I was very privileged to be allowed to attend a business program at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business as a military veteran. During the course I was given the rare opportunity to have a private discussion with two great economic professors from this esteemed university over a dinner. During our time together I shared a story about valuable intellectual property (IP) being highjacked and abused by profiteers, and also about the artificial barriers to market entry that were created by unaccountable committees with some members whom were being paid by said profiteers that subsequently prevented the use of the IP in business. The passion behind my hurt must have looked and sounded ridiculous to these two wise men who, when I was done with my long lament full of the pain that I felt having just recently discovered that most human beings choose to use operating systems that are driven by greed and self-aggrandizement rather than by justice and honor, simply looked at each other and said “The Theory of Economic Regulation”1 in unison. They laughed out loud as I asked my very pertinent next question: “the theory of what?”
The professors proceeded to unpack this significant economic work by Mr. George Stigler from 1971 where he discusses the many reasons that industries will seek governmental regulation and benefits, which are considerable, but amongst these reasons lies the power to control entry into a market. My two esteemed academic masters then proceeded to unravel a world of dark wonders from which I had previously been shielded by my ignorance, and like two wizards they explained the pig slop market to a naïve barn-yarder who did not yet know that the quest for power has almost universally corrupted every single Orwellian-American pig on the farm. Imagine my surprise when they explained to me that every industry or occupation that can buy enough political power will certainly do so in order to utilize state controls that can prevent other companies from interfering with their profiteering. And then they fired salvo after salvo at the very politicians whom had been running the military in which I had served most of my adult life, as well as at the judges whom are frequently paid by the same profiteers and therefore routinely prostitute themselves and their public positions in order to line their own pockets since they are free from the threat of prosecution.
And when I attempted to counter their dark map of the world as I didn’t know it, I did so by stating that the industry I was attempting to gain traction in was involved in the fielding of life saving medical devices and was therefore actually concerned with saving lives, they laughed even more. This is because they had already connected all of the dots between our health care industry, which had birthed such putrescent hell spawn as those whom would charge $800 for an epinephrine auto-injector with less than $5 worth of drugs in it, and their willingness to pay off government officials, politicians, and even judges in order to limit competition and to better secure the undiluted governmental gravy train coming to their doorstep. The more they spoke, the more apoplectic I became but the truth in their arguments, as well as the truth in Mr. Stigler’s work from 1971, is that human beings, without either robust accountability and transparency or possibly some form of permanent altruistic lens or filter through which to view their role in this world, will always operate in accordance with the worst of human nature. This means that they expressly will, and quite often do, lie, cheat, and steal in order to feed their own lust for power and financial gain. I read the article by Mr. Stigler and surmised that my problems with committees regardless of how altruistic the reasons for founding one were not unique to my situation, because they were commonly shown in The Theory of Economic Regulation to eventually betray their express purpose for being a committee in order to serve the interests of the committee members. In truth, we found committees that eventually become only committed to being committees and expanding their power base if at all possible.
But Mr. Stigler also stated that “[w]hen an industry receives a grant of power from the state, the benefit of the industry will fall short of the damage to the rest of the community.”2 However, I submit to you that, even with our impossibly interconnected wi-fi enabled modern lives, we most often do not notice when we suffer harm from either the abuses of regulation or from the profiteering of our political leaders and their beloved governmental agencies until it actually directly harms us. The regulatory fact patterns are often too complex to sift through and are further obfuscated by layers of liars who spout known falsehoods like so many lemmings chanting a “follow me – I know where I am going” mantra as they run off of the proverbial cliff. People avoid complexities naturally and, even when a person exists as a part of an overtly complex schema they may not actually understand the overarching impact of either the existent system programming or even of their own actions within the system. This is the norm: the function does not follow the form, but rather the forms of government that we create and fund enable the furtherance of unplanned agency functions as our baby morphs into something else entirely. But there are patterns to the evolutionary changes of both committees and governmental agencies, even when we can neither see nor appreciate them at first glance. Somewhat in accordance with the basics of Chaos Theory 3, but also from my own experiences dealing with ambiguous and hazardous situations, when one takes an action to engage the chaos and uncertainty around them one creates information, and it is that information which can be utilized to plan the next step in order to pursue a return to order by reducing or otherwise mitigating the chaos. It is important to note that there are certainly consequences to the actions that one takes when responding to chaos, but neither chaos nor the corruption created by the obscurity of regulations or political cronyism will fix themselves, so the best answer is always to take action in an attempt to restore order. And it is good to be careful with the forms (e.g. institutions) that we create along the way as well as to constantly reinspect their functional authorities and foci because, even if the much-maligned lemmings do not actually follow one another off of cliffs in nature, we as a distracted and unaware society will certainly do so if we continue to not pay attention.
