Cory Doctorow passes along this story from The New York Times about the travails of a San Francisco woman to open an ice cream shop in the city:

The Ice Cream Bar opened Jan. 21 in the Cole Valley neighborhood — an homage to the classic parlors of the 1930s, complete with vintage soda fountain and lunch counter seating. It has become an immediate sensation, packed with both families and the foodie crowd, savoring upscale house-made ice creams and exotic sodas (flavorings include pink peppercorn and tobacco). The shop also employs 14 full- and part-time workers.

But getting it opened wasn’t easy.

“Many times it almost didn’t happen,” said Juliet Pries, the owner, with a cheerful laugh.

Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city’s morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.

“It’s just a huge risk,” she said, noting that the financing came from family and friends, not a bank. “At several points you wonder if you should just walk away and take the loss.”

Ms. Pries said she had to endure months of runaround and pay a lawyer to determine whether her location (a former grocery, vacant for years) was eligible to become a restaurant. There were permit fees of $20,000; a demand that she create a detailed map of all existing area businesses (the city didn’t have one); and an $11,000 charge just to turn on the water.

The ice cream shop’s travails are at odds with the frequent promises made by the mayor and many supervisors that small businesses and job creation are top priorities.

The matter has also alarmed some business leaders, who point out that few small ventures could survive such long delays.

“Someone of lesser fortitude would have left three months into it,” Ted Loewenberg, president of the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, said of Ms. Pries. “Through these hard times we’ve heard all the rhetoric about streamlining the process, about one-stop shopping. It hasn’t happened.”

San Francisco is put one example, of course, of something that people looking to open news businesses nationwide run into on a daily basis. While the regulations are understandably more numerous in major cities, there is hardly a community in the country where someone seeking to open anything from an ice cream shop to a barber shop wouldn’t run into a whole host of rules, regulations, and requirements that end up making the process of getting into business for yourself, which used to be part of the American way of life, more and more difficult. There are city and county business permits, zoning ordinances, parking surveys, and use permits that must be obtained even before you can open your doors. Each of these costs money, not just in the fees that must be paid to local government authorities, but also the professional fees that you’ll have to pay to lawyers and other professionals in order to guide you through the process. If you’re “lucky” to be in one of those states that requires you to get a license to do something as simple as operating a flower shop, that’s another hoop you’ll have to jump through. Before it’s all over, the $33,000 that Ms. Pries paid to the City of San Francisco may end up being the least of your worries. And again, that’s all before you’ll end up even being able to open your doors for business and serve your first customers.

Contrast this with the way that local governments typically treat big business. Yes, they have to comply with the same rules as the small business owner but they’ve already got a huge pot of cash to cover that so the cost is negligible. Moreover, it’s quite often the case that local governments end up giving huge tax breaks and other subsidies to large companies in order to get them to locate a store, factory, or other facility in their area. The justification for these subsidies is typically the jobs that the employer brings to the area but, as with government-funded sports stadiums, the long-term benefit to the community of these subsidies (which can include major expenses like covering all or part of the cost of road construction for the near-exclusive use of the business) is doubtful at best. If these large companies are such a benefit to the communities that they move into, then shouldn’t they have to play be the same rules as everyone else?

Of course, the answer isn’t to hold everyone to a series of non-sensiscal bureacuratic rules that make opening a business more difficult and expensive than it needs to be, tha answer should be to make it easier for people to open new business and strengthen the local economy. It shouldn’t have taken Ms. Pries two years to open an ice cream shop, and you shouldn’t have to pass an exam to become a florist like Louisiana does. The Institute for Justice has spent years fighting these kinds of arbitrary and capricious licensing and permitting laws that serve little purpose other than protecting existing businesses and stifling competition. However, there’s far too little attention paid to this issue at the state and local level, even at a time when the economy is weak and The failure rates for a small business are already high, even in a good economy. It makes absolutely no sense to put a stranglehold on them in this manner, especially at the same time that localities are providing subsidies to large corporations.

H/T: Instapundit

Apparently, a lot of us are forgetting to take back the coins we keep tossing in those little plastic bins at the airport:

Airline passengers left more than $400,000 at airport security checkpoints operated by the Transportation Security Administration in 2011.

TSA found $409,085.56 in spare change last year that was unclaimed by passengers, according to figures released by the agency. Historically, if no one comes back to get the leftover money, it stays with the TSA.

A Florida lawmaker is trying to change that, however: Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) filed a bill in April of 2009 that would require TSA to transfer money that is not claimed by passengers when they leave airport security checkpoints to United Service Organizations.

Miller said Thursday in a statement provided to The Hill that the amount of change left at airport security checkpoints in 2011 could be put to better uses than the TSA’s operating budget.

“TSA keeps travelers change accidentally left at checkpoints as an appropriations backfill for agency activities,” Miller said. “There is no incentive for TSA to try to return the forgotten change to its rightful owner.

I’d love to ask the Congressman precisely how he thinks one is supposed to determine the rightful owner of 73 cents in spare change, or why trying to do so would be a productive use of the time of government employees.

If you sell bottled water in the European Union, you’ll no longer be able to make the seemingly self-evident claim that drinking your product will prevent dehydration, and it’s a decision that is earning no small degree of ridicule from the British press:

EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.

Producers of bottled water are now forbidden by law from making the claim and will face a two-year jail sentence if they defy the edict, which comes into force in the UK next month.

Last night, critics claimed the EU was at odds with both science and common sense. Conservative MEP Roger Helmer said: “This is stupidity writ large.

“The euro is burning, the EU is falling apart and yet here they are: highly-paid, highly-pensioned officials worrying about the obvious qualities of water and trying to deny us the right to say what is patently true.

“If ever there were an episode which demonstrates the folly of the great European project then this is it.”

The ruling came about in response to a proposal by two German scientists who are critical of many of the EU’s food safety regulations:

German professors Dr Andreas Hahn and Dr Moritz Hagenmeyer, who advise food manufacturers on how to advertise their products, asked the European Commission if the claim could be made on labels.

They compiled what they assumed was an uncontroversial statement in order to test new laws which allow products to claim they can reduce the risk of disease, subject to EU approval.

They applied for the right to state that “regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration” as well as preventing a decrease in performance.

However, last February, the European Food Standards Authority (EFSA) refused to approve the statement.

A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.

Now the EFSA verdict has been turned into an EU directive which was issued on Wednesday.

The Guardian’s Martin Robbins calls some of the reaction to the decision “daft hysteria”:

Firstly, “regular consumption” of water doesn’t reduce the risk of dehydration any more than eating a pork pie a day reduces the risk of starvation. If I drink half a pint of bottled water while running through a desert in the blistering sun, I’ll still end up dehydrated, and if I drink several bottles today, that won’t prevent me from dehydrating tomorrow. The key is to drink enough water when you need it, and you’re not going to get that from any bottled water product unless it’s mounted on a drip.

