How many people marry the first person they ever kiss or date or even have sex with? Not that many. The average age an American loses their virginity is 17 while the average age they get married is 27. Nonetheless, despite a decade in the dating pool, experiencing everything from one night stands to years of living with someone, when people finally take the plunge, half of all marriages end up in divorce.

There are lots of things that one might take from that observation, but the thing that is most compelling is that despite their best efforts, people are not perfect. They make mistakes. After spending the first 10 years of their adult lives trying to get it right for what is arguably the most important decision of their lives, half the population still gets it wrong and asks for a “do over”. Despite all efforts to make a good decision, half the time we get it wrong. And that’s with everyone involved seeking a common goal!

So the question is: If, with everyone involved seeking to do what’s in their and their partner’s best interests, we get it wrong half the time, how often does government, with its myriad players involved, many promoting conflicting, even mutually exclusive positions, get things wrong? No doubt far more often that individuals earnestly seeking a lifetime of happiness.

Unfortunately with government, unlike marriage, rarely, even in the face of abject failure, does a law or regulation get thrown out. Once a law is on the books, they almost never come off regardless of their cost or efficacy. Of course if it were only a few laws there wouldn’t be much of a problem. It’s not a few. In terms of actual federal laws, today there are somewhere in excess of 20,000 on the books. That is nothing when compared with the regulations those laws have spawned.

The Code of Federal Regulations is the list of all of the regulations of the United States – which are based on the bills passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. Today the Code contains over 150,000 pages of regulations. And those regulations are growing fast. In 1970, 183 years after the Constitution was ratified, the Code contained 53,000 pages. Today, a mere 40 years later we’ve actually added 100,000 more. And the pace is actually increasing and becoming more onerous.

If these regulations had little impact on our lives it wouldn’t matter if there were millions of them. Unfortunately their impact is anything but little. Federal regulations alone (and there are lots more laws at the local level) cost Americans over $1 trillion per year, or approximately 7% of our GDP and more than we actually pay in income taxes. And those are just the direct impact costs. Imagine how many companies are never started, how many would be entrepreneurs settle for secure government jobs, or how many companies fail because of the phalanx of federal regulations? No doubt the number is huge.

This leviathan of government regulation is made all the more worse because it has spawned an army of millions of federal government employees and lobbyists, none of whom wants to put themselves out of work. The intractable problem of government growth and increasing regulation will not solve itself. It’s going to take brute Constitutional force.

A Constitutional Amendment should be passed that states that all federal laws have an implicit sunset provision of 10 years unless it passes each house of Congress by at least 60%. It would also stipulate that all federal regulations would sunset after 10 years, regardless of the margin of passage of the underlying law. The effect of this Amendment would be a greatly diminished the number of zombie like federal regulations that never die, regardless of their cost, efficacy or unintended consequences. Each sub 60% law would have to be re-authorized each decade.

The most obvious impact of this change would be that politicians and bureaucrats would no longer be able to spin yarns about milk and honey without any accountability. At the time of reconsideration, each sub 60% bill (or every regulation) would have a decade’s worth of hard data to analyze, making it far more difficult to hoodwink the public with rosy scenarios that have no basis in reality. The beauty of this proposal is that it would force legislators and regulators to defend a law’s actual results rather than opine on its promised virtues. Given that most government programs cost more than projected, rarely work as promised, and often have significant unintended consequences, a decade should be a long enough time to inflict any law or regulation on the country and her citizens.

This proposed Amendment would apply to all existing laws and regulations, giving each 10 years from the day of ratification before it expired. The result of this would be immediate and twofold: It would dramatically slow the growth of government and regulations while simultaneously beginning to make government more efficient. By forcing politicians and bureaucrats to focus on defending their existing laws and regulations (AKA power) it would immediately diminish their incentive to create new programs. At the same time, given that politicians and bureaucrats would have to argue against a law’s or a regulation’s actual consequences rather than it’s promised benefits, it would force them to focus their attention on producing demonstratively positive results rather than just spending more money or accumulating more power.

In the Omega Glory episode of Star Trek Captain Kirk and company come upon a planet where the inhabitants are speaking the garbled versions of the words of the Pledge of Allegiance. The people don’t know the actual words or even what they mean but do so because that was what has survived through the generations. In a similar way, when laws and regulations (and the bureaucracy they spawn) calcify and become completely detached from the original goal for which they were established, they cease to be proper tools of government and instead become simply another instrument of government power and coercion. By putting in place a mechanism for objectively evaluating the success or failure of government actions in relation to the problems they were intended to address, this Amendment would both demand real accountability on the part of government as well as give citizens a reason to remain engaged in its workings.

I can think of no better mechanism for putting Thomas Jefferson’s words into action:

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

Which explains

The Cyclical Rise and Fall of Bureaucracy

While at the same time answering the age-old question:

“What happened to the Maya?”

OR

I’M NOT GIVING YOU ANYMORE CORN TO BUILD PYRAMIDS

Introduction

“The Mayas were intelligent; they had a highly developed culture. They left behind not only a fabulous calendar but also incredible calculations. They knew the Venusian year of 584 days. . . ” (p.55)

Von Daniken, Erich. Chariots of the Gods? Bantam Books: New York.

For years people wondered where did these peaceful geniuses go.  Did the mother ship come down and carry them back to Jupiter or wherever peaceful geniuses come from?  Did they evolve into a higher state of being? 

All this wondering provided the gist for popular speculation and pseudoscientific pontification for many years or at least until Yuri Valentinovich Knorosov and other linguists translated the Mayan language.  Then it was learned that they might not have been so peaceful after all, and as a matter of fact they may have been one of the most warlike of all peoples.  And low and behold archeological data began to supply the required evidence and the problem was solved: the Mayan had destroyed themselves in an orgy of fire and arrows.  It all seemed so neat, scientific, and profitable.

Then some smart aleck historian, who also happened to be an organizational leadership researcher, made the mistake of interviewing some of the Native Americans who today make-up a sizable portion of the population of Guatemala and Mexico who happen to look surprisingly like the people depicted in the Mayan bas-reliefs.  And inconvenient as it may seem once all this speculation, pontification, and general wondering had made several careers and helped some otherwise starving publishers buy much needed yachts and mansions this eager young researcher emerged from the wilds ofNorthern Arizona and declared, “The Maya had NOT disappeared after all.” 

“What!”  Cried the popular speculators. 

“Away with him!”  Yelled the enraged pseudoscientific pontificators. 

“Quick, have him write a book about it!”  Yelled the copious publishers from their thousand foot yachts docked outside their hundred room mansions.

Since it is impossible to categorically answer the question, “What?”  And since no one really ever feels like following the Red Queen’s advice and conveniently being, “Away withed.”  I figured I might as well at least write an article and do my little part to help keep poor, disadvantaged publishers supplied with at least enough caviar, truffles and European blended coffees to avert any relief from the high cholesterol and gout which serve as their red badge of courage.

So where did the Maya go?  To quote one of my sources, “We got tired of giving those guys all our corn to build pyramids so we moved to the next valley and kept our corn for ourselves or something like that.”

This somehow brings me to the breakthrough Organizational Leadership concepts that should make my career as a leadership expert and hopefully get me an invitation to sip European coffee and eat truffles on one of those yachts. 

Are you ready? 

Here they come:

1. Bureaucracy is a good thing.
2. History supports the theory that bureaucracy is fundamental to the human condition
3. Bureaucracies all start out as pyramids with a large base, a small peak, and a proportional center, which adequately supports the top and adequately covers the base.
4. Bureaucratic pyramids all eventually become diamonds as they bloat in the middle.
5. All organizational diamonds eventually collapse due to the bloated weight of the expanded center.
6.  The top is always lost in the crash. 
7. A majority of the center plunges back to the base.
8. The natural leveling process of change never leaves a level playing field.
9. A new peak immediately appears because there is always a point that rises above the field.
10. The remaining middle coalesces to support the new peak in order to accentuate and solidify its difference from the base.
11. Another pyramid establishes itself on the ruins of the preceding one. 

