The Illusion of Knowledge

~ "A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.” --Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

The Illusion of Knowledge

Monthly Archives: June 2014

When Government Fucks Up We Need… More Government

19 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by Milton in Uncategorized

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For some people, more government is always the answer.  When the government is efficient, it should get a bigger budget because it is doing a good job.  When the government screws up, it is because its budget wasn’t big enough.  From the latter category comes Dylan Matthews in Vox: “The IRS scandal shows the IRS needs a bigger budget.”  Almost at the end we get to the following paragraph:

So it’s no wonder that they took shortcuts. Of course, if those shortcuts were in fact politically biased, there’s only so much that budget cuts could have contributed to that. There’s no budgetary reason to look for groups with “Tea Party” in the name and not ones with “progressive.” But again, accounts differ on whether or not the watch-words they used were in fact biased. What seems likelier than a nefarious conspiracy of mid-level IRS management to destroy the Tea Party is a group of overworked bureaucrats who saw group names as a way to make an utterly unmanageable workload somewhat more manageable.

Matthews is right, accounts differ, but the justification from the liberal side of the aisle looks shakier and shakier with every new detail.

 

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