When This Is Over, We Hang the Bureaucrats

After problems arose with the C.D.C.’s test, officials could have switched to using successful tests that other countries were already using. But the officials refused to do so, essentially because it would have required changing bureaucratic procedures.

The federal government could also have eased regulations on American hospitals and laboratories, to allow them to create and manufacture their own tests, as Melissa Miller of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine told The Washington Post. But federal officials did not do so for weeks. The Times’s Sheri Fink and Mike Baker reported this week about a Seattle lab with a promising test that was blocked by “existing regulations and red tape” while “other countries ramped up much earlier and faster.”
So what can we replace the CDC with that is not a bureaucracy, or at least not a government bureaucracy?

18 comments:

Christopher B said...

Glenn Reynolds keeps suggesting that Civil Service needs to be largely abolished. Make these people responsible to elected officials again.

Dad29 said...

If CDC is abolished, who will treat gun violence as a "disease"? (Think that's a made-up scenario? Think again.....)

Ymar Sakar said...

Grim, the angels and gods will help replace cdc. Plus the energy healers.

What was that old revelation about 3 5ths of earth dying off? That was a worst case scenario that has beeb diverted. Congratulations humanity, there wont be another extinction event.

Bad news? The cabal will likely spray a special wmd into air. Thus will stack with corona.

See thr problems of letting traitors to humanity live. I saw no option than to wipe them from the face of the earth.

Ymar Sakar said...

Also as i said, the cdc do what they are told.

Grim said...

I suppose I might be in danger of being accused of shoehorning my ordinary policy preferences re: bureaucrats here, but I think this one is at least directly relevant to the present case.

bc said...

What about your dear leader abolishing the pandemic response office entirely? About gutting the funding for CDC? About installing non-professional cronies to oversee the CDC? Your suprematism is blinding you to the obvious occams razors responsible for all the incompetence and disasters faced by the US.

Grim said...

Occam's razor is a tool for gamblers. In this case, it's causing you to make some foolish bets, because you are assuming a common explanation for a wide array of events that had different causal chains. (The pandemic office, for example, was stood up for Ebola and was standing down because Ebola is much less of a crisis.)

If you think this blog is somehow uncritical of Trump, you should scroll back and read the post about Aristotle from a few days ago. It's clear that he's a demagogue of the sort that Aristotle warns about; the only debate is about just which sort. Virtuous leadership is absent, and none of the remaining candidates for the Presidency are any good -- actually, I think none of them ever were any good in this election season. I can't think of one of the 14 or 15 that I'd have actually wanted to assume the office.

That said, the bureaucracies -- all of them, I think -- are horrid when they are not downright wicked. I'd say it was time to disband the whole thing, really. And yet we do need some sort of coordinating capacity for things like pandemics, at least to stand up temporarily and stand down when it's over.

Grim said...

By the way, the one thing I am definitely not is a "supremacist." Of any sort.

bc said...

Remember your endorsement of the Georgia governor using Jim Crow tactics to steal the election from a morally and ethically upstanding Black woman who you disagreed with? That’s exactly what a good German does.

Grim said...

Not only do I not remember that, you don’t remember it either. What I said was that he had performed disgracefully as Secretary of State, and did not deserve elevation.

Grim said...

You can read the post here. It’s one of several that were very critical of Kemp.

http://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2018/11/in-parting-georgia-governors-campaign.html?m=1

E Hines said...

DFTT, Grim. It's a waste of your heartbeats.

Eric Hines

raven said...

Most tales of war coming to a country that has not known an existential fight, start with a burden of deadwood in the upper leadership that has to be winnowed out. And an existential situation is the only thing that will do it- people have to really assimilate the idea if the incompetent stay, they will die because of it. In ordinary times, "it's just city hall", nothing you can do.

Every organization is afflicted with Jerry Pournelles Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Lickspittles, connivers, backstabbing manipulative vermin rise to the top, because that is all they care about.

Grim said...

"...a burden of deadwood in the upper leadership that has to be winnowed out..."

Yes, precisely. Only it may be the whole thing, or very nearly so. Parts of the military remain sound, but less even of that than once.

Christopher B said...

Man, the Soros checks are flying everywhere.

Ymar Sakar said...

I dont even remember that. Must havr been his past wife.

Ymar Sakar said...

The only reason soros has money is he took it from weaker livestock.

Bit ironic. Currency markets are based on manipulation and fear. He made bank cause of 2008 crash. Indirect tax.

Ymar Sakar said...

The deep state and space military has formed an alliance which debriefed trum before 2015.

If tget had any agents monitoring you, they would have noticed my comments as well.

They have finally found the guts to take on the ds cabal. It is an invisibke war although i assume plenty have died.