Former US president Donald Trump supposedly absconded from the White House with reams of classified documents, stored them at his Mar-a-Lago home, responded first lackadaisically then combatively when called upon to hand them back over, finally resorting to weird claims about having declassified those documents by “thinking about it.”

Former US vice-president (now president) Joe Biden supposedly absconded from his official residence at the US Naval Observatory with reams of classified documents, which ended up in a closet at a private office, in a garage at one of his homes, and possibly elsewhere. He began returning them of his own volition, but apparently discovered them before, and waited to mention them until after, the 2022 midterm elections.

Either situation would constitute marvelous grist for the scandal mill;. In combination the effect is exponential. Most of that grist has to do with double standards:

First, why do presidents and vice-presidents get to just walk around (and, apparently, out) with classified information when members of Congress have to look at it in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) and hand it back over immediately?

Second, why are presidents and vice-presidents who apparently drive away moving vans full of the stuff treated more leniently than lowly government employees who (possibly unintentionally) take single classified documents home from work in their briefcases?

I’ve written before about a third, non-grist category of scandal: Why do we let the government treat much, or for that matter any, information as secret in the first place?

But here, I’d like to focus on a fourth question: What does this whole thing tell us about the quality of management in the managerial state?

Running back to the first two paragraphs, we should probably understand how unlikely it is that either Trump or Biden personally walked away with those documents. They’ve got staff members to take care of such things. Neither of them has ever been lauded as intellectually curious or an avid reader. Heck, they may not have KNOWN they had the documents until they were told.

The president is the “chief executive” of the federal government. Strip away the pomp, circumstance, and ceremony, and he’s just a manager. He supervises a boatload of employees. Most decisions he makes really amount to signing off on other people’s recommendations.

Two presidents in a row have proven they can’t even impress upon their underlings the importance of not abandoning the nuclear launch codes in a garage or on the floor of a resort.

Would you trust someone with such poor management skills to run a convenience store or coffee shop?

If not, why on earth would you trust him to run the largest, wealthiest, most powerful, and most dangerous organization in history?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“By the end of this year,” Michael Munger writes at Reason, “GPT4 chatbots will be able to produce, in less time than it takes to read this sentence, millions of texts on all the topics that you can think of, as well as those no one has ever thought of.”

Which, coupled with a couple of “conceptually simple” steps, leads to a “text singularity” in which writing as a human activity essentially stops. Artificial intelligences automagically write … well, all the things. People are reduced to mere readers.

As a working writer, I can’t help but shudder for the same reasons that inspired Ned Ludd and his disciples to rebellion against early factory automation in the 19th century. If machines can do what I do — better, faster, and cheaper — I guess I’m out of  the writing racket.

On the other hand, as a working writer, I’ve pointed out numerous times that automation is, generally speaking, a good thing.

Automation results in products that are more available, less costly, and often of higher quality.

And since that results in more demand for such products, it often creates more jobs than it eliminates — more people to bring material to the machine, more people to haul away and sell the machine’s output. In fact, England employed far more textile workers after the  automation of weaving than before, putting the lie to Luddism’s complaints.

Maybe I can get a job dusting cooling fins or replacing defective cables at the Big Writing Machine’s server farm.

Or maybe I won’t have to.

Much as it grinds my Austrian economics devotee gears to think so, it could be that the impending “text singularity” and similar developments are bellwethers leading us toward the post-scarcity of Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” — an age in which few if any humans really need to “work” because automation makes EVERYTHING abundant and free or nearly so.

That sounds like the better side of the utopian science fiction milieus I immersed myself in as a young reader. Whether we can avoid the worse sides — which usually involve political schemes to subjugate us all — is a different question.

It also sounds unlikely, but perhaps my long-held prejudice toward the value of human creativity, ingenuity, and motivation as the way toward a better future are skewing my viewpoint.

Either way, history runs forward, not backward. And the future promises, if nothing else, constant fascination.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

After four days of acrimony and 15 ballots, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) finally became Speaker of the House early on January 7. Yay! Congress is finally back in business! Gridlock ends! The republic is saved!

Well, not really.  The whole sorry exercise was just another attempt to compete with professional wrestling for the attention of entertainment-seekers. Congress, unfortunately, was never OUT of business, except for exactly as long as, and precisely to the extent that,  it CHOSE to be out of business, for the purpose of attracting attention to its own supposed importance.

How vital is the position of Speaker? What’s its role and function? What can or cannot happen while the office remains vacant?

The answer to all those questions is “whatever Congress decides.”

For nearly 200 years, the position of Speaker was referenced a grand total of once in the US Constitution, in Article I, Section 2:  “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers.”

It wasn’t until 1967, when the 25th Amendment was ratified, that the Constitution ascribed any particular significance to the position at all, and that significance is fairly minor (he or she is one of the officials to be notified of presidential incapacity).

Apart from that single specific role, everything defaults to Article I, Section 5: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings.”

The only reason the House couldn’t swear in new members, consider and pass legislation, etc., until a Speaker was elected was that that’s how the House chooses to do things.

Nor was there any reason the House couldn’t have chosen to do things differently, even in the middle of the chaos.

The only conceivable — and exceedingly unlikely — material fallout from the position remaining vacant indefinitely would be if the president or vice-president had needed to let the Speaker know that the president was incapacitated, or if both the president AND the vice-president were incapacitated or killed and a Speaker was needed to fill the office of president. In which case the remaining anti-McCarthy holdouts in the Republican camp would have knuckled under in minutes rather than in days.

At any time in that four-day pageant, a majority of the House could have changed its rules to let it pick the Speaker by, say, drawing names from a hat. Or to proceed with the chamber’s other business and hold weekly votes to eventually fill the position. Or any sizable group of Democrats or Republicans could have changed their votes to elect McCarthy, or Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), or for that matter you or me (the Speaker need not be a House member).

What finally broke the impasse? Two things:

First, once the thing really got going, Republicans weren’t going to let it stop on January 6, the anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot.

Second, once they were past January 6, they weren’t going to delay further and risk letting Saturday’s NFL schedule steal their thunder.

Which should tell you all you need to know about the ratio of drama to substance. It was just another TV show, folks.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY