May I respectfully add a footnote. While this article uses “arms’-length” in what is now the conventional understanding of the phrase, this is not the original definition in law. An arms-length relationship is one where there are two independent parties, neither one of which has power or influence over the other. In Britain, where the term in relation to cultural policy originated, this meaning has been significantly lost. There are no longer two independent arms, belonging to two independent parties, but a single arm. The hand that does the work is the Arts Council, but the arm is the government’s. In the twenty-first century the “arm” has got progressively shorter, to the point where the Arts Council’s independence is a convention, but in practice a fiction. Keynes was happy with the arms-length principle because at that time there was no disagreement between government and the leaders of the Arts Council, as they were essentially the same sort of people, starting with Keynes. Since the 1960s that has no longer always been the case. Today, the arm is very short indeed. Robert Hewison U.K.
Greetings from Team Nozick. (Early Nozick, anyway. Anarchy, State, Utopia was a fairly early work and he reconsidered some of his positions.)
Hannah Arendt wrote, "In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant."
This is where we find ourselves. What Mike Flynn said about Lutheran Services was over the top. But they were regularly receiving eight- and nine-digit sums to resettle immigrants, under an extremely divisive Biden-era immigration policy, in numbers exceeding the population of some US states. Elon just discovered that the Treasury is sending a billion dollars a week to persons with no SSNs. USAID paid $8 million to Politico; Rubio froze USAID and Politico missed payroll for the first time. Victims of the 2024 hurricane season were denied aid because they had Trump signs in their yards. The FBI has 13,000 employees and 5,000 of them were assigned to persons connected to January 6. As I was typing this, a report just came in that FEMA spent $59 million last week to house illegal immigrants. That was against the law. The scale of fraud, insubordination, partisanship, and self-dealing throughout the governing structure is cartoonish.
I don't think it's the case that Republicans disdain any theoretical form of service provision. They disdain what's being done with the actual ones. They doubt, reasonably, that reform is possible. So instead they're hamstringing the agencies responsible for the chaos. That's going to injure some laudable efforts, but by the time American taxpayers have funded transgender comics in Peru, that's not a salient objection.
If you have rational and moral actors all over the system, any of the arrangements you describe can work fine. The problem is that you can depend, like the sun coming up tomorrow, on there not being rational and moral actors all over the system. In that the conservatives were more correct than they were about anything.
The quote from Arendt is an interesting one. In our modern world, with its complex organizations, I think bureaucracy is inescapable, regardless of the specific model chosen to run things. Consider my example of the person who has a family member incarcerated and feels that the inmate’s constitutional rights are being violated. To whom does she appeal? Does the contracting of prisons to the private sector make this situation even worse?
A personal example for me is health insurance. I’ve been an adult and insured in Canada, Australia, and the US (and in the US, gone from a private insurer when I was working, to Medicare now that I’m retired). The systems are all different, with differing roles for the public and private sector. But while there are differences for patients, and, I can only imagine, service providers, the one constant is an inescapable bureaucracy.
I wonder if the Trump administration is overly optimistic in their goal of purging the “deep state.” Consider trade policy as an example. Trump’s views on tariffs and free trade are at odds with the traditional conservative mainstream - The WSJ or AEI for example. Even the Heritage Foundation, in its Project 2025, opted to have two chapters on trade: one by the Trump loyalist Peter Navarro, and the other giving what would have been the traditional Heritage position advocating free trade. Now, people being interviewed for positions in the new administration, who are going to be conservative, are going to be asked in interviews “do you support President Trump’s policy agenda” and they will to a person respond “oh yes, I can’t wait to get started.” But those new staffers who work in economic policy positions are, many of them, not going to like all these tariffs. And I think they are sure to attempt to nudge policies towards what they had traditionally thought were sound, market-based conservative economics.
There's not a single conservative economics. You have free-trade people and protectionists. Someone at Reason pointed out in the 20-teens that Trump's economic policies overlapped heavily with those of Bernie Sanders. There's also not a single progressive economics, so that may be the human condition. The libertarians are pretty consistent: they all hate the tariffs, but they think any day that the government is getting less money is a good one, and they're happy that Ross Ulbricht is free, speaking of rights violations.
I don't have the exact quote, but somewhere in his book Bureaucracy, Mises says that bureaucratic structure as such is necessary for certain kinds of activity. What people hate about bureaucracy is its indifference and lack of accountability. Key to making Keynes's arm's length principle work is keeping the bureaucracy small enough that no one can disappear into it.
