Friday, July 31, 2015

Charles Murray’s Prescription for American Government

Charles Murray’s Prescription for American Government By Charles C. W. Cooke — July 25, 2015

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is adapted from one that ran in the July 20, 2015, issue of National Review.

By the time that Charles Murray sat down to write By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, he had decided that he’d had enough. During the process, he confides in the acknowledgments, his wife had been a touch worried about him: “‘No more mister nice guy,’ I would say ominously, and then disappear back into my lair.” Once she read the finished manuscript, though, she concluded that she’d been overly concerned.

It is quite the trick to call for substantial civil disobedience but to do so without ever worrying the reader, but Murray has pulled it off. In By the People, he appears as a mild-mannered Howard Beale, sticking his head out the window of the social-sciences train and announcing, with frustrated resignation, “I’m not going to take this anymore!” In so doing he joins a long line of American rebels who have contrived to take up literary arms against the established order, and to reclaim their birthrights from Leviathan. If you want a book that will crisply outline what has happened to Madisonian America since the Great Depression, without scaring the neighbors, it’s your lucky day.

That Murray is a restrained warrior should not be taken as an indication that his diagnosis is half-hearted or that his indignation is faint. His intention, he explains candidly on the first page, is no less than to convince his readers that “America’s political system has been transmuted into something bearing only a structural resemblance to the one that the founders created.” How bad have things become? Bad enough at least that Part I begins with a host of serious epithets — America is “lawless”; “systemically corrupt”; in a state of “advanced sclerosis”; saddled with a “broken constitution” — and that, by the time their use has been assiduously justified, the reader does not consider them hyperbolic.

Once upon a time, Murray contends darkly, the United States enjoyed a political order that was uniquely effective at limiting the influence of government. Alas, since the New Deal that order has been slowly perverted: in part by faithless courts that have failed to police the state and to uphold the Constitution as written; in part by the abandonment of crucial common-law principles such as mens rea and limited negligence standards; in part by the metastasization of the administrative state, which has taken power away from Congress and become a law unto itself; in part because democracies inevitably eat themselves; and in part because the very political system that could in theory push back against these excesses has itself become corrupted. By Murray’s lights, there is no realistic chance that, simply by electing the right people to Washington or by appointing Scalia-esque justices to the Supreme Court, the voters can reverse the decline. “It is not,” he submits, “unlikely” that the United States will be restored at the ballot box — it is “impossible.” And so, it is time to raise some hell.

Clearly anticipating the obvious charge — that he is merely bitter that his own team has not been winning of late — Murray goes to great pains to rest his case upon the legal strictures contained within the original Constitution and upon the universal precepts of the Declaration of Independence. In most polities, to claim that the government is on “the wrong path” makes little logical sense. The inevitable question in, say, Italy, is “By what yardstick?” But “American government,” as Murray contends convincingly, “does not command our blind allegiance to the law.” Indeed, “it is part of our national catechism that government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights, and that when it becomes destructive of those rights, the reason for our allegiance is gone.”

It is quite the trick to call for substantial civil disobedience but to do so without ever worrying the reader, but Murray has pulled it off.

These are potentially seditious words, and because there is such a thin line between legitimate rebellion and unwarranted law-breaking, a good number of Americans will presumably recoil at them. But, ultimately, they need not worry. Murray insists that he is “not proposing revolution” so much as suggesting that the government has “lost elements of its legitimacy” and needs therefore to be selectively challenged from the outside. To underscore this claim, he reports polling data illustrating a concerning fact: Voters of all stripeshave lost faith in their institutions as those institutions have grown beyond recognition. Suspect that it’s just tea-party types who are disgruntled with the way Washington works? Think again. Jefferson’s “consent of the governed” has been lost.

Those who are hoping to recruit Murray to their side in a broader fight against the state will be disappointed. Certainly he has of late adopted “an adversarial stance toward the federal government.” But his ideal insurgency is a limited one. In Murray’s view, there are no victories to be won by encouraging Americans to cheat on their taxes or to chip away at the nation’s civil-rights laws or to put people in physical danger — or, for that matter, to pick any public fight during which the state can trot out a sympathetic victim. Nor does he believe that conservatives can win their battle against extensive transfer payments, restore the federal government to its pre-1932 role, or overturn the more damaging of the Supreme Court’s acts of constitutional vandalism. Rather, he aspires to give a voice to the voiceless, and accord to the put-upon a realistic chance of fighting back against a bureaucratic machine that routinely crushes anything that finds itself in its path.

