Gun policymaking

There is one circumstance that even the must ardent gun control advocate must admit, if not of the fact, at least of the possibility: that the people who would profit or otherwise benefit from circumventing gun control regulations are smarter and better motivated than those doing the regulating. We see this phenomenon played out regularly with, for example, reference to the prevalence of illicit drug use, and historically with the prohibition of alcohol. The motivated creativity of someone who would make tens of thousands of dollars providing firearms manufactured in Mexico or Honduras to street gangs in a given American city is likely to trump the naive determination of earnest bureaucrats who do not understand the limited influence that government has on human nature. The semi-literate gang enforcer in Chino has much more in the way of practical smarts, at least in acquiring the minimum firepower necessary to an international criminal enterprise, than Dianne Feinstein or Bret Stephens. This disparity is likely to widen with advances in technology. Say what you will about bump sticks, the guy who came up with the idea was pretty sharp.

This is not an argument against gun control; it is an argument against the notion that restrictions will do much good. For good or ill, the technology of repeating firearms is about 150 years old; gun smithing is a community college degree, not an advanced course offering in the theoretical physics department at Harvard. An advanced civilization is much more reliant on the decency of its citizens for its survival than it is the force of its statutes. The Second Amendment applies only to the right to keep and bear arms, it is not necessary to their existence, nor to their availability in the criminal underground. Firearms themselves are not essential to the madness that perpetrates mass murder.

If Mr. Paddock, the perpetrator of the Las Vegas had not provided his own demise, one might reasonably wish to ask: was his primary motivation to shoot or to kill? Would he have foregone the anticipated satisfaction of killing if he had to forego the expected pleasure of shooting? We of course will never know, but even so, we can note, with just a cursory, off-the-top-of-the-head list, dates verified by Wikipedia, the following sample:

Date Number killed
May 18, 1927 45
December 12, 1986 98
December 7, 1981 43
April 19, 1995 168
March 24, 2015 150
March 20, 1995 12
March 11, 2004 192
June 11, 1964 10
December 19, 2016 12
March 1, 2014 31
February 27, 2002 59
May 17, 2010 44
June 3, 2017 8
July 7, 2005 56

The means used for these deaths included airplanes,, knives, sarin gas, explosives, motor vehicles, a flame thrower(!) and matches.

This list is not a sample of inadequate regulation, it is rather a specimen of psychopathic depravity against which the most competent of government is impotent.

The call for gun control is a symbolic protest against an uncomfortable fact: people that are crazy in their motives might be quite rational in their methods; they may in fact be quite ingenious in them. It is a form of inexcusable arrogance to assume that people who seem so illogical in their motives cannot outwit well-intentioned regulation, and the advice of “experts.”

None of which is to say that there should be no limits on guns or gun ownership. Reasonable regulation should be expected to have reasonable results. Expecting to confine the darker and disordered impulses of the psychopath by assuming that decent people cannot be trusted with the means of emergent defense is not reasonable.

Scientism

Scientism, like any ism, is an ideology, and, like any ideology, is driven as much by ambition, wishful thinking, and base emotion as it is by rational analysis. Science is not the fount of human perfection and happiness; it is a product of humankind’s ability to reason and to apply reason in human affairs. The beneficial application of science requires moral guidance and ethical scrutiny, because blind pursuit of scientific knowledge leads to uncomfortable spaces.

The Nazis dunked soviet POWs in frigid water in a “scientific” attempt to devise strategies to help downed Luftwaffe pilots survive in the North Sea. One conclusion of such experiments was that exposure to cold caused cerebral hemorrhages. This “scientific” discovery turned out to be wrong. The United States government scientifically investigated the course of untreated syphilis in African-Americans; very scientific, yet somehow unpraiseworthy. The Imperial Japanese Unit 731 did competent scientific work, so much so that their biological warfare experiments were able to decimate several Chinese villages. (The scientifically oriented American government, rather than opting for war crimes complaints gave many of the perpetrators immunity, because, hey, SCIENCE!). The soviets' use of psychiatry on political dissidents is probably not an example of “improved policies and regulations that serve our best interests.” Orbiting the white nationalist fringe is the “human biodiversity” movement that uses scientific evidence to argue that certain racial and ethnic groups have intelligence, behavioral and personality traits that are heritable and therefore partially genetically determined, a scientific hypothesis that would likely be rejected by scientism on grounds unrelated to method.