So, what is true about the eventual corruption of individuals, businesses, and committees per Mr. Stigler also must be true of the now massive bureaucratic state that was allegedly created to protect the freedoms of the American people. This is not a partisan political observation because the administration before this one (i.e. the Biden administration) identified that the United States could have lost as much as $1 Trillion dollars during their four year term to fraud,4 and this figure did not include the recently exposed abuses of USAID and other agencies. Yet when the new administration (i.e. the Trump administration) exposes de facto corruption in our federal agencies, as well as extravagant waste and money laundering by often inept and even corrupt government officials, the defense of the exposed and unconscionable corruption is somehow presented as a new found partisan wisdom and it is then subsequently regurgitated back upon we, the people, as a political weapon to smear the party in power. Based solely upon the disgusting abuses of our American system of governance that have been uncovered in this purge operation thus far, all persons with an actual soul and an IQ at least two points above plankton must reject any media or political argument that attempts to refute the need for the further pursuit of complete transparency on the spending patterns and inefficiencies of our government agencies.
Any honest person should seek the objective truth of a matter before adopting an opinion as a belief, and this specifically means resisting the adoption of any perceived truth espoused by collectives with which one seeks to either identify or to belong, and especially from our global non-objective media sources whom seem to relish emoting their own opinions rather than reporting the facts in an objective fashion. I propose gleaning data from more than one source of information from different points on the political spectrum, and then discounting at least 50% of what everyone reports as either outright lies or the vanity of opinion, and to specifically avoid reports from reporters whom wear wooden clothespins on their fire jackets while reporting on a fire so that they look better or whom repeatedly conduct interviews in an overtly biased fashion. And with the information that you obtain, seek to form opinions which you know are transient and that you may change when you are given more information, rather than anchoring yourself in the emotive depths of what you wish to believe in order to avoid continuing to seek the objective truth. I also implore anyone reading this to think of government as a business that provides services to the people in the society, and that those whom are granted the authority and responsibility inherent in any government position are actually representing the American people. Then ask if those represented by the business of government deserve to know how their investment dollars (i.e. their taxes) are being spent and if they, as stock holders in this national corporation, should be able to demand that the wanton waste and fraudulent taking of their investment dollars be curtailed.
Any working Theory of Government Efficiency is going to take time to develop into true and robust safeguards and this will involve a concerted effort at all levels, but our government could, and should, seek to be more efficient. The abuses being uncovered are a direct result of extensive fraud being known and discussed but somehow remaining unchecked for decades. Fraud is now so widespread that it unfortunately involves more than a few of our elected and unelected officials, government employees, and even some esteemed committee members purportedly serving the greater good. But let’s make a new, working Theory of Government Accountability (TOGA) become a reality by maintaining a bias toward action and continuing to root out those whom defraud their fellow citizens in an effort to improve our governmental business processes. We can simply no longer afford to give the keys to our kingdom to political cronies and privateers who seek to utilize once esteemed public positions for private gain. If we continue to discuss accountability but have neither a metric for success nor a means to eliminate known fraud and waste, then our nation is a circus and we, the people, are the clowns.
An American by the name of Dr. Deming helped develop a cycle of continual improvement that was adopted to great effect by Japanese manufacturers and, I believe, it is as applicable to government processes as it is to business ones. The Deming Cycle is Plan – Do – Study – Act (PDSA)5 and it has been used successfully to continually improve products, processes, and services in corporate sectors around the globe. And probably since approximately $600 million USD was known to be lost to fraud during the first Trump administration, but also because the President is a successful business person and is very adept at seeking value through efficiency, his administration is now eliminating wanton wastefulness in the “Act” part of the Deming rubric during the beginning of their second term. President Trump will certainly continue the cycle by observing the effects of the actions being taken to curtail the waste and excess of USAID and other agencies, and then begin the cycle again with planning as more information is created and analyzed. And since I tend to point out the potential neuro-genesis of such harmful thinking as was present at a USAID, who actually spent our money to feed and fund our enemies,6 as being propagated by too much Dopamine 7, which has been observed to make people extravagant enough to spend “taxpayer dollars like it was monopoly money,”8 take it under advisement that your brain may be seeing the world through too blue of a dopaminergic filter if you do not believe that our government is too big and does too little to cost this much. Efficiency can be gained if we simply drop our beloved colors and stop acting like a member of warring gangs and start acting like concerned citizens of a country that has overspent it’s wealth like a drunken sailor on shore leave due to a system that is long overdue an overhaul.