The “repeated injuries and usurpations” against which Murray hopes to wage war are regulatory and administrative in nature. He is on the side of the dentist whose business is destroyed by an overly literal hygiene inspector; of the restaurant whose owners are fined for keeping cheese a single degree above the temperature established in the rules; of the family-run storage-drum-reconditioning plant that is threatened with a $9.3 million fine for no discernible reason whatsoever.

‘It is not,’ he submits, ‘unlikely’ that the United States will be restored at the ballot box — it is ‘impossible.’ And so, it is time to raise some hell.

Murray’s troops are lawyers — representatives of a proposed pro bono group that he has termed “the Madison Fund” — and their role in the mutiny is to “pour sugar into the government’s gas tank.” Murray envisions that, by tying up in court the most capricious and petty among the regulators, his liberty-friendly attorneys would achieve two salutary victories against Goliath. First, they would bring much-needed legal relief to a host of tormented Davids: No sooner would the government threaten to end a career or put a company out of business than a counselor with a legal briefcase would show up and announce his intention to take it from there. This, in turn, would force the nation’s mandarins to rethink their approach, enjoining the out-of-control bureaucratic state to contemplate whether it is really worth issuing a citation for that minor infraction. Just as the federal government lives in constant fear of restricting speech lest the ACLU show up at its door, and just as the states tend to shy away from limiting the right to keep and bear arms for fear that the NRA will jump on their case, so too would America’s many Departments of Frivolous Interference think twice before sending out a crack squad to smash a peanut with sledgehammers.

Which is to say that, despite the high-flown appeals to the liberty of man and the bleak assessment of the scale of the “abuses and usurpations” to which modern Americans are daily subjected, the Charles Murray of By the People is not Sam Adams, and his weapon of choice is not the musket; he is Atticus Finch with a Gadsden Flag.

All revolutions rely for their success on timing, tactical prowess, and the identification of their enemy’s key weaknesses. Murray’s would be no different. We are, he proposes in his final chapter, coming out of an era of peculiar homogeneity and entering an era of technological change and genuine intellectual and political diversity. The one-size-fits-all government that grew up during the culturally uniform post-war period is no longer suitable in the age of the “liberation technology” that we now take for granted. In consequence, he argues, we might be on the verge of a broad rejection of prior regulatory norms, and of a moment in which the rest of the country stands up and insists loudly that we refrain from treating the United States as if it were merely an extension of New York City. Should this happen, and should the government choose to react by persevering in the manner to which it has become accustomed, it will more than likely expose itself to be a paper tiger, unable to enforce its will without inviting the ire of the disaffected. “What looks like Goliath to any one of us,” Murray submits, “is actually the Wizard of Oz.” If we want to restore our liberty, we have only to pull off the mask — whether we are permitted to do so or not.

The Left Says: U.S. Plan To Move Minorities To New Neighborhoods Works

Economist: U.S. Plan To Move Minorities To New Neighborhoods Works

22 Comments

BY RAPHAEL BOSTIC

07/30/2015 06:01 PM ET

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a final rule revising its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation to clarify and streamline what local communities must do to use HUD funds.

Specifically, communities will have to examine whether their investments have helped provide all residents — including minorities and other groups that have historically faced discrimination — with access to better opportunities. The new rule was designed after careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of previous rules and made improvements where needed.

While these types of rules are rarely implemented without detractors, the arguments against AFFH that appeared in a July 9 editorial titled "HUD's Own Study Dashes Utopian Dream Of Cross-Neighborhood Prosperity" attempt to use an evaluation of a HUD demonstration program — Moving to Opportunity (MTO) — to suggest that this effort and all future programs are doomed to fail.

As an assistant secretary for the HUD department that oversaw the study, I penned the foreword and summarized this analysis. Since my words were the key supporting detail in the editorial's theory, I feel it is important that I respond to set the record straight.

First, the MTO evaluation found many benefits that your editorial staff overlooked. Those who moved to lower-poverty neighborhoods experienced significant reductions in diabetes and obesity, two conditions that are often precursors to chronic health ailments.

These improvements reduce the need for health services, thereby reducing health care expenditures and limiting expenses associated with Medicare and Medicaid.

These are important benefits that should not be written off.

Second, the record on the demonstration is far from settled.

You should not have interpreted my forward to that study as the final word on the subject, as it simply summarizes the study's contents and is not a definitive statement.