One concern that naturally arises is that of avoiding "abuses" of science. Science has no reliable way of identifying “abuses” apart from human values. Science has no inherent conscience.

The modern scientist has much in common with the prehistoric thinker who thought that virgin sacrifice kept volcanoes from erupting or that fickle gods made the sun rise and rains come., Both applied the evidence at hand to questions relevant to their interests and reached conclusions constrained by the state of their knowledge. Much of what modern science knows is wrong; there is even a book, “Ending Medical Reversals” that focuses on the harm done by adopting  therapies and theories as scientific based more on apophenia and wishful thinking than on rational rigor This is why “consensus” is irrelevant to the advance of scientific knowledge, and is no substitute for it. Remember saccharin and how it causes cancer? Or how drotrecogin was the holy grail of sepsis treatment? What was the state of consensus regarding phlogiston theory 400 years ago? What does one one say about the scientific certainty regarding “gender fluidity?”

Science, is a tool without an inherent moral or ethical constraint. The scientific method is useful, for both good and ill, but is not infallible. Its usefulness derives from the ability of human reason to make sense of objective evidence, and that is all it is. It is not something to be venerated or blindly believed. It is something that can be cynically exploited by charlatans. It may be used as a prop to argue for greater government control over people’s lives just as hucksters with knowledge of solar eclipses were able to con those innocent of astronomic knowledge by implying some mysterious power. Science does not validate atrocity or immorality (as the Tuskegee syphilis and Unit 731 experiments show) merely by their being scientific, and science does not validate any ideology or political fashion that presumes otherwise. The use of science for political ends does not have a happy history.

Healthcare policy principles

There are a few principles that should govern healthcare policy-making:

1.)  The fundamental characteristic of a sustainable healthcare system is not compassion, or comprehensiveness, or justice, or equality, or cost effectiveness. It is predictability. Predictability is why we have written laws it is the characteristic that allows engineers to design aircraft and computers, and chemists to develop new pharmaceuticals. Predictability is what allows actuarial analysis and rational assessment of risk. Predictability is what allows people to make plans with a reasonable expectation of favorable outcomes. The first step in formulating a sustainable healthcare policy is to excise as much caprice, and uncertainty as possible.

2.) Healthcare policy does not determine who gets care, it determines who gets rich. In point of fact there is almost no one in this country who does not have access to at least least some healthcare. It may be inefficient; it may not be cost effective and it may not be particularly thoughtful, but no one need die of tuberculosis or typhus or beri-beri unless psycho-social factors intervene. The future of healthcare as asocial asset will be determined more by technology and the principles of economics; the future of healthcare as an industry will be determined by regulation and policy.

3.) The Pareto principle applies to healthcare: 80 % of the care can be delivered for 20% of the cost.

4.) All systems of benefits and resource allocation become multi-tiered. There is a multi-tiered educational system in this, and every country. There is a multi-tiered judicial system. there is a multi-tiered public health system and a mult-tiered infrastructure system. It does not matter if policy prescribes a single payer system, some sort of hybrid, or a totally market-based system, it will be multi-tiered. This is not the avoidable result of corruption or malign intent on the part of policy makers, although that will certainly make matters worse. It is rather the result of the uneven distribution of inherent advantages and disadvantages, tangible and intangible, across any sizable group of people.

5.) The next big revolution in healthcare will be probabilistic medicine driven by enormous strides in data processing. the cognitive aspects of computers will yield to a significant degree to massive decision algorithms that incorporate huge volumes of data from tens of millions of patients.