Secondly, dehydration doesn’t just mean a lack of water, or ‘being thirsty’; electrolytes like sodium are important too. If salt levels fall too far, the body struggles to regulate fluid levels in the first place. That’s why hospitals use saline drips to prevent dehydration in patients who can’t take fluids orally, and why people with diarhhoea are treated with salt-containing oral rehydration fluids. Presumably the next big investigation at the Express will expose the shocking waste of NHS money on needless quantities of saline solution, when jolly old tap water would work just as well.

So the ruling seems pretty sensible to me, or at least as sensible as a ruling can be when the claim being tested is vexatious in the first place. It’s accurate advice, and it prevents companies selling bottled water from making exaggerated claims for their products, which is a good thing.

Exaggerated? Seriously?

Like regulators on this side of the Atlantic, the EU regulators and people like Robbins apparently believe that consumers are too stupid to think for themselves and that they blindly accept whatever claims are made by manufacturers. They also believe that they know better than the average person what’s good for them, and that the government exists to protect them, not so much from those venal, evil corporations, but from their own stupidity. Does Robbins truly believe that the average European is too dumb to realize that you need to do more than just drink water to stay healthy? Sadly, based on my own observations of people like him here on this side of the pond, I think he does.

What, exactly, would be wrong with permitting bottled water manufacturers from mentioning dehydration in their ads? Personally, I don’t see it, and I see far more evil in empowering a centralized state with the right to regulate the information that businesses are permitted to provide to consumers to such an absurd, paternalistic degree. People are smart enough to evaluate claims like this own their own, I say let them do it.

The most amusing thing about all of this, of course, is that, while the EU’s financial system continues to descend into chaos, the EU’s bureaucrats are wasting their time on nonsense like this. If Europe does survive as a united entity through all of this, it won’t be because of people like Martin Robbins who apparently find regulating the advertisement claims for bottled water more important than, well, fixing the broken system that they see all around them.

You really can’t make things like this up:

“At 1:00 PM, the Vice President will attend a meeting of the Government Accountability and Transparency Board in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. At 2:30 PM, the Vice President will meet with representatives of the National Sheriffs’ Association in the Roosevelt Room. These meetings are closed press.“

From March you may recall when President Obama received an award for transparency in a secret, closed door ceremony. Or, back in September when it was revealed that anonymous government officials called for more transparency.

Rick Perry’s latest effort to reboot his campaign involves a far-reaching, ultimately quixotic, government reform plan that essentially calls for a complete reworking of how the Federal Government works:

BETTENDORF, Iowa — Gov. Rick Perry of Texas on Tuesday announced a proposal to alter the federal government that ranks among the most radical plans offered by any major Republican presidential candidate this year — and one that legal analysts say will almost surely never happen: making Congress operate part time with half pay, and ending lifetime tenure for federal judges.

“I don’t believe that Washington needs a new coat of paint — I think the whole place needs to be overhauled,” said Mr. Perry, speaking to applause from more than 100 people on the floor of the Schebler manufacturing plant here. “I’m a true believer that we need to uproot, tear down and rebuild Washington, D.C., and our federal institutions.”

Mr. Perry, who is trying to reboot a campaign that is lagging in the polls, proposed cutting the pay of Congress in half (or by three-fourths, under one proposal he sketched out) and halving both its budget and the time members spend in Washington.

“We have a lot of well-intentioned members of Congress, but they have become creatures of Washington,” Mr. Perry said. “They get paid more than three times the average American family, and they have doubled their own budgets in the last decade.”

Mr. Perry also vowed to “reform” the federal judiciary. “Too many federal judges rule with impunity from the bench,” he said, “and those who legislate from the bench should not be entitled to lifetime abuse of their judicial authority.” He proposed 18-year terms, staggered every two years, for new Supreme Court justices, and suggested similar limits on federal appellate and district court judges.

In the speech, Mr. Perry sought to present himself as a consummate Washington outsider. He reminded the audience that he was one of the few Republican candidates who had never worked as a lobbyist, served as a member of Congress or spent time in a presidential administration.

“I’m unique to the Republican field,” Mr. Perry said. “I have never been an establishment figure. I’ve never served in Congress. I’ve never been in an administration. I’ve never been a paid lobbyist. My career has been that of a Washington outsider.”

The speech, which Mr. Perry referred to as his plan to “uproot and overhaul Washington,” was an effort to try to return to issues after an embarrassing stumble at a presidential debate last week raised new questions about his candidacy. He did not make a joke — as he did in Saturday’s debate in South Carolina — about forgetting the Department of Energy as one of three agencies he would like to eliminate.

Here’s a basic summary of what Perry is proposing:

• Ending the practice of giving lifetime appointments to federal judges (current judges would not be affected);
• Cutting Congressional pay in half;
• Cutting Congressional pay in half again if they don’t balance the budget by 2020;
• Cutting Congressional office budgets in half;
• Cutting the Congressional calendar by half;
• Criminalizing insider trading by Congressmen;
• Reducing spending to 18% of GDP;
• Privatizing Fannie & Freddie;
• Ending the funding of Planned Parenthood;
• Eliminating the Commerce, Education, and Energy Departments;
• Getting the EPA under control;
• Getting the TSA under control;
• Audit the government, including the Department of Defense;
• Freeze incoming federal regulations, and audit all of them for the last five years;
• Federal salary freeze for all non-military and non-law enforcement officials until the budget is balanced;
• And cutting the Presidential salary in half until the budget is balanced

Some of these ideas are quite banal, really. What exactly does it mean to say you want to get the EPA and TSA “under control”? How, specifically, are you going to cut Federal spending enough so that it’s equal to or less than 18% of GDP? The audit idea reminds me of the Grace Commission from the 1980s and the mostly useless idea of attacking “government waste.” I’ve written more than once already about Perry’s odd ideas for the Federal Judiciary (here, here and here). It’s also worth noting that a few of these provisions would require Constitutional Amendments, and the idea that it’s going to be easy to amend the Constitution is just silly.The part of Perry’s proposals that are getting the most attention, however, are his ideas to basically create a part-time Congress, and it’s an idea that’s getting criticism from both sides of the political aisle.

Matthew Yglesias describes Perry’s plan with one word, terrible:

The basic problem is that under modern conditions, de-professionalizing a legislature tends to make it more corrupt and less responsive to either the views or objective interests of the public.