If we fail to search for and find greater government efficiency and accountability solely because we stop looking for it in the name of either lining another pocket or standing against a political rival without any regard to reason, then we deserve to go over the cliff that we are running towards. So, let’s seek ways that can make all of those whom serve this Nation in the public space accountable for what they do, and not just our soldiers and military service personnel whom are sometimes made to pay for things in their charge whether or not they actually lost them. In one very personal case the items charged to my account were utilized for the express purpose of evacuating casualties from the battlefield, and yet the author of this paper was required to personally pay the US Army for the use of those items in that exact role. And yes, that is a true story so please do not try to tell me that these bureaucratic behemoths which were created at our expense should continue to cost us much more than they benefit us, or that those whom run them can continue to hide behind layers of lawfare and corruption so that they cannot be held accountable.
If I can be held personally responsible for the use of items to care for casualties in a war, and to be clear I am not proposing that I should have done anything different because it was the right thing to do and I would not change my actions ex post facto even if I could, then I expect the same accountability from every single governmental employee including all of our politicians. We are all responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of this Nation - it gives us both the individual and collective freedoms that we can use to pursue our own interests and to live our own lives in any legal manner that we see fit. We certainly do not need a bigger government at this point in our journey because only the criminals amongst us will continue to benefit from a sloppy, wasteful, and corrupt government that expropriates the property of its citizens “without due process of law.”9 Our civil servants and agencies must account for all of the money that they spend and we must create societal efficiency and transparency where it is needed most – in our now wasteful, inept, and often corrupt government where it seems that only a select few are diligently serving anyone else’s interests but their own.
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1. Stigler, George J., “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” The Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science, Volume 2, Issue 1 (Spring 1971), 3-21.
2. Ibid.
8. This is a quote from US Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA) as reported in this article: https://kfoxtv.com/news/nation-world/improper-government-payments-near-1-trillion-under-biden-administration-report-open-the-books-pandemic-benefits-budget-federal-treasury-national-debt-deceased-prison-children-tax-credits-irs-politics
9. The Due Process clause in the 5th and 14th Amendments stem from the Magna Carta and a 700-year-old promise by the King to treat everyone fairly by acting in accordance with the law with regard to everyone. The money a person earns is property and if he or she is coerced by the state to relinquish it to pay a tax burden that is certainly within the scope of the law at least when it is levied fairly and spent legally. I would argue that Due Process is not violated when officials elected by the people pass laws that impact the people’s tax burden because the people elected them and therefore have some procedures to address the decisions of those elected (discussed in Bi-Metallic Investment Co. v. State Board of Equalization, 1915). However, when those same funds are given to unelected officials whom then either fraudulently spend it or otherwise illegally utilize their property, especially for purposes that undermine national and individual security guarantees from the government, what is the legal procedure for the individual taxpayer to address the removal of his or her property to fund the downfall of our nation? All of our federal and state agencies produce regulations and even ask for comments on proposed rule-making prior to making the rules that become de facto common laws, but these are only read by a select few and therefore rarely deviate from the writer’s intent creating another form of law fare that expressly defies oversite. I believe that there are potentially due process claims to be found in the refusal of USAID or other agencies to provide information to our duly elected officials (i.e. Congress) whom sought to make these rogue agencies accountable on our behalf. There are certainly other legal means to pursue those who lied to Congress about the classification of aid being provided to companies in the Ukraine and in other places so that it could not be either reviewed or curtailed by Congressional oversite. But the 11 words of the Due Process Clause are worth reviewing because if the process and procedures are purposefully kept opaque and spending remains unreviewable and unaccountable, then neither the citizen nor their elected representatives have any legal recourse to follow in order to fight the removal of their property for use funding activities that may actually cause them harm. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/due_process
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