The future of healthcare

There are a few principles that will dictate the future of the American healthcare system:

1. There will always be a two-tiered system. This will not be due to a flaw in system design or implementation, but is due to the unalterable dynamics of societies. there is not a country on earth that does not have multi-tiered healthcare. The United States will not have a single tiered system for the same reason that it does not have, in fact, a single tiered educational system, or a single tiered legal system, or a single tiered social welfare system. Economics, technology and data management will have a much greater influence on the shape of the American healthcare system than will politics. Politics however, will have a much greater influence on who becomes rich as a result.

2. Healthcare in general, and medical care in particular, can be divided up into three functional categories:
     i. The technical or procedural aspect. This is the part of healthcare where someone takes out your appendix, adminsters chemotherapy, does endoscopy, or performs a CT scan;
     ii. The cognitive aspect. This is where someone interprets data and makes decisions about interventions, and
     iii. The clerical aspect. This is where data is collected, collated,and and packaged.

These three aspects will become more distinct and regardless of what type of healthcare reform or payment system is implemented, will dictate the future of healthcare.

The procedural aspect will be taken over by technicians. this trend has been underway for a couple of decades and has resulted in niche practices by "proceduralists.: It is also apparent in the now common practice of attending physicians or primary care providers referring patients to specialists who perform procedures on request, with no other role in diagnosing or managing a patient;s condition. In the future, these people will be less educated in broad aspects of medicine and will be hyper-specialized technicians. Since these procedures will be will established and understood, the practitioners performing them will be more like tradesmen than professional decison makers. They will have less education and more procedural training, and consequently will be expected to do less and will be paid less.

The cognitive aspect will largely be displaced by massive data management systems. This will commonly be referred to as AI, but will involve computer algorithms classifying each patient and processing huge amounts of epidemiologic, genetic, and clinical data to arrive at diagnostic and treatment plans for individual patients. These systems will become more reliable as experience is gained and they will drive down the costs associated with routine care. One offshoot of this will be a new medical specialty: the "outlierist" or the "anomalist" who will be looked to for the artisanal elements of medicine when the data driven computer algorithms are unsuccessful.

The clerical aspect is taking up a larger portion of providers time right now. They spend significant time gathering and entering data that eventually will form the databases on which the artificial neural networks, inference engines, Bayesian belief networks, and other computer modeling systems will operate. Provider systems and payers will soon realize that these tasks can be both largely automated and performed by medium skilled workers without medical degrees.

Respect

If you earn respect, you will have self respect.
If you demand respect, you will have self pity.

There are two things with which self respect should never be confused: self pity and self esteem.

When faced with challenges, self esteem often becomes self pity; self respect becomes courage and determination.

Coaching

It is very difficult to teach a person something that he is convinced he already knows.

Speech as action

A piece by David Solway entitled "Free Speech vs. 'Hate Speech'" makes the following assertion:

Of course, speech itself can be an act, as philosopher J.L. Austin has shown in How to Do Things with Words: in his most famous example, when the minister states “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” an act has been performed since it changes the status of the participants.

This is wrong. The words themselves are innocuous absent other considerations. If a second grader speaks the quoted words to two other second graders,the latter are not thereby married. More importantly, if a minister says the words to two people who do not wish to be married, or in fact merely disagree with those words, their status does not change. In the former case, the words are powerless because of the status of the speaker. She has no authority to change the status of her classmates, regardless of the words used. The latter case is more fundamental, because it is an example of a larger principle: the effect of words in the absence of external force is dependent on the acceptance of the hearer. Certainly, when a judge pronounces a sentence, the words used wold be of little significance apart from a mechanism to enforce them. The same result holds if the judge has no authority to pass such a sentence, as for example if  jury had acquitted the accused.

The effect of words in such case would depend on the subjective acceptance of their object. To put the matter more succinctly, no one is obligated to be offended by speech, and no one is required to perceive injuries in mere opinions. 

