5 ms·

Putting it in software terms: The administrative state is arguably the result of a lot of incremental hacks adopted to cope with decades of changing conditions

Putting it in software terms: The administrative state is arguably the result of a lot of incremental hacks adopted to cope with decades of changing conditions — and the fact that political polarization (and our imbalance of power favoring small rural states) has made it impracticable to try to modify the "code" in a "proper" fashion. (Not least this is because it's the production version that would have to be modified, with little opportunity for beta testing.) Sure, there's lots of code smell. But the code runs, more or less. Continuing to run the existing hacked version seems preferable to the alternative of giving up and shutting everything down.

rayiner 3y ago
By “proper” you mean “legal” and that makes all the difference. If the highest law of the land requires your OS to be a micro kernel, then sorry you’re not putting the GUI in kernel space, even if that would improve performance. And if you’ve already done that, well we gotta rip it out. One of the great virtues of Anglo culture—one that’s unfortunately been diluted to a great extent in America—is its formalistic, rule following nature. Our tolerance of fundamental departure from the formalism of our Constitution should be a matter of shame, in and of itself. But the complaint here isn’t merely aesthetic—about “code smell.” The ways in which we have ignored the constitution has changed who runs the country. And that’s bad for the country. No matter who you vote for, the actual running of the country will be done by the same corporate-friendly center-left bureaucracy. That’s not just frustrating to the right, it’s also ultimately frustrating to a large swath of the left. Every four years election promises go into the black hole of the administrative state, where they make at most minor changes in how the country is run.
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > If the highest law of the land requires your OS to be a micro kernel, then sorry you’re not putting the GUI in kernel space, even if that would improve performance. And if you’ve already done that, well we gotta rip it out. Except nothing in the highest law in the land requires the OS to be a micro kernel. The nondelegation doctrine [0] arose from a needlessly-cramped (and result-oriented) interpretation of the Constitution's grants of federal power. That interpretation was correctly jettisoned in the New Deal's response to the societal threats posed by the impact of the Great Depression. Again: • The vast majority of software users couldn't care less whether the OS is a micro kernel — they just want code that works, with reasonable reliability and efficiency. If it's not unreasonable to describe the existing OS as being a micro kernel, then let's just move on. • By the same token, the vast majority of citizens don't care how government is structured, they just want responsive, reliable service that doesn't needlessly intrude on their lives and isn't excessively costly. It's not at all unreasonable to say that delegation to agencies is not inconsistent with the Constitution's grants of federal power. So let's just move on and spend our time and energy on actual problems, instead of trying to return to the imagined doctrinal purity of yesteryear. • When actually changing the "kernel" (the Constitution) is difficult or impossible, as now, then workarounds are needed. Moreover, trying to do a complete rewrite of the running production system (i.e., a constitutional convention, à la 1787) would be reckless. • The administrative state is not unaccountable — we still have elections (at least for now), and administrative regs do change when administrations do, as we've seen repeatedly in recent years. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/nondelegation_doctrine https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/nondelegation_doctrine (which has links to selected law-review articles at Penn, Notre Dame, and Stanford).
- dctoedt 3y ago
  > Every four years election promises go into the black hole of the administrative state, where they make at most minor changes in how the country is run. And that's a bad thing? The administrative state is like code that's been tweaked to try to accommodate a shipload of edge- and corner cases, i.e., what's wanted by different people and interest groups who make their voices heard when things aren't being run to their liking.
aaomidi 3y ago
It’s literally the problems of legacy systems! A junior engineer comes in, without really grasping the whole problem, and says rewrite it. That’s what this conservative argument is boiling down to. “This software is a critical piece of our system. It’s literally the backbone of everything!” “Don’t care, rewrite it”

rayiner 3y ago

By “proper” you mean “legal” and that makes all the difference. If the highest law of the land requires your OS to be a micro kernel, then sorry you’re not putting the GUI in kernel space, even if that would improve performance. And if you’ve already done that, well we gotta rip it out. One of the great virtues of Anglo culture—one that’s unfortunately been diluted to a great extent in America—is its formalistic, rule following nature. Our tolerance of fundamental departure from the formalism of our Constitution should be a matter of shame, in and of itself. But the complaint here isn’t merely aesthetic—about “code smell.” The ways in which we have ignored the constitution has changed who runs the country. And that’s bad for the country. No matter who you vote for, the actual running of the country will be done by the same corporate-friendly center-left bureaucracy. That’s not just frustrating to the right, it’s also ultimately frustrating to a large swath of the left. Every four years election promises go into the black hole of the administrative state, where they make at most minor changes in how the country is run.

dctoedt 3y ago
> If the highest law of the land requires your OS to be a micro kernel, then sorry you’re not putting the GUI in kernel space, even if that would improve performance. And if you’ve already done that, well we gotta rip it out. Except nothing in the highest law in the land requires the OS to be a micro kernel. The nondelegation doctrine [0] arose from a needlessly-cramped (and result-oriented) interpretation of the Constitution's grants of federal power. That interpretation was correctly jettisoned in the New Deal's response to the societal threats posed by the impact of the Great Depression. Again: • The vast majority of software users couldn't care less whether the OS is a micro kernel — they just want code that works, with reasonable reliability and efficiency. If it's not unreasonable to describe the existing OS as being a micro kernel, then let's just move on. • By the same token, the vast majority of citizens don't care how government is structured, they just want responsive, reliable service that doesn't needlessly intrude on their lives and isn't excessively costly. It's not at all unreasonable to say that delegation to agencies is not inconsistent with the Constitution's grants of federal power. So let's just move on and spend our time and energy on actual problems, instead of trying to return to the imagined doctrinal purity of yesteryear. • When actually changing the "kernel" (the Constitution) is difficult or impossible, as now, then workarounds are needed. Moreover, trying to do a complete rewrite of the running production system (i.e., a constitutional convention, à la 1787) would be reckless. • The administrative state is not unaccountable — we still have elections (at least for now), and administrative regs do change when administrations do, as we've seen repeatedly in recent years. [0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/nondelegation_doctrine https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/nondelegation_doctrine (which has links to selected law-review articles at Penn, Notre Dame, and Stanford).
dctoedt 3y ago
> Every four years election promises go into the black hole of the administrative state, where they make at most minor changes in how the country is run. And that's a bad thing? The administrative state is like code that's been tweaked to try to accommodate a shipload of edge- and corner cases, i.e., what's wanted by different people and interest groups who make their voices heard when things aren't being run to their liking.

aaomidi 3y ago

It’s literally the problems of legacy systems! A junior engineer comes in, without really grasping the whole problem, and says rewrite it. That’s what this conservative argument is boiling down to. “This software is a critical piece of our system. It’s literally the backbone of everything!” “Don’t care, rewrite it”