Indeed, many other researchers studying MTO have found evidence suggesting that the demonstration resulted in substantial income and other benefits for families who were in the program.

For example, a recent study by Harvard economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence Katz found that children, particularly those who moved when younger and thus had more ability to take advantage of the better educational resources, had incomes 31% higher than those who remained in isolated, high-poverty neighborhoods by the time they were in their mid-20s.

This is a big effect, and the authors suggest that mobility may be an important component of a strategy to end poverty's persistence across generations.

So I would suggest that the claim of "failure" is at best overblown and more likely just flat-out wrong.

Third, and quite importantly, your suggestion that the HUD regulation is new social engineering that mandates outcomes in jurisdictions is also just wrong.

The regulation revises procedures that have been in place for decades; the mandate is not new.

In fact, I was tasked with helping conceive of the new approach and so am well-versed in its goals and structure.

The new regulation streamlines the process so that communities can better assess their efforts to improve the quality of life of their citizens and consider new strategies in those cases where some residents — often minority residents — have not benefited as much as they might otherwise.

Communities that want to do right by all of their residents will clearly benefit by these revisions. Hopefully, those not so readily inclined will start doing better.

Moreover, under this new regulation, communities will have broad discretion to craft a locally appropriate strategy to ensure that all citizens have access to opportunity.

In some cases, it might involve locating affordable housing in more affluent areas. But in many cases, it will involve investing to improve schools, transportation linkages to job opportunities, or other revitalization strategies.

There are many possible approaches, and HUD clearly recognizes this. The opening paragraphs of the regulation make this point explicitly.

Finally, while I am happily and proudly an African-American economist, highlighting that fact in your editorial was wholly inappropriate, as it implied that academics, government officials and African-Americans neither respect evidence nor develop opinions based on evidence.

This is a low blow that is wrong on all counts. I hope that in the future, the IBD editorial staff will not demean itself by using such transparent race-baiting tactics.

• Bostic is director of the University of Southern California Bedrosian Center on Governance and former assistant secretary of the Housing and Urban Development Department.

Obama's Economic Growth Gap Now Tops $2 Trillion

18 Comments

Revisions: The latest GDP numbers show that President Obama's economic recovery — already the worst since World War II — was even worse than previously thought. This isn't slow and steady growth, it's punishingly slow.

News accounts of the latest Bureau of Economic Analysis report pointed to the 2.3% growth in real GDP in the second quarter as evidence that the economy had "bounced back" and "continued the slow but steady recovery trajectory of the last six years."

To be sure, 2.3% growth isn't awful, and it does come after the BEA revised its Q1 estimate upward — from -0.2 % to +0.6%. But the real story isn't found in these latest quarterly numbers. It's elsewhere in the report.

As it periodically does, the BEA revised previous years' GDP numbers, and what it found this time is that growth in almost every quarter since 2012 was weaker than it previously calculated.

The result is that GDP growth from 2012 to 2014 was just 2%, not 2.3%. In dollar terms, the revisions cut more than $100 billion from the nation's economic pie.

It also means that President Obama has presided over an economic recovery — now more than six years old — that is far worse than all the previous 10 stretching back 70 years.

Even President Bush's recovery from the 2001 recession — widely derided by Democrats and the press for being far too tepid — was stronger that Obama's. After 24 quarters, Obama's GDP is up a mere 13.3%. By this point in the Bush recovery, GDP had grown 18%.

Looked at another way, if Obama's recovery had been merely average — that is, if it had kept pace with the average of the previous 10 — the nation's economy would be $2.07 trillion bigger.

That works out to more than $17,000 in lost wealth per household thanks to Obama's subpar growth.

When confronted with such dismal results, the Obama administration and its defenders will blame the recession, claiming that recoveries from fiscal crises are always slower. Leave aside the fact that multiple studies have debunked this claim — as the charts below show — Obama's recovery has vastly underperformed even his own projections.

Obama's fiscal 2010 budget, for example, pegged 2010 growth at 3.2%. Actual growth was 2.5%. Even now, Obama keeps overestimating the growth his policies are supposed to be producing. While slow and steady might win some races, when it comes to the economy, it means leaving millions of the most vulnerable Americans falling behind.

Average income among the wealthiest 5% of households has climbed since 2009, but it's dropped for those in the bottom 20%, Census data reveal.