You can see this along a number of dimensions. One is that if members of Congress need to work second jobs, their business relationships will involve conflicts of interest. A second is that to the extent that earning extra income takes up more of members of Congress’ time, they’ll become more dependent on lobbyists and special interest groups for information and assistance with their projects. A third is that lower pay tends to induce legislators to retire sooner, and less-senior legislators are more dependent on lobbyists and special interest groups for information and assistance with their projects. A fourth is that to the extent you cut legislators’ pay, a larger share of the real compensation for doing legislative work is the opportunity to “cash in” after you leave office. A fifth and related consideration is that to the extent you cut legislators’ pay, a larger share of the real compensation for doing legislative work is the ability to raise PAC and campaign funds that you spend on yourself. Last, but by no means least, to the extent that you reduce the desirability of winning re-election, you encourage members of the legislature to ignore their constituents in favor of pleasing others.

The response to this argument, of course, is the idea that increasing rotation in Congress returns us to the ideal that the Founders had when the first drafted the Constitution, the idea of the citizen legislator. Now there’s nothing wrong with this idea in principle. For one thing, the idea that Congress is so heavily dominated by the legal profession strikes me as as a bad thing because it reduces the perspectives that are available to members. It’s a good thing, I think, that we get business owners, entrepreneurs, and maybe even a few ordinary people in there if they can convince people to elect them. Of course, that ideal hasn’t existed for a long time, if it ever did, and there are now plenty of people in Washington for whom their sole career for decades has been being a Member of Congress or a Senator.

But Perry isn’t just talking about a more diverse Congress, he’s talking about a Congress that does less work for less money, and there’s more than a few problems with that idea.

On the money side of the equation, Matt Glassman points out that, adjusted for inflation, the Members of the 112th Congresss are not making all that much more than their predecessors in the 63rd Congress, which ran from 1913-1915.  Glassman’s chart tells the tale:

John Sides makes another point about the impact that a Congressional pay cut as drastic as the one Perry proposes would have:

The broader problem with Perry’s proposal, as Kevin Collins noted, is that “de-professionalizing” the legislature by cutting pay and the like would actually make Congress less responsive to voters.  He cites this paper (pdf) by Jeffrey Lax and Justin Phillips.  In it, they find that the congruence between state policy and voters’ opinions is stronger in states with professionalized legislatures—where professionalism is captured by legislators’ salaries, the number of days the legislature is in session, and the number of staff assigned to legislators.

In short, if you want public policy to reflect popular will, don’t stock the legislature with amateurs.

There’s another argument about Perry’s plan that I think is actually more important, though, because it involves the enhancement of the power of a Presidency that has already grown far beyond where the Founders ever intended:

One of the key levers of power for Roosevelt’s New Deal and, more broadly, the modern presidency is its corps of bureaucrats and analysts; the Executive Office alone has at least 2000 or so staffers. The president has access to layers and layers of information. This access gives the president great influence in shaping the annual budget and the details of policy. Members of Congress may propose laws, but the substance of these laws often has considerable White House backing.

Congressional staff provide at least a partial check on the data power of the executive branch. By undermining Congressional staffs through salary cuts, one also undermines the ability of Congress to shape the information narrative and write legislation. Meanwhile, cutting Congressional pay might seem an invitation to more petty corruption.

(…)

Any talk of cutting government employment may elicit shouts of glee from many on the right. But conservatives need to ask themselves whether it advances the cause of smaller government to reform the federal government so that the centralized executive branch has even more power.

Indeed.

The truth of the matter is that cutting Congressional pay and reducing Congressional staff is going to do very little to bring Federal spending under control. As noted above, it’s also not likely to make the legislative branch more responsive to the public. While the “citizen legislator” idea is an appealing one, the truth of the matter is that a Congress filled with inexperienced legislators working for half of what their predecessors a century ago did isn’t going to improve Congress. In fact, it’s likely to make Congress worse and the President more powerful. In fact, a suspicious person would say that Perry is proposing something like this because he knows it would increase the power of the office he’s seeking. In reality, though, much like Perry’s own chances to win the Republican nomination, there’s very little chance any of these ideas would ever see the light of day. To the extent Perry intended to propose a real plan, he failed here. Instead, all we’ve got are gimmicks.

Let me start out by saying that I think the PSU Trustees made the right decision in firing Joe Paterno. If things had happened differently, perhaps they could have found a way for him to coach the final games of his career, and his final game at Happy Valley, but the circumstances of the Sandusky case simply don’t permit it. I also found the rioting last night in State College to be pretty appalling, although perhaps that could have been alleviated had the university done a better job of communicating the reasons for the Board of Trustees decision to the Penn State community. A late night press conference three days before Game Day isn’t the way to do that, in my opinion. I also think that Mike McQueary, the then Graduate Assistant and now Wide Receivers Coach of the Nittany Lions, who saw a child being raped and didn’t stop it, should be fired immediately. All of that said, I found interesting this insight that Rod Dreher passed along from a reader that, if not excusing the way Paterno and Mike McQueary acted, at least partly explains it:

Rod, You need to know the culture of college campuses regarding these kinds of issues. As an administrator (a department chair) I have taken the “sexual harassment” online course that we all have to take (indeed, as a faculty member I had to do it again!). The correct answer to every scenario is the same: do nothing and report it to the appropriate administrator. “If true,” Paterno did exactly what university policies all over the nation ask us to do: nothing. The institutions have bureaucratized how they deal with these kinds of accusations. For fear of lawsuit, this whole area, that of sexual harassment/abuse, has been turned over to bureaucratic professionals housed in the legal and human resources wings of our universities. One can guess that Paterno told the appropriate division of his institution and was then told by university legal counsel to keep his mouth shut.

I do not wish to give Paterno (or anyone else) a pass. I will withhold judgment until I know more. But if we wish to be indignant, let’s spare some of that indignation for a system that doesn’t allow people to do the right thing for fear of violating bureaucratic policy and courting lawsuits. What someone needed to do was beat Jerry Sandusky senseless and throw him to the cops. But that would get you a wrong answer on the online Sexual Harassment Policy test.

One rejoinder, of course, is that this really isn’t a sexual harassment issue, it’s a sexual assault issue. According to his own testimony, what McQuery witnessed in the showers at the athletic facility was felony child abuse and rape. When you’re witnessing something like that, it seems really strange to think that you’re mind goes back to the sexual harassment training seminar you took a year or two ago and use that as your guide for what to do. I suppose it’s possible, though. In Paterno’s case, he did what those rules, and Pennsylvania law, require him to do, and reported up the chain of command to the Athletic Director, which is where the whole mess fell apart when administrators failed to follow up.

Was it “the system” that ultimately let Jerry Sandusky get away in 2002? That’s not clear, but it certainly seems to have contributed to the way the matter was handled. In that case, the actors certainly still deserve to be punished for what they failed to do, but if Penn State doesn’t take a look at its rules and the culture that grew up around its football program, then they’re making it possible for something like this to happen again.

