and the federal government has been transformed from a provider of services to a hirer of contractors.

Nobody really knows how many of these contractors there are. The best guess is that something in the vicinity of a quarter of all American workers are employed by government at all levels in one form or another, employee or contractor. That’s something in the vicinity of 50 million workers, somewhat more than the number reflected in the graph above.

The blog form precludes relating in detail how that happened. Suffice it to say that when you have one political party that has made a fetish of reducing the size of government and another that has made a similar fetish of maximizing its scope, the Hegelian synthesis is the chimera that is our present government.

Now look at the pink line in the graph above, showing the growth in the number of local workers. Note that their numbers have grown faster than the growth of the population, nearly four times as many as there were 70 years ago. Many of those are in education. I’ll look around for a chart that illustrates this but most of those additional workers aren’t teachers. They’re administrators. Both our educational and healthcare systems have succumbed to Gammon’s Law.

How that came to be is complicated, too, but it was a combination of the requirements of compliance, pursuing grants, and the natural tendency of bureaucracies to grow without any relevance to their notional missions.

What should be done? I’ll just provide a few quick bullet items for discussion:

• More professional managers, fewer political appointees.
• Modernize government workers’ pension plans.
• Hire employees where necessary and appropriate rather than spending three times as much for contractors.
• Update procedures and policies at least to the late 20th century if not all the way to the 21st century.
• Limit the province of government regulation to what is actually needed.

We can have as many services as we need but not as many as we want. There is no limit to those. That is human nature.

In 2010 the fingerbone of a woman dating back at least 40,000 years was discovered in a cave in southwestern Siberia, near the Chinese and Mongolian borders. The woman has been determined to be a member of a hitherto unknown hominin species dubbed the “Denisovans” after the Russian hermit who lived in the cave in the 18th century.

I’ve been something between amazed and amused to hear a vast amount of human variation, from why Tibetans are able to live at high altitudes to why Inuits are able to live at low latitudes, to Denisovan DNA.

I think it’s a fad. My guess is that after the novelty has worn off and more science is done scientific opinion will settle down to find that Denisovan DNA is present in modern humans but not quite as influential as some are claiming.

Today’s claims are a lot to deduce from a no-longer-existent fingerbone and a molar that are tens of thousands of years old.

Austin Frakt’s New York Times op-ed on why price transparency in medical services won’t reduce healthcare costs can be summarized in two sentences from the op-ed:

Dennis Scanlon, a Penn State health economist, is not surprised. “Health care choices are different than most product and services,” he said. “Most decisions are driven by physician referrals, and insured patients usually face little variation in costs across options.”

To decompress that a bit, our system of healthcare would need a radical transformation for market forces to work. Insurance wouldn’t just need to be universal it would need to be abolished. As the article notes:

If patients’ out-of-pocket costs are the same at both a high-cost and low-cost doctor, what’s to prompt them to select the cheaper one?

Courses of treatment would need to be removed from the hands of physicians and transferred to patients. Patients would need a vast amount of education to enable prudent decisions. And their attitudes would need to be changed so that they were more predisposed towards that.

In short it’s not going to happen.

In an article at The Week by Michael Brendan Dougherty on how “Angela Merkel is destroying Europe”, the key passage is here:

Germany thought it could assimilate newcomers. It believed it had done so before, having absorbed Turkish “guestworkers” during the 1960s and 1970s. But there are notable differences between Turks and the current refugee wave. Turkey had already undergone significant secularization. This new wave of migration into Germany is showing signs of developing some of the generational problems that mass Islamic migration has created in France. Syrian migrants find that the Arabic-language mosques in Germany, often funded by Saudi Arabia, preach a form of Islam far more fundamentalist and hostile to Western people and culture than anything they knew in Syria. Secondly, Turks came with skills that were immediately put into employment in the German economy. The new migrants are hardly working at all.

Germany was wrong. The Turkish minority in Germany is by many accounts the largest unassimilated minority in Europe. The German nationality law means that there are ethnic Turks in Germany whose grandfather was born in Germany who aren’t German citizens.

The Germans have had a project of Germanizing the European continent for at least 150 years. In the 20th century they twice attempted to effect that goal through war. For the last half century they’ve pursued their project by economic and political means.

Through their feckless policies they’re now faced with a new problem.

There’s a very interesting post at The Conversation considering the empirical evidence of whether “big government” is good or bad. The authors’ conclusion?

We found only partial support for the idea that the size of government has an effect on economic growth. Specifically, our research suggests that the effect of government size on economic growth is negative in developed countries but insignificant in less developed countries (LDCs).

Put differently, while we find evidence of a negative effect of government size on economic growth in developed countries, we find no effect in the case of LDCs. This is the case irrespective of whether government size is measured as the share of total expenditure or consumption expenditure in GDP. It also suggests that big government is usually bad for growth in developed countries but not in LDCs.