May I respectfully add a footnote. While this article uses “arms’-length” in what is now the conventional understanding of the phrase, this is not the original definition in law. An arms-length relationship is one where there are two independent parties, neither one of which has power or influence over the other. In Britain, where the term in relation to cultural policy originated, this meaning has been significantly lost. There are no longer two independent arms, belonging to two independent parties, but a single arm. The hand that does the work is the Arts Council, but the arm is the government’s. In the twenty-first century the “arm” has got progressively shorter, to the point where the Arts Council’s independence is a convention, but in practice a fiction. Keynes was happy with the arms-length principle because at that time there was no disagreement between government and the leaders of the Arts Council, as they were essentially the same sort of people, starting with Keynes. Since the 1960s that has no longer always been the case. Today, the arm is very short indeed. Robert Hewison U.K.
Point taken - thank you for adding this.
Greetings from Team Nozick. (Early Nozick, anyway. Anarchy, State, Utopia was a fairly early work and he reconsidered some of his positions.)
Hannah Arendt wrote, "In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant."
This is where we find ourselves. What Mike Flynn said about Lutheran Services was over the top. But they were regularly receiving eight- and nine-digit sums to resettle immigrants, under an extremely divisive Biden-era immigration policy, in numbers exceeding the population of some US states. Elon just discovered that the Treasury is sending a billion dollars a week to persons with no SSNs. USAID paid $8 million to Politico; Rubio froze USAID and Politico missed payroll for the first time. Victims of the 2024 hurricane season were denied aid because they had Trump signs in their yards. The FBI has 13,000 employees and 5,000 of them were assigned to persons connected to January 6. As I was typing this, a report just came in that FEMA spent $59 million last week to house illegal immigrants. That was against the law. The scale of fraud, insubordination, partisanship, and self-dealing throughout the governing structure is cartoonish.
I don't think it's the case that Republicans disdain any theoretical form of service provision. They disdain what's being done with the actual ones. They doubt, reasonably, that reform is possible. So instead they're hamstringing the agencies responsible for the chaos. That's going to injure some laudable efforts, but by the time American taxpayers have funded transgender comics in Peru, that's not a salient objection.
If you have rational and moral actors all over the system, any of the arrangements you describe can work fine. The problem is that you can depend, like the sun coming up tomorrow, on there not being rational and moral actors all over the system. In that the conservatives were more correct than they were about anything.
The quote from Arendt is an interesting one. In our modern world, with its complex organizations, I think bureaucracy is inescapable, regardless of the specific model chosen to run things. Consider my example of the person who has a family member incarcerated and feels that the inmate’s constitutional rights are being violated. To whom does she appeal? Does the contracting of prisons to the private sector make this situation even worse?
A personal example for me is health insurance. I’ve been an adult and insured in Canada, Australia, and the US (and in the US, gone from a private insurer when I was working, to Medicare now that I’m retired). The systems are all different, with differing roles for the public and private sector. But while there are differences for patients, and, I can only imagine, service providers, the one constant is an inescapable bureaucracy.
I wonder if the Trump administration is overly optimistic in their goal of purging the “deep state.” Consider trade policy as an example. Trump’s views on tariffs and free trade are at odds with the traditional conservative mainstream - The WSJ or AEI for example. Even the Heritage Foundation, in its Project 2025, opted to have two chapters on trade: one by the Trump loyalist Peter Navarro, and the other giving what would have been the traditional Heritage position advocating free trade. Now, people being interviewed for positions in the new administration, who are going to be conservative, are going to be asked in interviews “do you support President Trump’s policy agenda” and they will to a person respond “oh yes, I can’t wait to get started.” But those new staffers who work in economic policy positions are, many of them, not going to like all these tariffs. And I think they are sure to attempt to nudge policies towards what they had traditionally thought were sound, market-based conservative economics.
Early days yet…
There's not a single conservative economics. You have free-trade people and protectionists. Someone at Reason pointed out in the 20-teens that Trump's economic policies overlapped heavily with those of Bernie Sanders. There's also not a single progressive economics, so that may be the human condition. The libertarians are pretty consistent: they all hate the tariffs, but they think any day that the government is getting less money is a good one, and they're happy that Ross Ulbricht is free, speaking of rights violations.
I don't have the exact quote, but somewhere in his book Bureaucracy, Mises says that bureaucratic structure as such is necessary for certain kinds of activity. What people hate about bureaucracy is its indifference and lack of accountability. Key to making Keynes's arm's length principle work is keeping the bureaucracy small enough that no one can disappear into it.