Safe spaces

The concept of civilization only makes sense in the context of interactions between humans. A solitary individual having no interactions with others would have no use for norms and traditions that are useful in public life. A civilized society is one in which the clashes and confrontations that inevitable arise when human beings interact are managed by certain understandings regarding tolerance, accommodation and compromise. The norms and institutions of civilization are means by which the clashes of individual interests and diversity of opinions are processed so as to make social interactions worthwhile. Civilization is a consequence of the public benefits which arise from preserving individuality. Civilization thrives when individual differences are allowed to compete.

A "safe space," in the current usage of the term, is a place that is free from distressing opinions or disquieting deviations from uniformity. They are precincts where feeble ideas are allowed to persist unchallenged and unimproved, not because of the intellectual validity of those ideas but because of the emotional discomfort occasioned by alternative views. Safe spaces only appear so because of uniformity and conformity, and as such are intellectually stagnant. The aversion to individual thought and dispute makes them intellectually inert and emotionally anesthetic. The adjective "safe" is a euphemism intended to disguise an environment that is intellectually desolate, intolerant and craven.

Outcomes

The most significant difference between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, at least as it concerns practical politics, is that there was a significantly greater risk of corruption being normalized under a Clinton administration than under Trump. This is independent of whether a Clinton led government would be any more or less corrupt than the current administration. In the former case, corruption would be viewed by institutions such as the media and entrenched interests as a price to be paid for favorable policies; in the latter case, it is a target of opportunity by which to advance one's agenda and protect one's interests. Normalization of corruption is far more damaging than any policy which could be reasonably implemented by either candidate.

Thought experiment

Consider a woman, a citizen in a western democracy, Now consider that it is desirable to someone, for whatever reason, to have her behave in a particular way, to conform to some model, or submit to some reform. One way to accomplish this would be to use coercion, to invoke force or the prospect of undesirable consequences to influence her in the desired direction. Another alternative would be to use persuasion, appeal to reason, and try to convince her of the wisdom and benefit of the desired behavior, model or reform.

The first method is the resort to force. She will be made to conform regardless of her her own reason, values or choice. The second is a resort to rational discourse, to principles of analysis and evidence. Only the second of these is consistent with a respect for dignity; i.e. that a person is worthy, all else being equal, of living her life in accord with her own conscience.

Now image that the second method, the use of persuasion, is discouraged on grounds that the method of persuasion, i.e. free speech, might cause offense to someone. Thus we have in stark relief the malignancy at the heart of political correctness: that it is better to use force and the threat of personal consequences to bring about some policy or other, because to allow reasoned debate might offend subjective sensibilities. Rejection of political correctness is rejection of the notion that the benefits and individual dignity must be surrendered to protect the sensitive from disquieting opinions..

Racism

Charges of racism seem to be an inexhaustible element of public discourse in the United States. Race is injected into a wide swath of public debates and the allegations of racist motives are regularly used to discredit and silence opposing views. Some people claim that the United States is an inherently racist country; others that the single minded search for any hint of potentially racist or race-tinged thought has reached the point that it is doing more harm than good.

Certainly, overt and institutionalized racism has declined steadily since the second World War. Certainly there are those, in all races who still harbor racist attitudes, and there is a corresponding disparity in perceptions of just how racist America really is. A simple explanation for this phenomenon is found not in comparing attitudes and conduct to some mythical non-racist standards, but in understanding different peoples' priorities in considering matters of race.

Let us assume you have two people of different races, each of whom honestly considers herself non-racist. Now construct a list of attitudes and actions that are, or could potentially be considered racist, and rank them, from most obviously racist to spurious at best. this list would range from the egregious, such as lynching a teenager for kissing a person of a different race, to things like refusing to hire a person because of their race, to telling stereotyping jokes, etc, to the silly, such as objecting to terms like "black sheep" or "black mark, to the weird, like complaining about "cultural appropriation" to the just plain ignorant, such as claiming that the word "niggardly" has anything at all to do with race.