I call this Owens’ Law of the Oscillating Pyramid.  I propose that this Law explains the cyclical rise and fall of bureaucracy.  This Law is based upon observation and research and upon the fact that eventually the costs outweigh the benefits and someday, somewhere someone is going to yell, “I’m not giving you anymore of my corn to build pyramids!”

The collapse of the Soviet Union provided a perfect example of this phenomenon.  For decades, this highly bureaucratic “Evil Empire” had enforced its rule by giving benefits to one group (the communists) to brutalize and dominate other groups (everyone else).  As the model predicted the Soviet system admitted more and more people into the middle of the pyramid thus bloating the mid-level brutalizers and increasing the number of people who supposedly had a stake in the system.  But unfortunately for the Evil Empire the inefficiencies of the system didn’t allow the pyramid to provide the material advantages needed to continue the inflation nor to even sustain the growing weight of the middle level.  Therefore with no incentive to continue supporting the regime the pyramid collapsed.

Bureaucracy = hierarchical structure, division of labor, written rules, and records. 

This has been evident since the beginning of time. 

Examples:

Revolution every generation

Revolutionary youth becoming Reactionary adults

Luther from 99 theses to peasant revolt

British bureaucracy “the ministry” goes on though ministers may come and go.

Pyramids are made of pyramids, each department or group has a head, and each head is supported by layers. 

When a pyramid falls these component pyramids tend to seek independence (Chinese mandarins – Roman Empire) and then they begin to coalesce into succeeding pyramids, such as exemplified by the successive Egyptian and Chinese dynasties or the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne.

Signs that the end of a pyramids cycle is approaching:

• “I was just following orders,”  or “That’s the way we’ve always done it,” as an excuse for doing things that common sense tells us are foolish. 
• Malicious obedience.  When a subordinate follows the nonsensical orders of superiors in the hopes that doing so will bring about change.
• Geritocracy.  Look at Congress.  Almost automatic re-election ensures a constantly aging pool of leaders with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

In modern American society we have moved from Trueman’s “The buck stops here,” to Clinton’s “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.?’ ”  From Bill Gates leading an industry to change the world to octegenarian politicians whose secretary’s have to turn on their computers deciding what shape that industry should take.

At the time of the American Revolution there was no direct taxation there was instead taxes on various transactions which in total added up to a miniscule percentage of their income.  Today, for many it is now over 50%.  How much corn are we willing to give to those we don’t trust to do things we don’t want?  How long can this continue?  We are spending the money of the unborn to pay for the repose of the unproductive.  This is the ultimate expression of taxation without representation.

The Oscillating Pyramid Cycle:

Formless base – pinnacle dominated true pyramid – bloated middle diamond shaped twin pyramid – out of balance wobble (component pyramids strive for increasing individual autonomy) – collapse

Historical opportunity to break this cycle:

The Israelites at Mt.Sinai.  Instead they reject God’s offer to reinstate a personal relationship and demanded that Moses build them a social pyramid instead.

Proposed Exception to the Rule:

Steady-state primitive (Neolithic, pre-agriculture) societies both ancient and modern have been advanced as being different then the cultures of the present and therefore by implication exempt from this theory of bureaucratic/organizational structure.  There is not enough social or organizational data to make informed statements about unknown cultures.  Every one that has been extensively studied and reported on exhibited the pyramidal, hierarchical social structure and rule based operation even if a lack of writing precluded the development of true bureaucracy.

Long running societies (China, India, and Rome) exhibit this oscillating character within the ebb and flow of civil war and dynastic change.

