Everything the govt does is done through administrative agencies: the White House, Congress & Courts can only preen for screens or else pick little fights with all these ratty bureaucrats (whom they almost always can’t even fire). Let’s look at how they lean politically—brief 🧵:
The three best data sources for political tilt are campaign contributions, survey responses, & party registration. They all point towards a 10:1 Dem:GOP ratio in most agencies. In this 🧵, I’ll just use the Open Secrets data on individual political donations grouped by employer…
Let’s start with all the most stereotypically right-wing agencies: for example, here’s how political donations by DHS employees have been allocated between the two parties. Their Dem:GOP ratio was initially 1:2, but now is at 2.5:1—& I think this is the *least* left-wing agency…
Here’s the DoJ. Again: it was right-leaning until pretty recently, but its Dem:GOP ratio is now 4:1. My point isn’t that their political donations are huge, it’s that these indicate their partisan tilt; survey response & party registration data consistently give the same picture.
This is the Department of Energy: look at it shift from an even partisan split to 90% Democrat. It literally began as the Manhattan Project, & now it just bans most existing light bulbs (& all the good ones) for fake sustainability reasons. Despicable! An embittered gossip circle
Here’s the Department of Education: from briefly tilting right when Bush made school reform his schtick… to 99% Democrat now. This is what matters for policy: Congress gives them funds, & the White House makes a few brief appointments, & these bureaucrats control everything else
Department of the Interior: steadily rising from 2/3 Dem to 95% Dem. This is all bc 70% of civil servants have “MSPB protections,” which means they can’t be fired unless bosses can *prove* their malfeasance to an independent agency of bureaucrats (who also have these protections)
Dept of Health & Human Services: again the rise from neutral to 90% Dem (I expect their 2024 giving is “only” 80% Dem because only the GOP is running primaries & the general is far off still). & the literal millions of federal civil servants have other protections than just MSPB.
USDA: from evenly split to 90% Dem. When these bureaucrats control every aspect of policy implementation, & can’t be held accountable by elected officials—& when courts can at most slowly say individual cases of overreach must be briefly rolled back—they’ll seize ever more power.
National Science Foundation: from evenly split to 95% Dem (again: ignore preliminary 2024 giving). This is what leftism is: experts reaching selfless consensus in prestige jobs that don’t pay well, from which they can’t be fired; they take orders from the NYT, & NPR, & so forth…
Federal Trade Commission: over 95% Dem for over a decade! Of course people who opt into the civil service opt for smug do-gooder groupthink that makes them feel good once they’re there. It’s where all the incentives point, & it’s what births all wokenesses. They’re here to help!!
Dept of Housing & Urban Development: again dominated by Dems as the internet gave us all the ability to define ourselves by opining about what “should” be done. (Good god the search function on the Open Secrets website is awful, I can’t find half the departments I search for 😤).
There are dozens of other agencies, & the pattern seems obvious, & the Open Secrets website doesn’t sort them well at all. So onto the bosses that actually direct them: eg here’s how employees at the New York Times split their funding between the parties—haha of course they don’t
Here’s employee giving at the WaPo—for some reason unavailable pre-2016. Their moral panics give direction to the otherwise aimless civil servants, & provide the only perks these bureaucrats care about: smugness, quotes, profiles, & smears. & only journos can oust officials!
CNN is included as a subsidiary of Warner Bros Discovery, whose employees gave 99% of their political donations to Democrats ever since 2014. All of the media that isn’t explicitly right-wing is like this! & they can fire any officials—but officials can’t go after them or 😫 😭
The same is true of all the social media companies: eg here’s Twitter, but the same holds for Facebook etc. Everything focused on communications is like this—all the choke-points in political speech
& so the same is true of all the major movie studios! Here’s Netflix, but the same holds true for more traditional Hollywood fixtures. & so forth—I’m sure you can pattern-match from here. But wait: what about the industries often called “right-wing”: energy, finance, defense, etc
The biggest companies in each of these sectors—& others like pharma, construction, etc—almost always have an employee Dem:GOP ratio that’s between 1:2 & 2:1. I can’t find *any* as skewed as *all* the admin agencies & media firms are. Which makes sense—real companies have to work!
