Great Moments in International Bureaucracy

A couple of days ago, I criticized officials at the United Nations for advocating higher taxes and bigger government.

Fortunately, that bureaucracy is so sclerotic and inefficient that its efforts to promote statism are not very effective

But it still galls me that international bureaucrats who receive lavish, tax-free salaries spend their days trying to promote higher taxes on everyone else.

And that’s also my view of the tax-loving bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund, as well as their counterparts at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Perhaps the logical takeaway is that international bureaucracies are inherently problematic, pushing misguided policy on their bad days and wasting money on their good days.

Here are some additional examples, starting with with the “Eurocrats” in Brussels. The U.K.-based Telegraph reports that they’ve been naughty hypocrites.

An MEP tried to escape through a window after police raided a 25-strong sex party in Brussels’ city centre for breaking Belgium’s coronavirus rules. …Police raided the flat after neigbours complained about the noise. …Belgian media reported two EU diplomats at the sex party… Police fined the 25 people, who were mostly naked men, at the orgy £225 each before releasing them. They broke rules limiting gatherings to groups of four. …A European Parliament source said: “There is nothing wrong to participate in a sex party of any kind. However, …parliamentary immunity does not exempt you from obeying the law.” Brussels hosts the major EU institutions, including one of the European parliament’s two seats.

Next, let’s take a look at the World Health Organization.

That bureaucracy is infamous for its bungled and politicized response to the coronavirus.

So maybe it’s a bit of karma that the bureaucracy is now suffering its own outbreak. Here are some excerpts from a story in the Las Angeles Times.

The World Health Organization has recorded 65 coronavirus cases among staff members based at its headquarters, despite the agency’s public assertions that there has been no transmission at the Geneva site, an internal email obtained by the Associated Press shows. …32 were found in staff who had been working at the headquarters building, suggesting that the health agency’s strict hygiene, screening and other prevention measures were not sufficient to spare it from the pandemic. …On Nov. 2, the WHO’s technical lead for the COVID-19 response, Maria Van Kerkhove, told reporters that there had been no transmission or clusters at headquarters.

Let’s wrap up by looking at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

You may have assumed this bureaucracy no longer exists since the Soviet Union (thankfully) no longer exists.

But not only is NATO still there, the Washington Free-Beacon reported that it built itself an opulent Taj Mahal-style headquarters.

…the new NATO headquarters…building cost an astounding $1.23 billion, according to a budget released by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Architecture, design, and quality management cost the alliance $129 million alone. Audio visual installations ran $29 million, while construction ran $514 million, the document states. …The alliance bragged that the structure is also a “green building for the future.” “The environment and sustainability have played a major role in the design process. The new building’s energy consumption has been optimized through the use of geothermal and solar energy and advanced lighting systems. …the buildings short wings will have green roofs,” the document states.

Lots of moral preening about being a “green building,” but nothing about whether this monument to extravagance will make NATO more effective as a fighting force.

Then again, as Mark Steyn observed many years ago, NATO nowadays is about as useful as “keeping forts in South Dakota to defend settlers against hostile Indians.”

In a perverse way, I almost have to admire NATO.

It takes special bureaucratic skills to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact. And it takes super-special bureaucratic skills to then get a $1.23 billion headquarters when the organization’s reason for existing disappeared nearly three decades ago.

Ronald Reagan obviously would not be surprised.

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“…maintaining NATO is like keeping forts in South Dakota to defend settlers against hostile Indians.”