You may recall last month when the Justice Department’s Inspector General released a report claiming that DOJ officials had been wasting money on outside seminars, including the now famous $16 muffins and $32 box of Cracker Jacks. While outrageous at first glance, the report didn’t really seem to stand up to scrutiny, and even the hotel responsible for the allegedly expensive muffins said that people were looking at the bill wrong. Now, the Inspector General that issued the report that started the ball, or muffin, rolling has retracted their claims:

WASHINGTON — The office of the Justice Department inspector general on Friday retracted its much publicized claim that the agency had spent $16 per breakfast muffin at a conference. And it expressed regret for the “significant negative publicity” for the department and for the hotel that hosted the meeting that resulted from the erroneous finding in a report last month.

The supposed “$16 muffins,” at a conference for immigration lawyers in August 2009, had been a highlight of the report, which blasted the Justice Department for “extravagant and potentially wasteful” spending on food at conferences at the end of the Bush administration and early in President Obama’s term.

The figure was cited in news accounts, including in The New York Times, and was much repeated on political shows.

But the department and the hotel, the Capital Hilton, said the cost of the breakfast had included not only muffins but also fruit, coffee, juice, taxes and a gratuity for the servers. It was also part of a package with the hotel that included “free” use of a ballroom and a dozen meeting rooms during the five-day conference.

In a new introduction to a revised report issued on Friday, the Office of the Inspector General said it had reviewed additional paperwork and now agreed that its conclusions “were incorrect and that the Department did not pay $16 per muffin.”

As I thought, it would seem that the explanation that Kevin Drum, and James Joyner, came up with when this started, which Hilton Hotels reinforced, is the real story of what happened here. However, one has to wonder if it matters. How many candidates for Congress will have something about the $16 muffins (that never existed) in their stump speeches next year? I’m guessing quite a few.

The people at Hilton have weighed in on those $16 muffins that the Department of Justice supposedly paid for:

Stung by an audit report this week that highlighted “$16 muffins” at a conference at the Capital Hilton in Washington, the hotel chain is fighting back, insisting the pricey pastries were not that expensive..

Hilton Worldwide responded to the much-publicized cost of the muffins, disputing the $16 per muffin charge cited by the Justice Inspector General in an audit of costs incurred at Justice Department conferences in 2008 and 2009.

“The contracted breakfast included fresh fruit, coffee, juice, and muffins, plus tax and gratuity for an inclusive price of $16 per person,” Hilton Worldwide said in a statement from corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia.

The Office of Inspector General said it stands by its report, noting investigators examined receipts submitted for the reception.

But Hilton says “dining receipts are often abbreviated and do not reflect the full pre-contracted menu and service provided, as is the case with recent media reports of breakfast items approved for some government meetings.”

(…)

The report by the Inspector General noted the training conference for the Executive Office for Immigration Review held in August 2009 served 534 people. The conference attendees averaged a daily cost of $14.74 for refreshments over the five day meeting just above the $14.72 limit set by the Justice Department.

The Inspector General agreed the reception provided the free items Hilton says were included. But the tussle in a teapot centers on the receipt for $4,200 for 250 muffins and $2,880 for 300 cookies and brownies.

“By itemizing these costs, we determined that with service and gratuity muffins cost over $16 each and cookies and brownies cost almost $10 each,” the Inspector General report said.

But Hilton says that simply doesn’t provide the full picture. “Hotel teams tailor these events to provide maximum value and ensure the best experience possible,” Hilton said.

That’s basically the explanation that Kevin Drum came up with earlier this week and, as James Joyner notes, this seems to be a fairly standard way of billing in the hotel industry, as well as other places. So, no there weren’t really $16 muffins, and focusing on them has kind of missed the point of what that Inspector General’s audit was really all about.

It’s a small part of the Federal Budget, but this is likely to be an example of government waste that’s remembered for a long time:

The federal government pays out millions of dollars to dead people each year — including deceased retired federal workers, according to a new report.

In the past five years, the Office of Personnel Management has made more than $601 million in benefits payments to deceased federal annuitants, according to the agency’s inspector general. Total annual payouts range between $100 million and $150 million.

Inspector General Patrick E. McFarland, who previously reported on the improper payments in 2005 and 2008, urged OPM to more closely track such mistakes.

“It is time to stop, once and for all, this waste of taxpayer money,” he wrote in the report.

Improper payments to dead retirees increased 70 percent in the past five years, far higher than the 19 percent climb in overall annuity payments, the report said.

The payments are on the rise because OPM is doing a poor job of tracking potential cheats, McFarland said. In one case, a deceased annuitant’s son continued receiving federal benefits until 2008 — 37 years after his father’s death. OPM learned about the improper payments — which exceeded $515,000 — only after the son died. The agency never recovered the money.

An OPM spokesman said Thursday that the agency is reviewing the report and had no immediate comment.

The report said OPM is attempting to stop and recoup payments in several ways, by conducting weekly and annual matches of its data against the Social Security Administration’s death records and occasionally checking records for annuitants 90 years and older to determine whether they are still alive.

It’s actually quite inexplicable considering that one branch of the Federal Government actually does a fairly decent job of cutting off benefits after death. The Social Security Administration is well-known for sending notices to banks immediately upon learning of a recipients death — something that happens very quickly nowadays since deceased person’s Social Security Numbers are immediately reported as such by the relevant authority in the jurisdiction where they live — and also recouping payments after death on a pro rata basis. Why the OPM is unable to do this?

The other issue, of course, is that there’s some actual fraud going on here. Family members who continue to collect benefits after a retiree dies are defrauding the Federal Government. Since the odds of recovering anything from people like this years after the fact are minimal at best, it strikes me that the best deterrent would be to start prosecuting these people and send the message that defrauding Uncle Sam comes with consequences.

Again, it’s a small amount of money relatively speaking, but that doesn’t mean something shouldn’t be done about it.

Remember yesterday’s story about the Justice Department’s $16 Muffins and $32 Cracker Jacks? Well, Kevin Drum has done some digging and a pronounces it a myth. Here’s what the report in question actually found:

Considering the EOIR reported that at least 534 people received refreshments at its 2009 Legal Training Conference in Washington, D.C., it spent an average of $14.74 per attendee per day on food and beverages—just above the $14.72 JMD limit for refreshments. We credit the EOIR for implementing the following controls to reduce food and beverage costs: (1) it provided just refreshments and not full meals, (2) it ordered fewer refreshments than the total number of reported attendees, and (3) it received 15 gallons of coffee, 30 gallons of iced tea, and 200 pieces of fruit for free. However, many individual food and beverage items listed on conference invoices and paid by the EOIR were very costly. The EOIR spent $4,200 on 250 muffins and $2,880 on 300 cookies and brownies. By itemizing these costs, we determined that, with service and gratuity, muffins cost over $16 each and cookies and brownies cost almost $10 each.