This is why Cthulhu swims left: it isn’t *primarily* about dysgenics, or civil rights law, or your preferred conspiratorial cabal, or whatever else—tho many aspects of those theories really do emerge from this process. It’s about the govt becoming a wet market for do-gooder memes
But this can be beaten: look at FDR, & sort of Reagan, & almost sort of Trump, & every former single-party state—they’ve all somewhat broken this by seizing easy control of the bureaucracies for managing personnel etc. I talk about this at length in my s*bst*ck about party-states
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Historians generally misunderstand what Smith meant by the “invisible hand,” & this misunderstanding is at the heart of what’s corrupted liberalism into wokeness. But he only used this phrase three times, so it’s easy to check how he meant it—& I think it’s interesting. Brief 🧵:
Smith 1st used the phrase in an essay on astronomy, to describe those phenomena (like regular orbits) which follow such simple & stable rules that even savages wouldn’t ascribe agency to them—“nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter ever apprehended to be employed in those matters”
Then in “Theory of Moral Sentiments” he uses it to intuit Coase’s Theorem: the rich “are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants”
In decadent times, a fine is a price; in chaotic times, a price is a fine. This is how monks & warlords created Medieval Ireland: by imposing an honor economy upon it, with enough power that order could emerge from it. Brief 🧵:
For example, the monks decided that if you cut someone, then you’d pay a monetary fee determined by the length of the cut as measured in grains, with grains of wheat being used to measure cuts upon the well-respected, oats for the moderately honorable, and, otherwise, peas.
Another example: you could be fined for coining a derogatory nickname for someone honorable if it caught on, but if that person failed to defend his honor from you then its value could be lowered in subsequent cases. Etc.
Human capital is used in two subtly different ways: first, the value of one’s claims of skills (eg degrees which—perhaps imperfectly—verify certain forms of aptitude or learning, or grant access to certain forms of rent-seeking); or, second, another’s claims on one’s value. But…
these subtle differences compound. The ways we maximize the first—“I have assets that can demand high returns from those around me”—produce unhealthy childless nerds & grifters who hollow out their community (to which they’re thus liabilities). But being an asset on some patron’s
balance-sheet gives them an interest in your biological & social wellbeing—because that’s what buying stakes in you gets them (as opposed to just renting your work). Human capital contracts mean there’s an angel on your shoulder guiding you to better ends
In the 1850s US, govt workers got nearly all of their pay thru personal plunder: either by fee-for-service entrepreneurialism, or by claiming prizes from & bounties for enemies of the state.
By our 1950s, the salary revolution was complete: impersonal plunder governed. Brief 🧵:
“Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government” charts this transformation in painstaking detail. You know the arguments: what about externalities, what about expertise… & you know the counterarguments: what about accountability, what about incentives…
But you probably don’t know the details of how this utterly alien world worked—& I think that it worked well, & it worked here, quite recently! Gilded age governance history reads like the best of cyberpunk. Sheriffs issuing bounties to entice deputies! Taxmen paid on commission!
Many say “information is physical,” & yet believe in the demons of Maxwell, Laplace, Descartes, & Yudkowsky—as if there’s info that can act on physics without itself being physical.
& so I say physics is informational: whether in relativity, thermodynamics, or quantum mechanics.
There’s a remarkably simple argument that informational & physical entropies are inherently separate magisteria: the incoherence of the Szilard Engine. To the extent that its piston can be moved by Brownian motion,it must also itself move by Brownian motion—so no infowork escapes
Likewise of course quantum mechanics is just the generalization of probability theory to allow for negative amplitudes (ie interference). All the math—complex numbers, the born rule, etc—is required if you want to maintain the basic properties of linearity, continuity & unitarity
Universities & bureaucracies teach you to think in terms of “moral” or “technical” slogans: “palestine will be free”; “two-state solution.” But both of these approaches only turn you into church-ladies yelling that “someone should do something.” Only the *spiritual* matters.
🧵:
Let me tell you about Yugoslavia. Broke up in brutal ethnic wars 30 years ago. Different parts tried each different proposal for solving Israel-Palestine: expulsion, stalemate, absorption, secession, federation, etc. & all of them worked well! So the answer isn’t what’s on paper.
Croatia unilaterally seceded from Serbs; it’s fine. Serbian Krajina tried to unilaterally secede from Croatia, so the Croats invaded it & expelled the Serbs—& it’s fine. Western Bosnia (Serbs) tried to secede from Bosnia—it was pacified, its population was reintegrated, it’s fine