The Virtues of Red Tape

Bureaucracy is a feature rather than a bug when it comes to government.

File this under “Be careful what you wish for.”

We do not necessarily want an efficient, streamlined government. This is the big fallacy in thinking we want a business leader as governor or president. That is the way to majoritarianism at best and autocracy at worst.

In many ways we want government to be slow, clunky, and easily second guessed. The reason is simple: It is way too powerful. We do not want government to “move fast and break things” because it is not breaking its own things when it does. Facebook famously used this as an unofficial motto, but even it modified this to “move fast with stable infrastructure” once it became exceptionally large, large for a company that is.

Government is at least an order of magnitude bigger, more powerful than a corporation. The government is the guys with guns and jails. Mark Zuckerberg cannot deport you. He took orders (from government) to suppress information during COVID—he did not create them.

The central problem with government as a solution provider is not inefficiency; it is innately poor incentives. The solution is smaller government, less government, not better-enabled government with fewer restraints and better execution.

This is obviously topical given Trump’s proposal to appoint Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as co-heads of the new "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) commission. Yet don’t by any means limit your concern to this particular iteration. Every presidential politician has claimed the cause of reducing waste, fraud, and abuse (WFA). This is noble in concept but worse than elusive in practice.

When one man’s WFA is another man’s income, there is a lot more room for collusion than reform. All the more problematic when the would-be reformer is the should-be enforcer. George Will succinctly lays out the difficulty noting how we’ve been here before. Alas, it seems there are no Serpicos.

Still, this is but the reason DOGE will fail. It is not the reason we should want it to fail. That is my main point in this post. We should want it to fail at least in part since a government that is efficiently powerful is more powerful and dangerous than is an inefficient version of the same.

We should want DOGE to succeed where it can meaningfully shrink government (i.e., reduce regulatory and administrative reach, smaller scope, less impact). None of that is “efficiency”. If anything, it is a hope for less efficiency. Fewer bureaucrats in the Department of Interfering With Private Citizens and Business means less opportunity for interference with private citizens and business. It does not mean quicker, more direct interference. So there is a disconnect here.

Think of government as a version of Cyclops from the X-Men. His namesake mutation was emitting powerful beams of energy from his eyes. From the Wikipedia entry:

The beams constantly emanate from his eyes involuntarily, and can generally only be stopped by his own eyelids, or by shielding his eyes with "ruby-quartz", a translucent mineral. Cyclops wears ruby-quartz as lenses in his sunglasses or in his visor, which is generally the only way for him to safely see without inadvertently damaging his surroundings.

Red tape is the government equivalent of ruby lenses. Remove it, and unmitigated damage can ensue.

“But don’t we then just need good government, better people, the right people?” I hear you derisively ask.

I’m tempted to answer, “That’s cute, but the adults are talking, sweetie. Run along.” My snarky reply is because that is a childish assumption for solving the problem. It is the political science equivalent to “assume a can opener”.

Astute readers will have already picked up on some tension between my position and Tyler Cowen's arguments for State Capacity Libertarianism. Indeed there is some areas of conflict, but most of that argument is orthogonal to the position I am laying out. Cowen argues for a small state with capacity. I don’t necessarily disagree with this. I just might have more concerns than him despite him being very, very far from a technocrat’s point of view—we are on the same side arguing details.

In Cowen’s framing government should be effective in the highly limited roles we give it. So to some extent he is assuming away or moving past the concerns I have. Again, I am fine with that discussion myself endorsing much/most of his position. It is the getting from here to there that worries me.

Added 2024-11-16: We’ll leave for another day the impossibility of finding $2 trillion of budget cuts without touching entitlements, defense, and interest on the debt.