Kevin quite correctly deduces that the muffins weren’t actually $16; rather, the cost of the “free” coffee, tea, and fruit were built into the muffins. That’s what I guessed was going on when I observed, “itemized costs are often dubious, with some items inflated to keep others under artificial spending limits.”

This is pretty standard procedure at conferences and, well, just about everything. You usually don’t actually get an itemized breakdown of costs. And, when you do, it’s often seemingly random. That’s why a hospital aspirin costs $200 and a military hammer costs $600; they’re just made up numbers to add up to the total cost.

I’m reminded of an old joke about a businessman whose umbrella was broken while traveling for work. He bought a new one and expensed it, only to be told by the accounting department that this was not an allowable travel expense. After his next trip, he turned in his expense report with a Post-It attached: FIND THE UMBRELLA.

So, basically, the budget allowance for refreshments was $14.72, they actually spent $14.74, and the amount was all assigned to muffins and cookies. That’s a bookkeeping decision, not an outrageous overcharge for baked goods. And, certainly, less than $15 per person for snacks and drinks strikes me as a reasonable expense.

Now, as Kevin goes on to note, “None of this is to say that DOJ didn’t overspend on its conferences.” Indeed, that was the whole point of the internal DOJ audit. But the problem is in holding them at expensive sites, spending huge amounts on outsourced event managers, and such. Or, quite possibly, holding so many conferences to begin with.

The US Justice Department spent $16 per muffin and $5 per meatball at recent conferences, an internal audit found.

Bloomberg (“$16 Muffins Found at U.S. Meetings“):

U.S. Justice Department agencies spent too much for food at conferences, in one case serving $16 muffins and in another dishing out beef Wellington appetizers that cost $7.32 per serving, an audit found. ”Some conferences featured costly meals, refreshments, and themed breaks that we believe were indicative of wasteful or extravagant spending,” the Justice Department’s inspector general wrote in a report released today.

The inspector general reviewed a sample of 10 Justice Department conferences held between October 2007 and September 2009 at a cost of $4.4 million, a period that included the administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama. The Justice Department spent $73.3 million on conferences in fiscal 2009, compared with $47.8 million a year earlier, according to the report.

The muffins were served at an August 2009 conference of the Executive Office for Immigration Review and the beef Wellington was offered at a February 2008 meeting hosted by the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. A March 2009 conference of the Office on Violence Against Women served Cracker Jack, popcorn and candy bars at a single break, costing $32 per person, according to the report.

The report is a follow-up to one from 2007 that found the Justice Department had few controls to limit the costs of conference planning, food and beverages. That audit cited a reception that included Swedish meatballs costing $5 apiece.

In April 2008 the Justice Department issued policies and procedures designed to control conference spending. The new report found that agencies were able to “circumvent meal and refreshment cost limits” when conferences were planned under cooperative agreements, a type of funding awarded by a Justice Department agency.

Let’s stipulate that food is outrageously expensive at conference hotels and that itemized costs are often dubious, with some items inflated to keep others under artificial spending limits.* The numbers are nonethless mindboggling. $79 million for one agency’s conference budget? Consider that the entire budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, is $430 million.

Now, unlike Stacy McCain (“‘MuffinGate’: Obama Says We Must Tax the Rich Because Federal Officials Can’t Do Without $5 Swedish Meatballs“), I don’t think there’s enough of this kind of waste in the federal budget to bring our fiscal situation into balance. But we agree that there’s too much of it.

CBS News chief legal analyst Andrew Cohen (“$16 for a Muffin?! A Justice Department Boondoggle“) calls this a “bipartisan mess.” But, really, I’m not expecting the Attorney General to go through the food budget. This is more a symptom of bureaucracy run amok, with an added twist of the scourge of contracting out services that should be done in house.

At places all over the country and the world, the conferences took place after the Justice Department had been warned by the OIG in 2007 that there was too little oversight over food and beverage costs. Investigators determined, for example, that the DOJ “spent $600,000 (14 percent of costs) to hire training and technical assistance providers as external event planners for 5 of the 10 conferences reviewed. This was done without demonstrating that these firms offered the most cost effective logistical event planning services. Further, these event planners did not accurately track and report conference expenditures.”

Business Insider‘s Linette Lopez (“You’ll Never Guess How Much The Justice Department Spends On Party Snacks“) notes that the $32 Cracker Jacks were at a conference of the Office on Violence Against Women. Insert tasteless  joke here.

Hot Air‘s AllahPundit quips, “I know you’re angry, but don’t forget that DOJ made some extra cash this year selling AK-47s to Mexican drug cartels.” On the matter of the $5.57 sodas, he adds, “That’s a fair price if you’re in a stadium watching football, less so if you’re in a ballroom watching Eric Holder sweat while he ducks questions about who knew what vis-a-vis Operation Fast & Furious. ”

____________

*My hunch proved correct. See my follow-up post, “When Is A $16 Muffin Not a $16 Muffin?“

In addition to all our other financial problems, we may soon see the United States Postal Service defaulting on its debts:

The U.S. Postal Service announced Friday that it had racked up a $3.1 billion quarterly loss and that if current trends continue it is likely to default on its payments to the federal government.

The USPS continues to suffer from falling mail volume. During the third quarter this year, USPS delivered a total of 39.8 billion items, a decline of 2.6 percent compared to the 40.9 billion items delivered during the same period last year, the Associated Press reported.

According to current revenue estimates, the postal service will be unable to make a $5.5 billion payment to its retirement fund that is due in September. Unless Congress takes action, such as waiving the payment, the postal service says that it will have no choice but to default on its payments.

As consumers increasingly rely on electronic communications instead of “snail mail,” the USPS has seen a serious drop off in demand, and it continues to struggle to adjust to the shift that has occurred during the past decade.

“We continue to take aggressive actions to reduce costs and bring the size of our infrastructure into alignment with reduced customer demand,” Postmaster General and CEO Patrick Donahoe said in a statement.

The solution here seems rather obvious. The Postal Service should be set free of its ties to the Federal Government and forced to compete with other companies. It is fundamentally absurd that they should need to go to Congress to get permission to do something like eliminating Saturday delivery. A private company doesn’t need to get permission to engage in a cost-cutting move like that, and USPS would clearly, in the long run, be a much healthier company if it had the freedom to make these kinds of decisions with the heavy hand of Congress interfering (there’s already been talk about Congress stepping to prevent the Post Office closures that were recently announced). Postal privatization has been done in other countries, quite successfully, and I don’t see any reason why it can’t happen here.

