Government Gets Bigger, Does Less, Costs More, and Leaves Us More Vulnerable than We Were Before - Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut Would Laugh
© 2010 Peter Free
19 July 2010
A positive feedback loop feeds the growth of ineffectual government
A systemic positive feedback loop feeds the growth of continually larger and more ineffectual government.
If, for example, government fails to do what we expect it to, the system has a tendency to add more layers, sections, or people, to fix the original problem.
These added numbers increase interdepartmental jealousies and inefficiencies, which leads to even less efficient government. It also wastes significant amounts of money, which makes the United States economically and militarily less competitive.
Take the nation’s ridiculous security apparatus, as an example
Dana Priest and William Arkin’s 19 July 2010 Washington Post investigation revealed that:
Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
© 2010 Dana Priest & William M. Arkin, A hidden world growing beyond control, Washington Post (19 July 2010).
Retired Lieutenant General John R. Vines (who has reviewed parts of the system) told the Post that he knew of no agency with responsibility for coordinating the interagency effort.
Taxpayers spend much more than $75 billion per year on intelligence alone. This already high figure does not include many military and some domestic programs.
Predictably, government apologists don’t see a problem
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the reporters he did not think the system was too big to manage. (Apparently he has God-like powers.)
Former Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, denied there was redundancy in the intelligence sector. The system was merely designed to tailor its findings for different customers. (Apparently he is a gullible person.)
People who actually do security and intelligence work disagree. Effectively contradicting their superiors, Defense Department “super users” (people with authority to know about all the Department’s programs) told the reporters that they are completely unable to keep track of what is going on.
Why is this mess so?
Vested interests keep the system as it is.
Intelligence failures merely require taxpayers to fund yet more effort. Failure is actually a plus for people who benefit from being inside the system (which includes virtually the entire military-industrial complex).
Security/intelligence insiders have jobs to lose, if programs are cut. Supervisors and top-ranking administrators are reluctant to lose power over their fiefdoms. Higher-ups tasked with overarching authority are reluctant to lose the ability to quote the impressive numbers of people and agencies they claim to (ineffectually) supervise.
There is no systemic, counteracting force to keep the security effort down to efficient, manageable, and effective size.
It also does not hurt the inflated system’s growth that everything is kept secret. It’s difficult to attack excesses and inefficiencies in systems that one is not allowed to examine.
So effectively, we have another twist on the oligarchy-in-America theme.
The irony?
Republicans, who are allegedly small government advocates, are first to increase the size of American military and intelligence infrastructure. They do this while simultaneously calling for lower taxes on the financially better-off sectors of the economy.
Republicans are (figuratively) so fiercely toilet-trained that it is far beyond their ability to question alleged authority.
Democrats (those few who occasionally recognize that there can be too much of a good thing), are reluctant to take on the Republican perspective because the latter might call them weak on defense.
Democrats are reluctant to give their opponents an opening to point out that Democrats were (figuratively) not toilet-trained at all.