In modern democracies, elections are designed to provide stability through a peaceful, periodic change in the pinnacle thereby allowing the base to exert influence and buy into the existence of the pyramid through nationalism.  Economic self-interest has also become a major factor in modern democracies.  Periodic major changes, Andrew Jackson, FDR, etc. change the tenor but not the shape as the middle continues to bloat.  Modern democracies are still too new of a phenomenon to contend that they will break the pattern and at the moment they appear to be textbook cases of its operation.

Change of focus for modern consideration: Bureaucracy is a GOOD thing.  The oscillating nature of its natural life cycle should be understood, recognized, appreciated, and factored into current calculations for what it is, the natural course of human organization.  Change is a constant component of life. 

So the next time you’re standing in line to renew whatever permit happens to need renewing at the time tell yourself that, “Bureaucracy is a GOOD thing.”  Tell yourself that about a thousand times as you wait for the clerk who has been standing at the window for ten minutes waiting to open the window at exactly 9 AM and not one second sooner.  And as your mind numbs through this exercise you can comfort yourself with the thought, “Eventually all pyramids fall,” as you fight to keep yourself from standing on a chair and yelling,

“I’M NOT GIVING YOU ANYMORE CORN TO BUILD PYRAMIDS!”

Then again as every pyramid falls another takes its place. That is Owens’ Law of Oscillating Pyramids.

Dr. Owens teaches History, Political Science, and Religion for Southside Virginia Community College.  He is the author of the History of the Future @ http://drrobertowens.com © 2011 Robert R. Owens drrobertowens@hotmail.com  Follow Dr. Robert Owens on Facebook or Twitter @ Drrobertowens

Conservatives are constantly being accused of wanting no government. When we talk about wanting to eliminate things like the IRS, the Departments of Energy and Education or rein in rouge agencies like the EPA and the NLRB we are accused of wanting no government at all. That’s simply false. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a conservative speak about wanting to eliminate all government, or even the federal government.

Most conservatives understand that the absence of functional government brings chaos. In an environment where chaos reigns, at some point someone will step in and impose order. That person or group then becomes the de facto government. Perhaps the clearest example of this in recent history was the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in the mid 1990’s. Although pockets of resistance remained, by the late 90’s the Taliban were firmly in control of the country. Most Afghanis didn’t like the Taliban, but they appreciated the relative order they brought to the country.

Here in America our problem is not a lack of government, but the opposite, too much of it. The strings of regulation end up wrapped around the wheels of the American economy and ends up clogging what might otherwise be a well oiled machine. An unfettered economy would not be flawless, but it would be far more dynamic than the straitjacketed one we have today.

To put this in perspective, take the IRS tax code. According to the Heritage Foundation, it will cost America just more than $400 billion in 2011 to comply with the tax code, and that does not include the cost of the actual taxes themselves. Given that the federal government will take in approximately $2.2 trillion in taxes this year, that means Americans will spend an additional 20% of their tax bill just trying to figure out how to pay the bill in the first place!

How is that even possible? Well, the tax code is approximately 72,000 pages long and it’s broken down into 750 subchapters. Imagine if you are a widget manufacturer with 10,000 employees spread out over 20 states. How many employees would you need to have on staff to make sure that that company was complying with the regulations written on every one of those 72,000 pages? How much time (read: money) would your accounting and legal staffs have to spend to ensure that everything you did was within the IRS’s guidelines? How much time would management have to waste evaluating what product or service to provide or what energy provider to choose depending on what provides the best tax advantage? How about deciding how employee benefits should be allotted between taxable and non-taxable to maximize employee compensation?

As difficult as scenario is, at least large companies can pay for the necessary accounting and legal staffs. Imagine you are a struggling businessman with 5 employees who has to choose between spending money on another employee to help him compete in the marketplace or on someone to decipher the 72,000 pages of the IRS tax code. The fact that an employer (or homeowner or parents of a college student or someone approaching retirement…) has to base many of their financial decisions on what the IRS rules are is bad enough, but for the rules to be so numerous and incomprehensible that it restricts productivity borders on criminal. And to put a cherry on top of it, all of that effort is spent just to figure out how to give the money to the government so they can spend much of it on stuff you’d never pay for if you had the choice.