The average length of unemployment is now 28 weeks — a month longer than when the economic recovery officially began way back in June 2009.

Millions have given up looking for work and dropped out of the labor force entirely. And millions more are in poverty and on food stamps than at the start of Obama's recovery.

How many of these people would say they're pleased with the "steady" snail's pace growth under this president? In our view, this is an intolerable economic situation, and one that would be widely viewed as such if someone other than Obama occupied the White House.

The Jew Who Saves Christians

Charles Krauthammer: The Jew Who Saves Christians

3 Comments

BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

07/30/2015

Christianity, whose presence in the Middle East predates Islam's by 600 years, is about to be cleansed from the Middle East.

Egyptian Copts may have found some respite under Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, but after their persecution under the previous Muslim Brotherhood government, they know how precarious their existence in 90% Muslim Egypt remains. Elsewhere, it's much worse.

Twenty-one Copts were beheaded by the Islamic State affiliate in Libya for the crime of being Christian.

In those large swaths of Syria and Iraq where the Islamic State rules, the consequences for Christians are terrible — enslavement, exile, torture, massacre, crucifixion.

Over the decades, many Middle Eastern Christians, seeing the rise of political Islam and the intensification of savage sectarian wars, have simply left. Lebanon's Christians, once more than half the population, are now estimated at about a third.

Disappearing Christians

The number of Christians under Palestinian Authority rule in the West Bank has dwindled — in Bethlehem, for example, dropping by half.

(The exception, of course, is Israel, where Christians, Arab and non-Arab, enjoy not just protection but civil rights. Their numbers are increasing. But that's another story.)

Most endangered are the Christians of Syria. Four years ago they numbered about 1.1 million. By now 700,000 have fled.

Many of those remaining in country are caught either under radical Islamist rule or in the crossfire between factions. As the larger Christian world looks on passively, their future, like the future of Middle Eastern Christianity writ large, will be determined by Iran, Hezbollah, the Assad dynasty, the Islamic State, the Nusra Front, various other local factions and by regional powers seeking advantage.

Meanwhile, on a more limited scale, there are things that can be done. Three weeks ago, for example, 150 Syrian Christians were airlifted to refuge and safety in Poland.

That's the work of the Weidenfeld Safe Havens Fund. It provided the flight and will support the refugees for as long as 18 months as they try to remake their lives.

The person behind all this is Lord George Weidenfeld: life peer, philanthropist, publisher (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, established 1949), Europeanist (founder of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue to promote classically liberal European values), proud public Jew (honorary vice president of the World Jewish Congress), lifelong Zionist (he once served as the chief of Cabinet to Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann) and, as he will delightedly tell you, the last person to fight a duel at the University of Vienna — with sabers, against a Nazi. (No one died.)

Weidenfeld, now 95, once invoked Torschlusspanik, "a German phrase which roughly translates as the 'panic before the closing of the doors,'" to explain why "I'm a man in a hurry."

Remarkably healthy and stunningly energetic (as distant cousins, we are often in touch), he appears nowhere near any exit doors.

But he is aware of and deeply troubled by the doors closing in on a community in Syria largely abandoned by the world. In context, the scale of the initial rescue is tragically small. The objective is to rescue 2,000 families.

Compared to the carnage in Syria wrought by the pitiless combatants — 230,000 dead, half the 22 million population driven from their homes — it's a paltry sum. But these are real people who will be saved. And for Weidenfeld, that counts.

Good Deeds, Punished

Yet he has been criticized for rescuing just Christians. In fact, the U.S. government will not participate because the rescue doesn't extend to Yazidis, Druze or Shiites.

This comes under the heading of no good deed going unpunished. It's a rather odd view that because he cannot do everything, he should be admonished for trying to do something. If Weidenfeld were a man of infinite means, the criticism might be valid.

As it is, he says rather sensibly, "I can't save the world."

The Arab states, particularly the Gulf monarchies, are surely not without resources. With so few doing so little for so many, he's doing what he can.

And for him, it's personal. In 1938, still a teenager, he was brought from Vienna to London where the Plymouth Brethren took him in and provided for him. He never forgot. He is trying to return the kindness, he explains, to repay the good that Christians did for him 77 years ago.

In doing so, he is not just giving hope and a new life to 150 souls, soon to be thousands. He has struck a blow for something exceedingly rare: simple, willful righteousness.