Ted DeHaven wrote about privatization of the mail last week at The Daily Caller:

Postal management is attempting to head off the inevitable congressional interference by creating “Village Post Offices” in the communities affected by the closings. Local businesses, such as pharmacies and grocery stores, would be allowed to offer postal products and services. This makes sense because whereas post offices used to generate almost all postal retail revenue, 35 percent is now generated through alternative channels like USPS.com, self-service kiosks and private stores.

Closing post offices is a small step towards cutting costs and “rationalizing” the retail network, which the USPS management recognizes as critical. However, that won’t be enough to overcome economic reality — let alone the control freaks in Congress. Ultimately, if the USPS is to continue operating like a business instead of becoming just another taxpayer-funded bureaucracy, Congress is going to have to hand the reins over to the private sector. That means privatizing the United States Postal Service.

Two bills have been introduced to reform the Postal Service since its plea for help. One proposed bill, the Postal Reform Act, is sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa. Option two, the United States Postal Service Pension Obligation Recalculation and Restoration Act of 2011, is sponsored by Rep. Stephen Lynch.

Paralleling the debt ceiling debate, Rep. Issa proposes true reform and cost-saving measures. Rep. Lynch’s bill is an accounting gimmick, similar to the “budget cuts” from Budget Control Act.

Issa’s reform leads to cuts in services, post office locations, and employees. These cuts will prevent a taxpayer-funded federal government bailout of USPS. In his words, Issa’s bill “encourages USPS to modernize its retail network and enables USPS to act more like a business.” As seen in the debt ceiling debacle, true cost-savings and straying from the status quo may be politically unfeasible.

Rep. Lynch’s bill extends USPS’s ability to accumulate debt, which will likely lead to a taxpayer bailout. Lynch makes convoluted claims of USPS over-payment of retirement obligations, which were put in place because of USPS’s fiscal liabilities and monopoly status. Rep. Lynch comments on the stringent obligations of USPS: “H.R. 1351 would correct the Postal Service’s overpayment to the federal government of both its Civil Service Retirement System and Federal Employee Retirement System obligations, which is collectively in the range of $60 to $80 billion, providing the Postal Service with an opportunity to find long-term solutions. In light of today’s announcement, we call on our Republican colleagues on the Oversight Committee to give this legislation prompt consideration.”

Issa’s bill is marginally better than Lynch’s, but neither one of them deals effectively with the real cause of the Postal Service’s problems, it’s government protected monopoly. Thanks to that monopoly, USPS not only finds it difficult to react to changes in the market because of the political implications of the decisions that it makes, but it has no incentive to do so until its absolutely too late like it is now. Consumers have found a way around that monopoly by essentially voting with their feet. Electronic payments mean that fewer people mail checks anymore. E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter mean that you don’t need to send a letter or a card to stay in touch with friends and family. The World Wide Web, and now tablet computing, have made paper magazines somewhat obsolete. At this point, the USPS’s first class mail system is little more than a vast junk mail delivery system. I don’t know about anyone else, but the average day most of what ends up in my personal mailbox gets thrown away immediately. And I rarely even bother to check my mailbox on Saturdays.

Privatizing the Post Office won’t prevent the changes in technology that are making mail delivery less relevant but they would allow USPS, or its successor, to respond more rapidly, and more creatively to those changes without having to please the political overlords on Capitol Hill. Privatize the mail, it may be the only way to save it.

Requirements that restaurants put calorie counts on their menus have been a favorite policy of health advocates on the left for years now. Some cities, such as New York City, have already adopted them in limited scope, and the Affordable Care Act contains a requirement that restaurant chains beyond a certain size provide calorie information on their menus. On it’s face it seems like a logical idea – give people information about the calorie and fat content of the Double Whopper With Cheese they’re about to order and people will start to think twice, and hopefully order something healthier. As it turns out, the evidence available from jurisdictions that have adopted nutritional labeling requirements shows that they have very little impact on consumer food choices when dining out:

Evidence is mounting that calorie labels — promoted by some nutritionists and the restaurant industry to help stem the obesity crisis — do not steer most people to lower-calorie foods. Eating habits rarely change, according to several studies. Perversely, some diners see the labels yet consume more calories than usual. People who use the labels often don’t need to. (Meaning: They are thin.)

Questions about the effectiveness of calorie disclosure come as the federal government is finalizing regulations to nationalize labeling in chain restaurants next year as part of a measure tucked into President Obama’s health-care law. Some chain restaurants are tweaking menus in anticipation, offering more low-calorie meals. Yet several high-cal eateries that operate in Montgomery — including the Cheesecake Factory, Chipotle, Five Guys and Red Robin Gourmet Burgers — report no change in dining habits because of the labels.

“Have we seen a big [drop] in sales? No, not at all,” said Todd Stallings, owner of several Five Guys restaurants in Montgomery, which based its rules on the upcoming federal policy. “When people come to Five Guys, they know we are not cooking their french fries in water.”

Some experts question the wisdom of the labeling policies, even if they agree that people have a right to know the caloric content of what they are ingesting. (Recommended daily calorie intake varies based on age, weight, height and activity levels but is generally 2,500 for men and 2,000 for women.)

“There is a great concern among many of the people who study calorie labeling that the policy has moved way beyond the science and that it would be beneficial to slow down,” said George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University who studies calorie labeling. In a recent editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, he asked: “Given the lack of evidence that calorie posting reduces calorie intake, why is the enthusiasm for the policy so pervasive?”

Not only that, but the evidence available from jurisdictions where menu labeling laws have been in effect shows that they clearly don’t impact human behavior

In New York, the first big city to adopt menu labeling, NYU researchers studied the eating choices of low-income fast-food diners, focusing on
those who saw the labels. “Even those who indicated that the calorie information influenced their food choices did not actually purchase fewer calories,” the study says.

Research in a fast-food restaurant in King County, Wash., where calorie labeling is also law, found similar results. The stated finding was grim: “Mandatory menu labeling did not promote healthier food-purchasing behavior.”

Another recent study shows what really worked was imposing a higher price — by way of a tax — on big-calorie items.

Loewenstein, in his editorial, cited just one “rigorous” study showing a positive effect: at Starbucks stores in New York City, where diners seeing calorie information reduced their intake — but only for food, not beverages. Researchers consider that result a bit of an outlier, theorizing that Starbucks consumers are more sensitive to nutritional information. “I’m sure the average BMI at Cheesecake Factory or McDonald’s is a lot larger than at Starbucks,” Loewenstein said, only half-joking.

Experts say that for most diners, the issue is not about having information but about lacking self-control. Behavioral economists have for years zeroed in on a logical hiccup: We are unable to balance short-term gains with long-term costs. Many humans are simply really, really impatient. With eating out, the gains are immediate (yummy giant burrito!) and the costs are delayed (staggering bills for heart disease!).