I think I’d frame the question a little differently, something along these lines:

1. In an environment of big business, big labor, and so on big government is inevitable and probably even necessary.
2. Over time every organization either grows or dies.
3. Over time self-interest always overwhelms the public interest.
4. The deadweight loss resulting from bad or self-serving decisions inevitably reduces economic growth.

It’s not merely big government that presents a problem. Bigness per se presents a problem. The system of permanent revolution set up 200 years ago is no longer effective in diminishing the role of self-interest and, since those most interested are those who’d need to reform the system, there’s no way to accomplish that.

The general dissatisfaction going back to 2008 is not feigned. We’re just doomed to disappointment.

Here’s our Christmas tree for this year. It’s a tiny bit smaller than in past years but I think it’s a pretty tree. If you look closely at the ornaments, they tell the story of our lives.

Here’s something you might not have thought of. Christmas tree ornaments are the most popular collectible in the United States—more people own a collection of them than of anything else although they don’t seem to think of them as a collection.

That’s Nola there in the foreground. I’m not sure what she’s looking at. Maybe waiting for Santa Claus.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or just a good rest to all! We could use it.

At the Washington Post Dan Drezner predicts a substantial decline in the popularity of the motif of the “zombie apocalypse” during a Trump presidency:

If you support Trump, then it’s going to be hard to hold onto an apocalyptic mind-set come Jan. 20. A president Trump, GOP control of Congress and the ability of Trump to alter the federal judiciary means that the very people who warned that the world was going to hell will be in charge of not letting that happen. Trump and his acolytes will have less of an incentive to talk about how bad things are once they are in charge. And his supporters will likely respond to those cues, as we’ve seen in attitudes about the direction of the U.S. economy. For 2017 at least, conservatives who were attracted to apocalypse narratives in the Obama years might find them less appealing with such a conservative administration in office (though it is possible that Bannon might want to continue the apocalyptic talk as a means to further his revolution).

As for liberals, the problem is that the modern apocalypse narrative ain’t terribly friendly to them. As I wrote back in April, “The problem with these shows is that they seem unable to escape a single, unrelenting theme: The post-apocalyptic world is a Hobbesian nightmare that forces surviving humans to evolve into nihilistic killing machines.” Liberals neither survive nor thrive in such a narrative. To be sure, George Romero’s older zombie films had a decidedly more liberal bent. But at the risk of offending people, I’l just say that “Day of the Dead” ain’t a good film.

My hunch is that if politics really drives viewership, the apocalypse narrative will find a rival in the Trump years, which is some variation of a resistance narrative. Liberals will flock to narratives in which a plucky band of diverse characters resists domination by some authoritarian stand-in for the Trump administration.

The only thing I have to add to this is that while the “zombie apocalypse” may be unique in its depiction of “the breakdown of modern society in the wake of an external threat” that isn’t the only sort of societal breakdown. The world of Mad Max is either in collapse due to nuclear war (external threat), running out of gasoline, or just plain giving up. The three Mel Gibson movies offer differing explanations for their world.

If apocalyptic motifs continue to have appeal Mad Max is one direction that might take without zombies.

Personally, I think we’d all be better off with variety shows featuring young, pretty boys and girls singing and dancing and dumb comics—the escapism of the 1930s—than we are with the endlessly violent and depressing post-apocalyptic narratives of the last several years. More Marx Brothers and less Karl Marx, that’s what I say.

Rather than fisking Arizona Sen. John McCain’s op-ed in the Washington Post on the U. S. stake in Syria, I’ll just ask two questions:

1. Did arming Al Qaeda in Syria weaken it or strengthen it?
2. Has U. S. involvement in the conflict shortened or prolonged it?

The weapons sent by the U. S. to allegedly moderate Syrian rebels fell into the hands of JaN (Jabhat an-Nusra now called Jabhat Fateh Al-Sham) and JaN is Al Qaeda (or at least was until five months ago—whether that holds remains to be seen). And if U. S. support didn’t help the Syrian rebels keep fighting what was its objective?

I think that U. S. support for the rebels, illegal as it was, can be supported if you have a mind to as a cynical exercise in Realpolitik intended to kill as many Syrians as possible without direct U. S. military intervention but not on humanitarian or security grounds. That’s just bizarre.

I honestly don’t know what to make of President Obama’s decision for the United States not to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the settlements Israel has been building on the West Bank. The Chicago Tribune reports:

In a striking rupture with past practice, the United States allowed the U.N. Security Council on Friday to condemn Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem as a “flagrant violation” of international law. In doing so, the outgoing Obama administration brushed aside Donald Trump’s demands that the U.S. exercise its veto and provided a climax to years of icy relations with Israel’s leadership.

The decision to abstain from the council’s 14-0 vote is one of the biggest American rebukes of its longstanding ally in recent memory. And it could have significant ramifications for the Jewish state, potentially hindering Israel’s negotiating position in future peace talks. Given the world’s widespread opposition to settlements, the action will be almost impossible for anyone, including Trump, to reverse.

