Bureaucracy

June 10, 2013 — Steven Hayward

Was Orwell Right After All?

Featured image Cast your mind back a ways to the 1980s and early 1990s, and you may recall that our thoughts about technology started undergoing a revision—namely, that far from offering increasingly powerful tools for government oppression and control, personal computers, cell phones, and all the rest of the emergent technologies were becoming means of our liberation as well as barriers to oppressive government.  Certainly personal computers and new communication technology—or really »
May 29, 2013 — Steven Hayward

Law of Unintended Consequences Strikes Again

Featured image I forget which Chicago-school economist it was (probably it was Sam Peltzman) who once suggested that the most effective way to cut down on automobile accidents would be to place a sharp, eight-inch knife on the steering wheel of every car.  Instead, we got mandates for seat belts and air bags.  Peltzman’s research showed that in the early years people with seat belts suffered fewer injuries in accidents, but . »
May 25, 2013 — Steven Hayward

In Praise of Slow Learners

Featured image There’s this much to be said in praise of Jonathan Turley, professor of “public interest law” at George Washington University Law School, and frequent bobblehead on cable TV shows: at least he isn’t a supercilious smug-mugger like Jeffrey Toobin.  In addition, unlike Toobin, Turley often gets things right. But come on man, you’re only just discovering now that the federal administrative bureaucracy—the “fourth branch of government”—has become problematic?  From Turley’s »
January 28, 2013 — Steven Hayward

Bureaucracy in America

Featured image Bureaucracy in America may well be the subject and therefore the title of my next book, and its theme would be Tocqueville meets James Q. Wilson.  Tocqueville, as I mentioned in my note about the nanny state here a couple weeks ago, described the form of “soft despotism” that America needed to fear, but which he didn’t quite have a name for.  James Q. Wilson’s 1988 book Bureaucracy is still »