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Plus: A listener asks whether younger generations are capable of passing reforms to entitlement spending.

The solution to local government corruption is simple: deregulation. If Americans want less government corruption, they must reduce the government's power over private activities.

Andrew Pagliarini writes in The New Republic about the political crisis in Bolivia. He links to the new report by Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic and the University Network for Human Rights, which is really disturbing. The title is They Shot Us Like Animals so you immediately get the drift.According to witnesses, government repression since November 2019 has extended beyond killing protestors to quell criticism. The government has harassed, arbitrarily arrested, and tortured people that it perceives to be outspoken against the Áñez administration. Many Bolivians have found themselves facing charges or detention for vaguely defined crimes such as sedition, while others have been attacked in the streets by security forces and para-state actors. Certain visible groups are particularly susceptible to this persecution, including journalists, human rights defenders, and politicians. The result of this repression has been a pervasive climate of fear in many communities. Pagliarini frames the postponement of the presidential election in terms of lithium. Like so many other times in Latin America, political crisis and U.S. interests centers on a primary good deemed to be essential. And we're all using lithium.Añez will hold on as long as she can, so international pressure is essential. Sadly, this will definitely not come from the Trump administration, which rushed to give the new government aid. As usual there is no unified stance among Latin American countries or any regional leadership on it. Subscribe in a reader

This is not, in fact, about the politicians. This is about the level below, that permanent state of the civil service:The government has been accused of "staggering incompetence" after new school buildings it commissioned had to be closed due to safety fears, while others under construction were demolished before they even opened.Main buildings at two secondary schools and a primary school in England, which were all completed relatively recently using a modular, off-site construction method, were told to close with immediate effect, disrupting the start of the new term for many pupils.A government minister admitted there were issues with the structural integrity of some buildings, prompting fears they would not be able to withstand extreme events, including severe weather or being hit by a vehicle.Those Rolls Royce minds knowing best from Whitehall. Well, no, they don't. Clearly they don't. Which poses a problem. A problem for anyone who desires an invasive and managing state that is. The problem being that we've simply not got the staff to be able to have such. All the people who actually know things, how to do things, are off knowing and doing things. Leaving a cadre of adminstrators who, umm, administrate. And, as we can see, being able to file Form C in the C shaped slot is not an aid to being able to get a school built by a competent builder.Therefore, and obviously, that state, manned by incompetents, should not be managing or even administrating the building of schools. Nor anything else complicated beyond the idea of getting out of bed in the morning. This is not a theoretical nor ideological position it's merely the result of observation. The British state is incompetent. Therefore we should ask the British state, heck, allow the British state to do the minimal amount necessary to keep civilisation on track. That would mean that night watchman state which does only - and really only - those things that both have to be done and can only be done by government. Maybe defence - which they've not been good at these recent decades - and making sure the bins get taken out. Wouldn't want to tax the skill level too much after all.That this does neatly match up with our own ideological convictions is both true and fun. And yet an administrative state that allows schools to be built out of dodgy concrete and people want it to be planning how we're going to compete with the seven billion nine hundred and 30 million odd people who are not British? Not subject to such expert knowledge? We going to sell them JCBs after we've sold them the school building method or something?No, really, there are people insisting that these same minds - the ones who can't get concrete, a 2,000 year old technology, sorted - should determine what's the next mineral to be mined, the energy system of the future and who should make, how, the next generation of microchips but three.Getting rid of the civil service would be impossible, C Northcoate proved that. But we can sever their relationship with the real world easily enough. Leave them filing C in C and B in B and leave the rest of us to get on with life productively. Simply kill the requirement for anything to need civil service approval or oversight. They'll still be happy with their paperwork and we'll be amazed at how much better life gets. That argument, that is, for free markets and liberty is that the opposite, government control, is incompetent. We are in a reverse version of that movie Idiocracy. So, let's stop doing that then and be free - and vastly more important, let's be rich by being free. Anyone gets to do anything subject only to the basic Common Law rules of no harm, no foul, and leave government to pleasure itself with paperwork. Works for us.

Prof. Jane Bambauer and I discuss Murthy v. Missouri (the former Missouri v. Biden).

The only way to shrink government, significantly and sustainably, is to convince more people that smaller government is better.

Two months after July's snap and inconclusive general election, there are no signs of a new government. The Popular Party (PP), which won the most seats in parliament (137 out of 350), will have the first stab on 27 September when an absolute majority is required at the first investiture vote and a simple majority […]
La entrada In search of a government se publicó primero en Elcano Royal Institute.

AEI's Tony Mills and British biochemist Terence Kealey debate whether science needs government funding.

In the aftermath of the Conference on the Future of Europe, member of the EU3D Advisory Board Andrew Duff argues that only a reformed EU can shoulder its serious responsibilities for the wider Europe. He explains what a reformed EU should look like in this blog post. Photo by Ola Fras on European Union 2022 […]
The post In Search of Europe's Government appeared first on Future of Europe blog.

The ban also extends to private devices that are used to access state networks.

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman— The call for limited government is a recurring theme in Republican politics. Ronald Reagan's refrain that government is the problem, not the solution, has taken many rhetorical forms... READ MORE
The post The Myth of Limited Government appeared first on Yale University Press.

An entirely standard economic analysis is that government should be doing some part of the investing in a country. A lot is resting on that qualifier "some" there. Even we would agree that investment in the rule of law - as an example - is something government should be doing. But others take this much further. The argument does become that as government can borrow more cheaply then and therefore government should be doing the building of all large projects. This doesn't convince for a number of reasons but the most obvious is this: Thurrock's plight echoes recent insolvencies at Croydon, Slough, and Woking councils, each of which fell into difficulty after borrowing hundreds of millions of pounds to pump into ill-starred commercial investment and regeneration schemes.Those local councils were able to borrow at lower than market rates via a special scheme at the Treasury. They should, therefore, have been making super-profits. If your financing costs are lower than anyone else can possibly achieve then you really should be making higher profits than anyone else - the very definition of super-profits.As we can see it hasn't worked out that way. And no, we can't then turn around and say central government would do it better - not with HS2 staring us in the face we can't.The problem here is that people not used to thinking in commercial terms just aren't any good at investing even on better than commercial terms. So, in order to hoard and save societal resources we shouldn't allow the non-commercial world to be deciding upon investments. Not for any moral or ideological reasons but just because they're so damned bad at it. That local councils go bust left, right and centre even with the use of lower than market price money just shows that we shouldn't be using local councils to do any investing. QED.We can now define that word "some" to a useful level of accuracy in this application of it. Government may be the investor where only government can be the investor. Government may not be the investor where government may or could be the investor.That this entirely puts the kibosh on Mariana Mazzucato's ideas of modern corporatism is just one of those pieces of collateral damage that we'll all have to put up with.

Last summer, Lord Nick Herbert launched the Commission for Smart Government to tackle the systemic problems of government in the UK.

Fiscal irresponsibility might eventually shut down the government, but at the moment it's all for show.

Shutdowns don't meaningfully reduce the size or cost of government, but they also aren't the end of the world.