If we take our two subjects and present them with this list and ask them to prioritize each item on the list against other social concerns, such as economic efficiency or freedom of expression, it is likely that there would be a great deal of agreement at the more flagrant examples; both would agree that lynching is abhorrent racism. There would most likely be agreement that discrimination in employment and housing are improper, and that stereotyping jokes do reflect racist attitudes. But as you go down the list, it would be expected that there will be a point that the two people will disagree on whether a particular act or attitude is sufficiently serious that it should override other concerns. there will be a disagreement on the priority that a potential racist thought or action should be given in everyday life, and it is at this point that one person will accuse the other of racism. And it is not just an accusation as to that contested point; it will be assumed that the point of disagreement, e.g. that "Taco Tuesday" should be condemned is simply the point where the closet racist lets the mask slip, Thus, what should be simply a good faith disagreement as to whether an arguably innocuous, or even an obviously innocuous view can be transformed by racial prospectors into invidious racism. This is why the vast majority of people honestly do not consider themselves racist, and those who suspect others of racism readily think they have evidence to support their suspicions.

The clearest example of this is affirmative action. There are competing priorities here: countering the prospect that qualified minorities will be denied opportunity because of their race, and ensuring that race-neutral merit is the basis for allocating potentially limited opportunities. Neither view is necessarily racist. The allegation of racism, when it inevitably comes out is not directed at the principles underlying either position, rather it is directed solely at opposition to the accuser's position. The allegation is not that merit is racist it is that prioritizing merit over racial considerations is.

Of course, there are racists. There are those who believe that there are certain genetic traits that justify treating races differently. But for the majority of people what determines how they treat one another regardless of race depends on their experiences. It is much more likely that a black man who loves his wife and raises his children, and respects others has much more in common with a white man who loves his wife and raises his children and respects others than either has with a black drug dealer who abuses women or with a white methamphetamine addict who steals to support his habit and abuses women.

Sure, there are racists. There are also race hustlers who would contort facts and logic to smear otherwise decent people in support of  a cynical narrative that is destructive to people of all races.

Libertarians

A libertarian view begins with the premise that liberty is incompatible with coercion, and that a civil society should not substitute instruments of violence for persuasion. This view requires that all uses of force be justified, because force is never assumed to be just. There are certain categories of force, such as government force used against one person for the exclusive private advantage of another, or force used to protect subjective sensibilities, or to vindicate matters of etiquette that should never be justified.The rules for use of force should be predictable and of general application, neither singling out nor exempting particular parties. No person who is capable of reason should be subjected to force solely on grounds that it is for his or her own good.

Force and governmental violence is sometimes necessary but its legitimate use usually signals the breakdown of reason. The lapse of reason is not always on the part of the person against whom the force is directed. Force, or the ability to resort to force by authorities, is a tempting shortcut to assure compliance with questionable policies or to promote partisan interests, or worse, to attempt to compensate for incompetence in administering the laws. It is the enabler of oppressive laws and a hallmark of governing interests at odds with the will of the people.

Force is inherently inelegant and imprecise. There is no guarantee that "non-lethal" force will remain "non-lethal" just because the circumstances do not justify more severe measures.

Hostile

Of all the drawbacks of an excessive regulatory, bureaucratic state, perhaps the most significant is that all of the necessary mandates and prohibitions eventually mkes the government adverse to the citizenry.

Restorative forces

There is a corollary to yesterday's post on stability. When a stable system is perturbed, forces inherent in the system act to return it to equilibrium. In political systems, these forces are popular reactions against reform. Political systems differ from physical ones, in that the public responses are often delayed as a result of public perception, remoteness of experience, or initial misperception of the scope and purpose of the reform. The forces seeking equilibrium are present and relentless however, and eventually overcome the transient and artificial dispruptions imposed by authorities. This is why dictatorships fall, or stagnate, and why socialist utopias eventually encounter crises between promises and realities.