That line is from a great column by Steve Chapman, who wonders why NATO still exists. If you read this column and Mark Steyn’s recent National Review article (which I blogged about here), you will have a good grasp of what makes libertarian foreign policy very compelling.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates went to Europe recently to announce that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization may have a “dismal future” and that before long, American leaders “may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.” Why does he make that sound like a bad thing? “Watch out! We may have to stop spending so much money protecting countries that can protect themselves!” …Its entire purpose was to protect Western Europe from the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces in Eastern Europe, which were a plausible threat to invade and conquer. But at this point, maintaining NATO is like keeping forts in South Dakota to defend settlers against hostile Indians. The Western alliance won the Cold War, and in the absence of some major, general threat, Gates would do better to ask why it needs to be preserved. …Ever since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been an answer in search of a question. It validates what Ronald Reagan is credited with saying: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Everyone understood why we kept huge forces in (West) Germany a generation ago. But today, it’s a puzzle. Who are they supposed to fight? The Finns? Missions like Libya are an attempt to justify an organization that has outlived the problem it was created to solve. …The defense secretary fumes that too many countries “enjoy the benefits of membership” but “don’t want to share the risks and costs.” Of course they do. If you let people join a nice club without paying dues, how many would turn it down? And if you later asked them to mop the floors, how many would grab a bucket? Our allies are behaving rationally, and we keep wondering why. Gates may enjoy continually pounding his head against a brick wall. But the rest of us might find it feels really good to stop.

I suppose it would be appropriate to acknowledge that the NATO example is very simple and straightforward. It’s much more challenging for libertarians (and everyone else) to figure out how to respond to something like Islamic terrorism. Ending the nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan would be a good start, to be sure, but I strongly doubt whether that would have any significant effect on the threat of attacks. I don’t pretend to know the answer, but perhaps the drone attacks are the least-worst approach. Simply stated, keep cutting the heads off the snakes.

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Mark Steyn’s Case for Libertarian Foreign Policy

I don’t know if Mark Steyn would agree with my characterization, but his new National Review column presents a very powerful case for libertarian foreign policy.

As is so often the case with Steyn’s writing, it’s very clever and often funny, but it’s also a remarkable indictment of interventionism and international bureaucracies. It’s only available for subscribers, but here’s an excerpt.

Thanks to American defense welfare, NATO is a military alliance made up of allies that no longer have militaries. In the Cold War, that had a kind of logic: Europe was the designated battlefield, so, whether or not they had any tanks, they had, very literally, skin in the game. But the Cold War ended and NATO lingered on, evolving into a global Super Friends made up of folks who aren’t Super and don’t like each other terribly much. At the beginning of the Afghan campaign, Washington invested huge amounts of diplomatic effort trying to rouse its allies into the merest gestures of war-making: The 2004 NATO summit was hailed as a landmark success after the alliance’s 26 members agreed to commit an extra 600 troops and three helicopters. That averages out at 23.08 troops per country, plus almost a ninth of a helicopter apiece. Half a decade of quagmire later, Washington was investing even larger amounts of diplomatic effort failing to rouse its allies into the most perfunctory gestures of non-combat pantywaist transnationalism: We know that, under ever more refined rules of engagement, certain allies won’t go out at night, or in snow, or in provinces where there’s fighting going on, so, by the 2010 NATO confab, Robert Gates was reduced to complaining that the allies’ promised 450 “trainers” for the Afghan National Army had failed to materialize. Supposedly 46 nations are contributing to the allied effort in Afghanistan, so that would work out at ten “trainers” per country. Imagine if the energy expended in these ridiculous (and in some cases profoundly damaging) transnational fig leaves had been directed into more quaintly conventional channels — like, say, identifying America’s national interest and pursuing it. …Transnational do-gooding is political correctness on tour. It takes the relativist assumptions of the multiculti varsity and applies them geopolitically: The white man’s burden meets liberal guilt. No wealthy developed nation should have a national interest, because a national interest is a selfish interest. …in an era of Massively Applied Desultoriness, we spend a fortune going to war with one hand tied behind our back. The Forty-Three Percent Global Operating Industrial Military Complex isn’t too big to fail, but it is perhaps too big to win — as our enemies understand. So on we stagger, with Cold War institutions, transnational sensibilities, politically correct solicitousness, fraudulent preening pseudo–nation building, expensive gizmos, little will, and no war aims . . . but real American lives.

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