King Obama's Arrogance May Placate Iran, But Not The U.S. Senate

Obama's Arrogance May Placate Iran, But Not The U.S. Senate

28 Comments

BY GEORGE F. WILL

07/29/2015

It came two days after the announcement of the nuclear agreement with Iran, yet little mention was made on July 16 of the 70th anniversary of the first nuclear explosion, near Alamogordo, N.M. The anniversary underscored the agreement's attempts to thwart proliferation of technology seven decades old.

Nuclear-weapons technology has become markedly more sophisticated since 1945, but not so sophisticated that nations with sufficient money and determination cannot master or acquire it. Iran's determination is probably related to America's demonstration, in Iraq and Libya, of the perils of not having nuclear weapons.

Critics who think more severe sanctions are achievable and would break Iran's determination must answer this: When have sanctions caused a large nation to surrender what it considers a vital national security interest? Critics have, however, amply demonstrated two things:

First, the agreement comprehensively abandons President Obama's original goal of dismantling the infrastructure of Iran's nuclear weapons program. Second, as the administration became more yielding with Iran, it became more dishonest with Americans.

For example, John Kerry says that we never sought "anywhere, anytime" inspections. But on April 6, Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, said that the agreement would include them. Kerry's co-negotiator, Wendy Sherman, breezily dismissed "anywhere, anytime" as "something that became popular rhetoric." It "became"? This is disgraceful.

Verification depends on U.S. intelligence capabilities. And as Reuel Marc Gerecht says in the Weekly Standard: "The CIA has a nearly flawless record of failing to predict foreign countries' going nuclear (Great Britain and France don't count)."

In the 1960 campaign, John Kennedy cited "indications" that by 1964 there would be "10, 15 or 20" nuclear powers. As president, he said that by 1975 there might be 15 or 20.

It is a law of arms control: Agreements are impossible until they are unimportant. The U.S.-Soviet strategic arms control "process" was an arena of maneuvering for military advantage until the USSR died of anemia.

Might the agreement with Iran buy sufficient time for Iran to undergo regime modification? Although Kerry speaks of the agreement "guaranteeing" that Iran will not become a nuclear power, it will. But what will Iran be like 15 years hence?

Since 1972, U.S. policy toward China has been a worthy but disappointing two-part wager. One part is that involving China in world trade will temper its unruly international ambitions. The second is that economic growth, generated by the moral and institutional infrastructure of markets, will weaken the sinews of authoritarianism.

The Obama administration's comparable wager is that domestic restiveness will subvert the Iranian regime. The median age in Iran is 29.5 (in the U.S., 37.7; in the European Union, 42.2). More than 60% of Iran's university students, and 70% of medical students, are women. Ferment is real.

In 1951, Hannah Arendt, a refugee from Hitler's Germany, argued bleakly that tyrannies wielding modern instruments of social control (bureaucracies, mass communications) could achieve permanence by conscripting the citizenry's consciousness, thereby suffocating social change.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution changed her mind: No government can control human nature or "all channels of communication."

Today's technologies make nations, including Iran, porous to outside influences; intellectual autarky is impossible. The best that can be said for the Iran agreement is that by somewhat protracting Iran's path to a weapon, it buys time for constructive churning in Iran. Although this is a thin reed on which to lean hopes, the reed is as real as Iran's nuclear ambitions are apparently nonnegotiable.

The best reason for rejecting the agreement is to rebuke Obama's long record of aggressive disdain for Congress — recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess, rewriting and circumventing statutes, etc.

Obama's intellectual pedigree runs to Woodrow Wilson, the first presidential disparager of the separation of powers. Like Wilson, Obama ignores the constitutional etiquette of respecting even rivalrous institutions.

The Iran agreement should be a treaty; it should not have been submitted first to the U.N. as a studied insult to Congress. Wilson said that rejecting the Versailles Treaty would "break the heart of the world."

The Senate, no member of which had been invited to accompany Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, proceeded to break his heart. Obama deserves a lesson in the cost of Wilsonian arrogance. Knowing little history, Obama makes bad history.

How Dodd-Frank Ate The U.S. Economic Recovery

43 Comments

07/28/2015

Regulation: The Dodd-Frank Act's fifth anniversary this month has received surprisingly little notice. Too bad. It's a pernicious law, one that a devastating new report suggests is largely to blame for our lacklustereconomy.

How bad is Dodd-Frank? One of its main goals, cited by both the White House and the then-Democrat-run Senate, was to get rid of the "too big to fail" doctrine that made some banks too important to allow to go bust.