Lucky for Americans, the tax code is not the only sign of a government gone wild. There is also the Code of Federal Regulations (the codification of the general and permanent rules published in the Federal Register by the executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government). The Code covers 163,333 pages, in 226 books. Those are the regulations that cover everything from that ticket on your mattress to the kind of gas you can put in your car to how long an airline can delay a flight to what can be labeled diet in the supermarket to the endless pages of directions and warnings provided with medicine bottles. Unless you are living in Ted Kaczynski’s summer home, not a day goes by that you do not cross paths with hundreds or thousands of these regulations. Like microwaves, you may not see them, but they are there nonetheless, impacting everything from hiring (or not, as the case might be) or marketing or investment decisions for everyone from Fortune 500 companies to neighborhood entrepreneurs.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that federal regulations cost Americans $1.75 trillion each year. That includes everything from environmental regulations to cable rates to the number of hours employees can work to months of tax compliance research. Add to that the $2.2 trillion Uncle Sam collects in taxes and you have almost 25% of our GDP being directly driven by government. Given the suffocatingly large and restrictive presence of government in our lives, is it any wonder that our economy is moving along at a dying snail’s pace? At the end of the day conservatives don’t propose no government, just limited government. We’d like to free up the American people to transform this moribund economy into a juggernaut of creativity, productivity, jobs and prosperity. That can’t be done while they are being strangled by government rules and regulations…

So, Wednesday – while campaigning in Illinois, although I understand that we’re supposed to pretend that Obama isn’t actually campaigning, for some bizarre reason – the President of the United States faced with a technical question (the effects of new EPA’s soil and dust regulations on Illinois farmers) by a technical expert (an Illinois farmer). Despite the fact that the technical question is in fact supposedly within Barack Obama’s level of expertise, the President decided instead to make slight fun of the probably-not-voting-for-him-anyway technical expert by chiding him about believing rumors and suggesting that the technical expert call the Department of Agriculture.

Well. There was a Politico reporter who actually decided to see what would happen if s/he did precisely that. So s/he did. As near as I can tell, the original inquiry about “information related to the effects of noise and dust pollution rules on Illinois farmers” turned into a two day affair involving at least ten phone calls, seven separate, discrete offices (almost all of which also included internal phone tag), and at least twelve individuals. And as for the final answer? This is what they sent (yes, sent, via safely distancing email):

“Secretary Vilsack continues to work closely with members of the Cabinet to help them engage with the agricultural community to ensure that we are separating fact from fiction on regulations because the administration is committed to providing greater certainty for farmers and ranchers. Because the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction, it does not provide a fair representation of USDA’s robust efforts to get the right information to our producers throughout the country.”

Shorter USDA: “I dunno. Call the President.”

Lots of people – Jonah Goldberg in particular – are going off on this, but I’d like to explain why the President made such a dunderheaded comment as this. It has to do with his rather parochial background. Obviously, nothing in Barack Obama’s life until 1996 would have had him dealing with the Department of Agriculture: from college on he was firmly implanted in the warm, comforting isolation unit that is urban liberal academia. The odds of him having to navigate the byzantine agricultural bureaucracies? Nil. In fact, he probably rarely had to interact with government bureaucracies at their worst at all. Many people manage not to – unless there’s an unique problem*.

And after 1996, when Barack Obama became a legislator – and thus a person who did deal with government bureaucracies on a regular basis? Well. That’s precisely when the power dynamic would have changed for him anyway. You see, when a regular citizen calls a government bureaucrat, the former is counting on the latter having a good day, or at least not a bad one. But when even a state senator calls a government bureaucrat, that bureaucrat is the one who has to worry about good and bad days all of a sudden. Put more explicitly: Illinois State Senator Obama could reliably expect that his calls would be well-received, and that a prompt response would be provided. US Senator Obama could reliably expect that calls made by his staffers would be well-received, and that a prompt response would be provided. President Obama is used to having every random information request that he makes be immediately jumped upon by an eager policy wonk and sent off to be answered by the relevant agency, who will of course treat that request with the highest possible priority.