Stability

An essential characteristic of a stable system is the tendency to return to a state of equilibrium after being disturbed by some influence. This is true not only of physical systems but biological and political ones as well. The baseline or ground state is an inherent property of the system, and determines the response to perturbation.


Societies are highly complex and heterogeneous systems that, if they are to be stable, will have defined baselines in terms of institutions, economics, and social values. It is of course possible for these to evolve over time, but this evolution tends to be a response to environment and a constellation of circumstances rather than a discrete influence. When reformers and idealists seek to alter these fundamental characteristics of a society they often succeed in achieving only a transient and artificial change that cannot persist without the threat and use of force. Such enterprises, even if they initially have popular approval, eventually collapse under the strain of human nature.

It is difficult, almost to the point of impossibility, to "fundamentally change" a society through legislation or political machination. The natural tendency is for politics to eventually reflect the underlying values of the society, rather than to shape them. The fact is it is not possible for politicians of any type, whether they be tyrants, democratically elected legislators and executives, or appointed functionaries to prescribe what people want or what people value.

The forces necessary to fundamentally change a society, that is to change the baseline or ground state at which a society functions in the absence of force or duress, ultimately derive from people's experience and subjective interests. The instincts and subjective experiences that influence how people interact with each other are much more robust and enduring than political policies or ideological ambition.

A technological paradox

An article published in the medical literature in 2011 documented a significant increase in the number of pulmonary emboli that were diagnosed since the introduction of sensitive tests for them. The mortality associated with that condition, however, did not improve significantly over the trends that had existed prior to the adoption of more sensitive diagnostic methods. The number of complications associated with therapy of pulmonary embolism did increase in the same manner as the number of diagnoses. The implication of this is that the introduction of sensitive diagnostic technology led to a dramatic increase in the number of cases diagnosed, but that that increase did not have a significant impact on patient outcomes. Pulmonary embolism began to be overdiagnosed, and some patients experienced significant complications from therapy that previously would have been unnecessary.


This circumstance is not limited to pulmonary embolism, nor to a small number of similar conditions. Diagnostic technology has advanced to the point that resolution of diagnostic studies has out-paced our ability to interpret them. We are finding more minute and unanticipated anomalies for which we do not know the significance. As a result, physicians are making diagnoses, often based on incidental findings, and providing treatments where they would not have only a few years ago. The benefits and risks associated with making these diagnoses and treating these patients is unclear. In the case of pulmonary embolism, increase diagnostic sensitivity clearly carries the risk of overdiagnosis, providing treatment where none is required, and causing unnecessary complications.

The tendency to overdiagnosed and over treat arises not only from technological advancement. Fear of litigation, patient expectation, and the proliferation of protocols and algorithms also influences medical decision-making in the direction of more frequent and less efficacious treatment. Paradoxically, while diagnostic technology enables greater detail of unclear significance, the use of protocols and algorithms homogenizes diagnostic data and disregards other clinical information of significance to a particular patient.

These factors contribute to an undesirable praxis in American medicine. The desire to provide diagnostic certainty when there actually is none, to medicalize everyday difficulties and consider them as diseases leads to such excesses as overprescribing antidepressants and stimulant medications, a proliferation of unnecessary procedures for treatment of ill-defined "syndromes," and an explosion in the number of patients claiming disabilities of one type or another. A peculiarity of American medicine is that many diseases and medical conditions are associated with their own interest groups. Diseases have lobbies. It is an undeniable and likely inescapable fact of American medicine that some interests benefit from overdiagnosis and overtreatment, and those interests are active in perpetuating what is fundamentally bad medicine.

This is only one of an innumerable number of factors for which the affordable care act provides no answer.