It sounded good at the time. But in fact, it's had the exact opposite effect, leading to a decline in small banks and rising market share for the very largest. A cynic might suspect this was how it was designed to be. But what it's done to the economy is worse.

In eye-opening testimony to the House Financial Services Committee Tuesday, American Enterprise Institute fellow Peter J. Wallison said: "I believe that all the new regulation added by the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010 is the primary reason for the slow growth this country has experienced since 2010."

For the record, Wallison isn't just another anonymous "expert" or media pundit. He was a member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and co-chair of the Financial Reform Task Force in 2009.

And unlike many pundits still sounding off, he warned loudly and often in the early 2000s that our banking system was in danger of going off the rails. Later, he warned about Dodd-Frank's many flaws. Both times he was ignored; both times ended in disaster.

In the 23 quarters since the recession ended, economic growth has averaged a meager 2.2%.

As former Sen. Phil Gramm, an economist, recently noted, if this recovery had merely been as strong as the average post-World War II recovery, we'd have had 14.4 million more jobs, and per person income — including children — would be $6,042 higher.

But that didn't happen, and Dodd-Frank deserves much of the blame, says Wallison. Instead of killing too-big-to-fail, as promised, it imposed massive new regulations on banks.

As noted here last week, based on a report by the Mercatus Center, "Dodd-Frank's 27,669 rules are five times more than any other law and more than the total number of new regulations 'for all other laws passed during the Obama administration put together.'"

This regulatory siege under Dodd-Frank has created what Wallison calls a "bifurcated" economy.

While big companies can still raise money in global financial markets, small companies depend on banks for financing. So despite the Fed's zero-interest rate policy, the new rules have severely limited credit to small companies — taking a huge bite out of our recovery.

"Since most of the growth in the U.S. economy, and especially employment, comes from small firms, the economy is underperforming" and will keep doing so until the law is altered or repealed, Wallison said.

Based on recent estimates, U.S. GDP today is about $1.8 trillion less than it should be with a normal recovery. So that may just be the price tag for Dodd-Frank.

Millions of lost jobs, trillions of lost income and a crippled small-business sector. Wallison is right: Dodd-Frank is a disaster.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Newly recovered Lois Lerner email shows IRS tried to cover up tea party targeting

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Tuesday, July 28, 2015

The IRS sent one of its intrusive scrutiny letters to a nonprofit group in order to throw up a smokescreen and prevent the group from complaining to Congress about poor treatment, according to one of Lois G. Lerner’s apparently lost emails, which were recovered by auditors and released by an interest group Tuesday.

Judicial Watch, which sued to force the production of the Lerner emails, said the emails confirm that Ms. Lerner, the central figure in the targeting probe, and her colleagues were aware of the sensitive nature of the cases but appeared to hide details of the massive backlog they were amassing as they held up hundreds of tea party and conservative group applications for nonprofit status.

The IRS turned over 906 pages of emails July 15 to Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm, ahead of a Wednesday court hearing. Judicial Watch concluded that the emails were part of the messages Ms. Lerner lost in a computer malfunction, and released them Tuesday.

PHOTOS: See Obama's biggest White House fails

“This material shows that the IRS‘ cover-up began years ago,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. “We now have smoking-gun proof that top officials in the Obama IRS unlawfully harassed taxpayers just to keep them from complaining to Congress about IRS‘ targeting and abuse. No wonder the Obama IRS has had such little interest in preserving or finding Lois Lerner’s emails.”

The Lerner emails have become almost as big a scandal as the initial targeting. Ms. Lerner, who was head of the division that scrutinized the tea party applications until she retired while under investigation in 2013, suffered a computer hard drive crash that cost potentially thousands of emails that should have been part of the record.

The IRS took routine steps to try to recover the emails but reported that it was unable to do so.

PHOTOS: Politicians in prison: Public servants who've served time

But the agency’s independent inspector general said it was able to find the messages easily on backup tapes stored at remote locations — and that the IRS never bothered to look for those tapes, even as it was tellingCongress that all possible routes for message recovery had been exhausted.

According to the new emails, Ms. Lerner and her colleagues were aware of the growing outcry among nonprofit groups that they were being delayed.

In one Nov. 3, 2011, exchange between Ms. Lerner and Cindy Thomas, a program manager in the Cincinnati office that was handling the cases and was involved in a back-and-forth with Washington, the IRS admitted to having hundreds of cases stacked up and awaiting action.