So of course Barack Obama thinks that calling the USDA is not only a bright idea, but it’s such an obvious one that only the ignorant or obtuse wouldn’t get it immediately. He’s almost certainly never neither had the relevant life experiences, nor the intellectual curiosity, to discover otherwise.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*To be fair, many government agencies officials do in fact at least try to be helpful; particularly if you have a genuine emergency – like, say, having a swarm of bees in your house. But you never know.

So, Wednesday – while campaigning in Illinois, although I understand that we’re supposed to pretend that Obama isn’t actually campaigning, for some bizarre reason – the President of the United States faced with a technical question (the effects of new EPA’s soil and dust regulations on Illinois farmers) by a technical expert (an Illinois farmer). Despite the fact that the technical question is in fact supposedly within Barack Obama’s level of expertise, the President decided instead to make slight fun of the probably-not-voting-for-him-anyway technical expert by chiding him about believing rumors and suggesting that the technical expert call the Department of Agriculture.

Well. There was a Politico reporter who actually decided to see what would happen if s/he did precisely that. So s/he did. As near as I can tell, the original inquiry about “information related to the effects of noise and dust pollution rules on Illinois farmers” turned into a two day affair involving at least ten phone calls, seven separate, discrete offices (almost all of which also included internal phone tag), and at least twelve individuals. And as for the final answer? This is what they sent (yes, sent, via safely distancing email):

“Secretary Vilsack continues to work closely with members of the Cabinet to help them engage with the agricultural community to ensure that we are separating fact from fiction on regulations because the administration is committed to providing greater certainty for farmers and ranchers. Because the question that was posed did not fall within USDA jurisdiction, it does not provide a fair representation of USDA’s robust efforts to get the right information to our producers throughout the country.”

Shorter USDA: “I dunno. Call the President.”

Lots of people – Jonah Goldberg in particular – are going off on this, but I’d like to explain why the President made such a dunderheaded comment as this. It has to do with his rather parochial background. Obviously, nothing in Barack Obama’s life until 1996 would have had him dealing with the Department of Agriculture: from college on he was firmly implanted in the warm, comforting isolation unit that is urban liberal academia. The odds of him having to navigate the byzantine agricultural bureaucracies? Nil. In fact, he probably rarely had to interact with government bureaucracies at their worst at all. Many people manage not to – unless there’s an unique problem*.

And after 1996, when Barack Obama became a legislator – and thus a person who did deal with government bureaucracies on a regular basis? Well. That’s precisely when the power dynamic would have changed for him anyway. You see, when a regular citizen calls a government bureaucrat, the former is counting on the latter having a good day, or at least not a bad one. But when even a state senator calls a government bureaucrat, that bureaucrat is the one who has to worry about good and bad days all of a sudden. Put more explicitly: Illinois State Senator Obama could reliably expect that his calls would be well-received, and that a prompt response would be provided. US Senator Obama could reliably expect that calls made by his staffers would be well-received, and that a prompt response would be provided. President Obama is used to having every random information request that he makes be immediately jumped upon by an eager policy wonk and sent off to be answered by the relevant agency, who will of course treat that request with the highest possible priority.

So of course Barack Obama thinks that calling the USDA is not only a bright idea, but it’s such an obvious one that only the ignorant or obtuse wouldn’t get it immediately. He’s almost certainly never neither had the relevant life experiences, nor the intellectual curiosity, to discover otherwise.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*To be fair, many government agencies officials do in fact at least try to be helpful; particularly if you have a genuine emergency – like, say, having a swarm of bees in your house. But you never know.