There’s certainly a lot of angst over it.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S decision to abstain on a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements reverses decades of practice by both Democratic and Republican presidents. The United States vetoed past resolutions on the grounds that they unreasonably singled out Jewish communities in occupied territories as an obstacle to Middle East peace, and that U.N. action was more likely to impede than advance negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

The measure, approved 14 to 0 by the Security Council Friday, is subject to the same criticism: It will encourage Palestinians to pursue more international sanctions against Israel rather than seriously consider the concessions necessary for statehood, and it will give a boost to the international boycott and divestment movement against the Jewish state, which has become a rallying cause for anti-Zionists. At the same time, it will almost certainly not stop Israeli construction in the West Bank, much less in East Jerusalem, where Jewish housing was also deemed by the resolution to be “a flagrant violation under international law.”

The decision by the United States to abstain from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel over its settlements on the West Bank is one of the most significant, defining moments of the Obama Presidency.

It defines this President’s extraordinary ability to transform matters of public policy into personal pique at adversaries. And it defines the reality of the international left’s implacable opposition to the Israeli state.

A range of senators and congressmen from both parties also denounced the resolution, a reflection of the deep loyalty to Israel shared by Democrats and Republicans. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said, “It is extremely frustrating, disappointing and confounding that the administration has failed to veto this resolution.”

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who oversees a subcommittee that oversees United Nations funding by the United States, threatened to take steps that could “suspend or significantly reduce” that financing.

Reaction to the resolution also illustrated fissures among American Jews regarding Israeli policy. Some, like the World Jewish Congress and American Jewish Committee, called the resolution a one-sided measure that would not help the peace process. Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement: “It is also disconcerting and unfortunate that the United States, Israel’s greatest ally, chose to abstain rather than veto this counterproductive text.”

Other groups that have grown increasingly critical of the Israeli government’s approach to the peace process applauded the resolution and the Obama administration’s decision not to block it.

J Street, a Washington-based organization that advocates a two-state solution, said the resolution “conveys the overwhelming support of the international community, including Israel’s closest friends and allies, for the two-state solution, and their deep concern over the deteriorating status quo between Israelis and Palestinians and the lack of meaningful progress toward peace.”

Since 1972, the United States has vetoed 40 United Nations Security Council resolutions critical of Israel. Most recently, in February 2011, the Obama administration vetoed a resolution declaring Israel’s occupation of the West Bank to be illegal and calling for it to “completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.” But today, the administration abstained and allowed to pass by 14 to zero virtually the same resolution. By doing so, the US didn’t actually support the resolution – that’s why it gets only two cheers in my book – but it declared that it would no longer shield Israel from criticism by the Security Council.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Israel’s recent history does not bode well for any resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the annexation of Jerusalem dates from June 1967 when it captured these lands in the Six-Day War from Jordan. In the following months, as recounted in Avi Raz’s book The Bride and the Dowry, Palestinian mayors, with support from officials in the Mossad, pressed Israel to establish some kind of Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, but the Israel leadership balked, “We won the war and a nice dowry, but it came with a bride we don’t like,” Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol explained. Over the next fifty years, Israel has occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem against the will of its inhabitants. About 700,000 Israelis now occupy these lands.

President Obama’s been exercising a scorched earth policy as he retreats to the public sector. Not just the UN vote, but he also banned oil exploration in the Atlantic and Alaskan waters.

[…]

It is the recent UN vote abstention — which has hurt Israel — which has produced the most shock. Unlike Obama’s federal shenanigans, which can be undone when Trump comes into power, the damage in the UN may be irreversible. Russia and China would surely veto any recision of the resolution.

I thought there was something significant in Mr. Judis’s disquisition at Talking Points Memo. Prior to gaining full-throated U. S. support, Israel was repeatedly attacked by its neighbors—not just the people in the Palestinian territories but Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and other Gulf Arab states. Israel responded to the Six Day War in 1967 by doing what just about any other country would have done under the circumstances: creating a buffer zone between it and its enemies. Those are the “territories” being discussed.

On the merits I have mixed feelings. I don’t think that Israel should be building settlements in the territories and I don’t think that those who espouse a Greater Israel are being helpful. Neither are the irredentist claims of the Palestinians.

While the Administration’s failure to veto the resolution has no material effect, I doubt that it’s much help, either. There are roles for both public and private diplomacy and pursuing an end to Israel’s settlement-building is probably something better relegated to private diplomacy.

However, I also agree with this statement from the White House, reported by the New York Post:

The White House said on Friday that Obama made the final decision.

“Our position is that there is one president at a time,” said Ben Rhodes, the White House national security adviser. “President Obama is the president until Jan. 20, and we are taking this action of course as US policy.”

Mr. Trump will have his say soon enough. Until then he should butt out.

I can’t help but wonder if President Obama is making a strategic error, not with respect to Israel but with respect to the future President Trump and the Republican-dominated Congress. Depending on their good will and magnanimity seems like a chancy thing at best, made worse by a set of controversial executive actions at the eleventh hour.