Afraid of congressional pressure, Ms. Thomas ordered one of the inquiry letters to be sent, just to prevent one of the organizations being held up from complaining.

“Just today, I instructed one of my managers to get an additional information letter out to one of these organizations — if nothing else to buy time so he didn’t contact his Congressional Office,” she wrote in the email released by Judicial Watch.

Ms. Thomas said she feared a judge would get involved soon and order the IRS to move the applications more quickly.

That email exchange did confirm that IRS employees in Washington were deeply involved in making decisions about the nonprofit groups’ cases.

The IRS initially blamed the Cincinnati office for the glitch.

President Obama last week blamed the targeting scandal not on poor management but on “crummy” legislation he said Congress passed that gave his employees confusing instructions, and on funding cuts. He said the IRS wasn’t able to do its best work as a result.

“Congress has passed a crummy law that didn’t give people guidance in terms of what they were trying to do. They did it poorly and stupidly,” Mr. Obama told “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart.

A number of the 906 pages of emails released to Judicial Watch are redacted, with the agency citing the “b5” exemption under the Freedom of Information Act, which allows the government to withhold information deemed to be part of the agency deliberative process.

The IRS claimed other pages that were withheld contained sensitive taxpayer information — including what appear to be published news articles.

On Monday, Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform called Mr. Obama to oust Ms. Lerner’s successor,IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, for obstructing the targeting investigation.

Chairman Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, said Mr. Koskinen gave assurances that the IRS would save email that was key to the investigation at the same time the emails were being destroyed.

“The reality is what he said was false. He repeatedly made false statements,” Mr. Chaffetz said at a Capitol Hill press conference, where he was joined by more than a dozen fellow Republicans from the committee.

“Mr. Koskinen should no longer be the IRS commissioner,” said Mr. Chaffetz. “Mr. Koskinen failed in his duty to preserve and produce documentation to this committee.”

The IRS defended Mr. Koskinen.

“The record is clear that the IRS and Commissioner Koskinen have been cooperative and truthful with the numerous investigations underway. The agency has produced more than one million pages of documents in support of the investigations, provided 52 current and former employees for interviews and participated in more than 30 Congressional hearings on these issues,” the agency said in a statement.

The IRS inspector general has concluded that the agency did in fact target conservative and tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny, and the Justice Department is still conducting a criminal investigation into the targeting.

Mr. Chaffetz noted that 24,000 potential emails were destroyed after the materials were under subpoena and after the agency’s chief technology officer issued a preservation notice ordering employees not to destroy anything.

The chief technology officer later told the committee that he was “blown away” that backup tapes were destroyed 10 months after his preservation notice.

REP. CHAKA FATTAH (D-PA) INDICTED

REP. CHAKA FATTAH (D-PA) INDICTED FOR ALL SORTS OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION, REALLY. And note this:

Fattah’s office confirmed he has agreed to give up his leadership post on the Appropriations Committee, where he is the top Democrat overseeing criminal justice and science spending. He will be replaced by Mike Honda, D-Calif., who is currently the subject of an ethics probe.

At Front Page, Daniel Greenfield adds:

Fattah had garnered attention for demanding that Congress expunge the impeachment proceedings of Bill Clinton… and impeach Bush.
Chaka Fattah had joined Jesse Jackson Jr. on H. Res 635 to impeach Bush. Jackson was busted and went to prison. Now Chucklehead Fattah looks likely to join him. The bill was put forward by John Conyers whose wife went to jail for bribery.
Nothing to see here. Just more Democrats being Democrats.

Or as my friend Michael Walsh likes to say, “Think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.”
RELATED:

Posted at 4:01 pm by Ed Driscoll

Why Do Government Services So Often Suck So Badly?

The People As Pigeons Principle

by Charlie Martin

July 28, 2015 - 11:44 pm

n 2014, there was a flurry of scandal as it was revealed that employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs were cooking the books to make sure that statistics on wait times and care offered were meeting department requirements.

One of the tricks: finding out when an appointment could be scheduled, and then filling in the records to say that date was the date the patient wanted. So, no wait period — and no problems with reports. But people who had been watching the VA had a sense of deja vu, because the same problems had been reported in 2003. And 2001. And in the 1990s. And the 1980s. And so on, back to the original establishment of the VA system.

Just this month, it was reported that the IRS not only didn’t help most people calling for assistance, it only answered 37 percent of the calls at all — the rest got a message saying the IRS wasn’t taking calls just then.