“The long-term consequences are totally intangible,” Loewenstein said. “Eating has that in common with cigarettes: One cigarette is not going to kill you, and one big meal is not going to kill you. But the difference is, you need to eat to survive. So there’s an easy rule for the cigarette problem: Stop. There is no easy rule for eating. We must eat.”

Not only must we eat, but generally we like to eat things that taste good, and the stuff that tastes good is often high in calories, fat, and cholesterol. We are, in  other words, human and not robots who will simply process a number on a menu and decide oh I’ll have the salad instead. And, quite honestly, when you’ve already made the choice to go to a place like McDonalds, or Five Guys, or The Cheesecake Factory, healthy eating isn’t really at the top of your list of priorities at that moment in time. It’s not just menu labeling that doesn’t seem to have an impact on human behavior. A recent study concluded that taxes on sugary sodas won’t cause overweight people to drink less sugary soda, because by and large they already drink diet sodas.

Steven Chapman looked at the folly of menu labeling laws in a Reason article back in 2009:

[T]he early evidence suggests that people don’t choose high-calorie fast foods because they don’t know any better. They choose them because they like them, and they don’t really care if othersAdam  disapprove.

That’s the implication of a new study in the journal Health Affairs conducted by researchers at New York University and Yale University. They asked questions of and collected receipts from customers at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and KFC outlets in the city before and after the law took effect, and did the same in Newark, N.J., which has no such law.

The impact of the ordinance didn’t quite fulfill those fond expectations. To start with, only about half of the fast-food customers in New York said they noticed all this helpful information, and only a quarter of the patrons in this group said it made any difference in their choices.

Even those who said the data affected their decisions were fooling themselves. Before the law was implemented, the average customer in New York bought items containing 825 calories. Afterward, the figure was 846. In Newark, during the same time period, the typical patron went from 823 calories to 826.

In neither place did diners cut back on saturated fat, sodium, or sugar. The labeling law was the moral equivalent of the Chicago Olympics bid—lots of hype to little effect.

Despite clear evidence that the laws don’t achieve their intended effect, Matthew Yglesias seems confused why anyone would oppose them:

Enthusiasm for the policy is so pervasive because the intervention is so utterly mild. Compare that to a proposal for a $100 tax on cheeseburgers. A cheeseburger tax would be extremely burdensome on people who really like cheeseburgers. It’s possible that you could persuade me that the public health benefits would be so dramatic that this kind of seemingly arbitrary tax is a good idea, but that’d be a high evidentiary hill to climb. But the long-term financial cost of making people print calorie counts on menus is zero. It’s possible that consumers turn out not to care, in which case there’s no cost at all. Alternatively, if it does turn out that some firms’ interests are adversely impacted by the rule that would have to be because it turns out that consumers actually do care a lot about calorie counts. At worst, there’s no impact. At best, you’re helping people. Either way, it seems worth doing.

Adam Serwer makes the same “low cost, more information” argument:

As The Washington Post story suggests, for that reason it doesn’t hurt businesses’ bottom line either. But if the calorie labeling doesn’t meaningfully improve public health, it at least provides the consumer with the data to make an informed decision. With labeling, it’s harder to argue that your weight problem is someone else’s fault, whereas nannyism seeks to prevent you from making your own choices — by say, banning Happy Meals. Informed consent is a worthy goal in and of itself, even if people still choose to eat poorly.

When you’re talking about large chain restaurants, it’s likely true that a menu labeling law doesn’t significantly increase the cost of doing business, or at least not to a degree that impacts the bottom line. These are large corporations, or the very least franchises supported by large corporations, and menu redesigns are a routine part of business. Adding in some information about nutritional content wouldn’t be difficult at all. In fact, some restaurant chains already provide information of that type on their menus because they’ve used it as a way to appeal to people who are on weight management programs like Weight Watchers. The same can’t said, though, of smaller restaurants, which may consist of merely a single restaurant or a small chain, as this interview with the owner of Davanni’s, a chain of 21 pizza/Italian restaurants in the Minneapolis/St Paul area points out:

Ed Morrissey, who conducted the interview in the wake of the discovery that the Affordable Care Act included a menu labeling mandate, made this point:

The pressure of this law will eventually force restaurants like Davanni’s to reduce consumer choice as a way of managing the overwhelming burden of maintaining their disclosures. Smaller chains that succeed in satisfying their customers and managing their business used to be rewarded with growth, but this law will put an artificial cap on expansion at 19 locations. That means that fewer people will find jobs, and even in existing stores, money that may have funded more jobs will instead go to reprinting the same menu boards over and over again. And all of this comes because political elites think that people are too stupid to know that a pizza is fattening or how to access information that already exists in much more efficient formats than menu boards.

There are already several sources out there where you can find out the nutritional content of the food served in most large chain restaurants, why people like Yglesias and Serwer think that mandating that this information be included on every restaurant menu when it’s shown it doesn’t really change behavior is extremely puzzling.

There are other problems with these laws, of course. For example, who determines what the “correct” calorie count is for a given dish. A prepared meal isn’t like a pre-packaged meal in a supermarket whose nutritional information has already been determined. Sometimes, a chef will make changes to a dish on a daily basis that would make the information set forth on a menu incomplete. Who gets to say what an acceptable deviation would be?

As with other such regulations, a menu labeling law will inevitably hurt smaller businesses far more than it hurts large ones. As I noted above, the costs of adding nutritional information to a menu is relatively small for a large chain. That’s why you don’t hear the McDonald’s of the world objecting to labeling laws, they know they can comply with them at minimal cost. It’s their competitors in the smaller restaurants who will bear the brunt of the costs of the regulation, and who are also more likely to be the subject of disciplinary action by regulators for non-compliance with some hyper-technical aspect of the law. If you’re okay with hurting small business at the expense of big business I suppose it doesn’t matter to you, but when you combine this with the fact that it has no real impact on human behavior it seems pretty clear that these laws are a big waste of time.

Photo via The Washington Post

Ramesh Ponnuru offers, in one paragraph, the two most ridiculous arguments in favor of eliminating privatizing Medicare possible.

No, the alternative is heavy-handed bureaucratic cost- cutting. The Democratic plan is cutting payment rates so that Medicare becomes as lousy a program as Medicaid, with doctors refusing to participate in it. The Democratic plan is letting an unelected board decide which treatments won’t get funded.

Out of curiousity, is Ponnuru familiar with how the real world works? In the real world, the vast, vast majority of doctors accept both Medicare and Medicaid. In the meantime, anyone who has private health insurance knows that it’s a struggle to find an “in-network” doctor that you can go to without paying extra out of pocket costs. In my area, there are hospitals that don’t accept all health insurance companies — even national carriers.