Government healthcare

With all of the angst accompanying the roll out of the Affordable Care Act, the foibles, the unintended consequences, the unanticipated costs; it may be instructive to review the findings of a previous investigation into government run healthcare. These were the findings of a Senat Committee on Indian Affairs investigation into the operation of the Indian Health Service in the Aberdeen Area in 2010:

Among the investigation’s major findings:
• Chronic mismanagement, lack of employee accountability and financial integrity;

• Several service units experienced substantial and recurring diversions of reduced
health care services, due to lack of qualified providers or funds;

• Five IHS hospitals in the Aberdeen Area are at risk of losing their accreditation or
certification from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS);

• Several facilities have been cited as having health care providers on staff who
lacked proper licensing or credentialing;

• Key senior staff positions remained vacant for long periods of time, contributing to
the lack of proper management;

• Employees with a record of misconduct or poor performance being transferred to
different health facilities within the Indian health system;

• Pharmaceutical audits of narcotics and other controlled substances are not
regularly performed, and three service units within the region have a history of
missing or stolen narcotics.   Source: http://www.indian.senate.gov/news/pressreleases/2010-12-28.cfm

Morbid curiosity

There is perhaps an intuitive sense that human life is protected by the odds. It seems reasonable that the risk of cataclysm is sufficiently small to have enabled human beings to thrive for millennia, and expect to do so for many more. Most commonly perceived threats are associated with vanishingly small likelihood of occurrence. A worldwide extinction such as that which befell the dinosaurs is likely rare enough to have been considered a one off. This perception applies to most conventional threats, such as a catastrophic asteroid impact or nuclear calamity. The odds, simply, appear he to be in our favor.


It may however be the case that there are mortal threats lurking in far more likely scenarios. To take one such example, it is reasonable to assume that there is at least one, and likely several amino acid sequences that would code for a pathogen that would be devastating to human life. Imagine, for example if the human immunodeficiency virus had a genetic makeup that would allow it to be passed by casual contact, or to be transmitted with the ease of the common cold. It is possible to conjecture the existence of such a genome and wonder how likely random mutation is to produce it. Is such a peril thirty base pairs away? ten thousand? A million? It is also possible to consider that such a fateful genetic sequence might be the result of human manipulation.

This is not to imply that human beings are necessarily doomed, or that a biological catastrophe will wipe out the species. It is to suggest however that it might not be unreasonable to wonder what the true odds of disaster are, and when luck might run out.

Question

Why are there any non-essential government personnel?

The limited competence of public institutions

One thing that you learn from coaching or watching football is that not everyone can do everything well. Certain players can do certain things well that other players cannot do at all. The same applies to entire teams. You also learn that not everyone who does something well does so indefinitely. Players age, skills fade, and times change. Likewise, even though someone may do something very well there is always the possibility that someone will come along and do it better. These principles apply not only to sporting contests but in civic life. No one institution does everything better than the others. Institutions that do something well initially may get progressively worse at it as time goes on. Institutions may be so hampered by bureaucracy that they are unable to adapt to changing conditions, or they may assume responsibilities for which they are wholly unsuited.

These principles weigh against the progressive notion that the government should be relied upon for nearly all important endeavors. The fact is that there are some things that charities, and private enterprise do much better than public institutions. There are also things that public institutions may have initially done well that they have increasing difficulty doing competently. There are things that may best be done by government initially that private enterprise, or dedicated nonprofit organizations eventually do better.

The list of things that require public institutions because private or charitable institutions tried and failed is vanishingly short. There are of course some things which, on the whole, are proper objects of public enterprise; these include such things as law-enforcement, management of roads and thoroughfares, and providing fire protection services. Other areas in which public institutions to have a role, but which benefit from the participation of other entities include such things as managing hospitals and education. Scientific research likewise benefits from not being reliant on a single source of support, and undertakings such as space exploration are areas in which public institutions have been largely left behind.

The fallacy that, unless the government does something, it will not get done, or alternatively, that unless the government does something it will not be done well, is detrimental to both progress and to civic life in general. Governments and public institutions are inherently bureaucratic and hence inherently limited. There is no reason for a free and thriving society to inflict such limitations upon itself without good cause.