Newmark's Door

Just awful:

Bernhardt describes various factors that contribute to the bureaucratic morass within administrative agencies: badly-written statutes that provide little guidance to regulators; labyrinthine organizational structures within agencies, padded with layers of career civil servants; weak agency heads unwilling (or unable) to manage the sprawling operations they oversee—serving as mere “figureheads” and allowing their agencies to run on “autopilot”; and even chaotic White House staffing arrangements that impede vital communication between agency heads and the president to whom they report. Fixing some of these problems requires action by Congress or (in the case of Chevron deference) the Supreme Court, but—in Bernhardt’s telling—a strong executive can make progress with forceful, decisive management. However, it is not easy: systemic problems elude simple solutions.

Naomi Schaefer Riley rakes a new book, The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession, over hot burning coals.

"Teachers are this country’s silent, constant superheroes," writes Alexandra Robbins in her new book, The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession. The book, which is filled with this kind of pablum . . . 

Self-esteem, power posing, grit, and more get thrown on the trash pile.

Interesting discussion with a nice shout-out to North Carolina native Malcom McLean.

Another very favorable review of Gramm, Ekleund, and Early's The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate.

Review of The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies. The reviewer likes it a lot.

"While Guidara was GM of New York Times Four Star restaurant Eleven Madison Park, he recalled that 'We trained the people setting the dining room to place every plate so that if a guest flipped it over to see who had made it, the Limoges stamp would be facing them, right side up.' Why?"

Answer here.

It's important to read to little kids. Read Goodnight Moon as many times as you can stand.

Brief book review of Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power. The plan sounds good to me.

Something devoutly to be wished.

Howard ably distills the issues into a five-point indictment. He argues that public employee unions have:

1. Severed the links of accountability;
2. Rendered government substantially unmanageable with detailed rules and veto powers;
3. Made government unaffordable with opaque benefit packages and compensation manipulations;
4. Changed public policies to the harm of the public good; and,
5. Entrenched these abuses, and made reform practically impossible, through organized political power.

UPDATE: link fixed. Thanks, Albert.