In the 1930s, B.F. Skinner and others developed the theory ofoperant conditioning; they showed that there is a predictable pattern to behavior in organisms from flatworms to people: behavior that is rewarded is reinforced; behavior that is not reinforced tends to disappear.

Operant conditioning was controversial in theoretical psychology, linguistics, and as Skinner developed his ideas further into radical behaviorism, politically. In the meantime, however, animal trainers quickly started using operant conditioning to great effect. Pretty quickly, they learned that you had to be careful about what you are reinforcing, because what seems to be scolding a puppy for chewing a sock may seem to the puppy like “Oh cool! I can grab one of these things and Daddy will always play tug of war with me!”

You may be thinking now that somehow two articles have gotten mixed up in editing, but watch me pull these together.

People, like pigeons, do whatever gets them pellets.

In operant conditioning experiments, pigeons behavior was reinforced by giving them pigeon pellets, yummy pigeon snacks. When a pigeon did some behavior that was desired, from clicking a lever to pecking at the projected image of a ship, it got a pigeon pellet. Afterwards, it was more likely to do whatever it was that got it a pellet.

Of course, there are some differences, because people are not pigeons, and pigeon pellets are not very pleasant to people. (Trust me on this one.)

People are funny: they can find their own rewards, and food rewards aren’t usually the best thing. Money, however, is pretty good, and respect, applause, and autonomy are also good. But make someone unhappy enough and they’ll start finding it rewarding to fight back. In Scrum: the Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, Jeff Sutherland has an interesting example: GM co-owned (with Toyota) a car factory in Fremont, CA. While GM operated it, workers loved doing things like leaving an empty Coke bottle inside a car door, making a rattle that would bother the customer.

This leads to another observation:

People pellets are sometimes perplexing.

The trick is that people are more complicated than pigeons, so what rewards them is sometimes a little hard to see. Looked at rationally, one might imagine GM workers would see that making a worse product would hurt them eventually, with poor sales, leading to layoffs, leading to the plant finally closing down.

Which is, in fact, what happened. GM eventually pulled out and turned the factory over to their partner Toyota. It seems, somehow, that there was something rewarding to the workers in doing things that purposefully made the products worse.

Now, I am going to make a bit of a leap here and propose what I think is a corollary to the People As Pigeons Principle. Observe that if you have a puppy that always wants to chew a sock, it probably means that chewing the sock got it attention in the past. I suggest that:

What people are doing now is what got them pellets in the past.

If this is true, then we ought to be able to look at the way people are behaving now, and see why that was rewarding in the past. On the other hand — remember that behaviors that aren’t reinforced, disappear — if there are things that aren’t being done, we might find that those things weren’t being reinforced in the past.

So now we come back to the VA. In the most recent scandals, we found that administrators were getting paid bonuses for keeping wait times low; they weren’t particularly being rewarded for the number of patients seen. So, they acted to make the wait time measurements low. There was no particular reward for actually treating the patients — after all, that was just doing their jobs — so we’d expect that behavior to go away, or at least diminish until something else (like patients dying while awaiting treatment) started to hurt.

Which is, sure enough, what happened.

In software engineering we see the same thing: if we start measuring productivity in terms of how many lines of code are being written, we tend to get lots of lines of code. Looking at it rationally, if we think lines of code are what we want and what we reward for, lots of lines of code is what we’ll get.

Which is, sure enough, what happens.

With the IRS, we can imagine lots of reasons that the number of calls answered is so low. (I personally like the theory that the IRS is pissed about being caught in the IRS scandals, but I don’t actually know.)

Look at the situation, however, and we can see this: the IRS doesn’t get any particular rewards from answering calls; after all, they’re just doing their job. But the IRS commissioner can go in front of Congress and insist that they can only answer more calls if they receive a massive budget increase — which has always worked before, after all.

So what I’ve done here is proposed a theory: people tend to do what they find rewarding, and what people are doing now is what’s been rewarding in the past. Readers can evaluate this for themselves — just think about where you get good service and bad service, government or private, and see if what you consider good service is being rewarded. (For an interesting thought experiment, ask yourself why McDonalds drive-through orders are wrong so much more often than orders at the counter.)

If you find this theory plausible, then ask yourself one more question: do we reward government, and government workers, for when they are giving us good service?

If you have a puppy that always wants to chew a sock, it probably means that chewing the sock got it attention in the past.