As far as unelected boards making decisions about funding go, last time I checked, major insurance companies are also run by unelected boards. And whether a medical service is funded is the choice of the insurance company, not the patient. But the “unelected boards” of Medicare are subject to the political process and the voting in and out of elected officials–which means, ultimately, that patient concerns will be key, however attenuated they may be. The unelected boards of the private sector are accountable to shareholders — not patients. This is particularly true given that most of us have no opportunity to make decisions about our insurance provider — we’re limited either by our employer’s choices or the simple fact that most regions only have a handful of providers offering roughly the same plans.

If Ponnuru wants to compare the quality of service of Medicare vs. private health insurance companies, I don’t think his side is going to win.

This is especially true when you consider that Ryan’s Medicare vouchers will substantially increase the out-of-pocket costs for the poor and the elderly. This is, in part, due to the fact that the “efficient” private sector has over double the administrative costs than that “inefficient” government program, Medicare.

And, I might add, the “Democratic Plan”, as adopted by the Obama Administration and the Democrats when the passed the ACA, actually does something about the underlying problem with funding Medicare — rising health care costs. And they’re doing it by basing Medicare payments to health care providers based on performance.

A major goal of the new health care law, often overlooked, is to improve “the quality and efficiency of health care” by linking payments to the performance of health care providers. The new Medicare initiative, known as value-based purchasing, will redistribute money among more than 3,100 hospitals.

Medicare will begin computing performance scores in July, for monetary rewards and penalties that start in October 2012.

This plan ain’t perfect, but it’s at least a start.

In the meantime, the Ryan Plan is best characterized as:

1) Privatize Medicare
2) ????
3) Lower health-care costs!

I’m open to market-based reforms of the health care system. But it would be nice if they had some grounding in reality, instead of magical thinking.

In Alex Knapp‘s post yesterday on the topic of the size of government, a commenter opined the following:

the greatest evil mankind has ever imposed upon himself is bureaucracy

Now, apart from the obvious retort that the are any number of other things that come to mind in the great List o’ Evil before we get to bureaucracy (like, oh, I dunno, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, murder, rape, child molestation, and the like), I would even go so far as to say that bureaucracy is not only not evil but, in fact, good (even though it can be radically annoying at times).

In this post I want to deal with what a bureaucracy is, why it is a good thing, how it relates to the public sector and the private, and why

1. Basic Definition.

A bureaucracy, in a generic sense, has the following characteristics:

• It has a specific purpose/mission.
• It operates under known (and knowable) standard operating procedures (i.e., rules specific to its mission).  These rules apply to behavior of those who work in the organization and the way in which those seeking services from that bureaucracy.
• It is hierarchical in organizational structure.
• Personnel is selected based on their expertise relative the job needing to be done.

So, if consider a university by way of example:  its mission is to provide an undergraduate and graduate education (basic mission) and it details that mission in its undergraduate and graduate catalogs (its standard operating procedures).  Further, the university has an array of employees from the groundskeepers to the clerical staff to the faculty and to the administration (which is hierarchical in organization).  In fact, like all complex organizations, a university is made up of several interlocking bureaucracies (e.g., the academic portion, the human resources portion, the physical plant, etc.).  And those people are hired because they have the appropriate expertise (e.g., an assistant professor of Biology needs to have a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences and the head of financial services needs the appropriate training in finance/accounting, etc.).

Certainly it is easy to see how the US Defense Department or the Department of Health and Human Services fits the basic model.

It should be noted that the above definition is true whether we are talking about the public sector or the private sector.  In other words, while we often associate the word “bureaucracy” with government, the fact of the matter is that the definition above applies not just to the DMV or the Department of Defense, but also to your cable company or McDonald’s.

2.  Why This is Good (and Why it is Annoying)

It is important to understand that this basic mode of organization is a hallmark of modernity and it is, on balance, a very good thing.  The alternative is a system of ad hoc rules and one that employs people based on patronage or family ties. We should want dispassionate, properly trained functionaries following established rules doing basic administration work.

To restate:  do you want the rules at the DMV to be arbitrary?  That is to say do you want them just made up the rules on the spot, dependent on whom is working that day and what their mood is?  Do you want driver’s licenses issue on a wholly ad hoc system of qualification?  Do you want people who do safety inspections on airplanes to actually know what they are doing or do you want them getting the job because Uncle Bob got to hire whomever he pleased?

Of course, dispassionate bureaucrats who follow the rules can be massively frustrating when we have a problem, don’t understand the rules, and/or are in a hurry.  When we have a problem with the DMV (or our insurance company) we don’t want the rules, we want “common sense” in a way that solves our problem the way we want it solved.  Of course, depending on the situation, the solution that we want may not comport with the rules (and perhaps for very good reasons) and that can be extremely frustrating (and yes, sometimes the rules are dumb).  What we forget, however, is that complex organizations (even relatively small ones like your doctor’s office) cannot make up the rules on the fly and tailor every experience to the individual (if not idiosyncratic) needs of a given client.

If we all lived in small (very small) towns in a pre-industrial age where we did not need big organizations to provide services (e.g., electricity, water, waste water, garbage collection, phone, internet, cable, insurance, police, fire, and education to name several of both public, private and combined natures) then we wouldn’t need the rules and structures and, theoretically, transactions in life would be less frustrating because we would be interacting one-on-one with people we knew (such as at the local feed store) and not with large, faceless organizations.  Of course, sometimes interacting with the same person all the time can be a pain as well (what if the owner of the feed store is an ass?).

And yes, bureaucracies have a host of pathologies, some of which are endemic to public sector bureaucracies while others are more common in the private sector.   A basic explanation for this fact can be found by looking under “human nature” in the “inherent imperfections thereof” section.

3.  Conclusion

No doubt someone is going to tell me that they have had experiences with unqualified person in a bureaucratic job.  I am sure that this is true.  I am also sure that sometimes people get preferential treatment because of personal relationships and that rules sometimes get bent or ignored.  None of that undercuts the fact that those are the exceptions to the way the over system works, rather than the rule.   We need these structures because the alternative is ad hocery and patronage politics, which is a far less desirable method governing both public and private organizations.

Really, the main problem that most people have with bureaucracies is rooted in the fact that managing the needs of large numbers of persons is always complicated and it is, like all of human existence, an imperfect affair.

To get back to Alex’s point in the post that inspired this one:  since bureaucracy is an integral part of modern governance, the question before us is not whether we should have them or not but, rather, how to make them function as well as is possible.

All of this is important because unless we understand the basic facts we get well off course in our discussions of reality.  The simplistic notion that bureaucracies are “evil” or that if we just had less of them our lives would be better is a problematic one.  The focus should be more on getting things to work properly–which sometimes means adding, sometimes means subtracting, and very often means fine-tuning.  And, above all else, recognizing that ideological visions of perfection are fantasies.