Cost disease versus Leviathan explanations of rising government cost: An empirical investigation

In this paper we reexamine the apparently conflicting empirics of Borcherding et al. (1977) versus those of Barry and Lowery (1984). The latter, designed to test the cost disease versus bureau voting power hypotheses on US Citibase annual data between 1947 to 1979, was retested for the longer period available through 1989. Second, and more importantly, we isolate and test for the presence of a second channel for the exercise of bureaucratic power. That channel is the bureau's ability to use its information advantage to capture a portion of newly generated government rents through higher personal benefits (such as higher salaries). Such an analysis (following West, 1991) requires first that those factors generating new rents for government actually result in successful bureaucratic rent-seeking in the form of higher compensation levels. In addition, the analysis requires that these “artificial” increases in bureaucratic wages show up as significant determinants of the higher cost of providing government services. Incorporating a constructed Kau/Rubin variable into the Barry and Lowery database is then shown to improve the predictive power of both the cost disease and bureaucratic power hypotheses for US annual data between 1948 and 1989.     

Voluntary and therapeutic castration of sex offenders in The Netherlands (1938–1968)

Between 1938 and 1968 some 400 sex offenders in the Netherlands who by court orders had been put at ‘the discretion of the government’ and were incarcerated in asylums for the criminally insane, ‘voluntarily’ submitted themselves to ‘therapeutic’ castration, the surgical removal of their testes. Prior to 1938, inspired by a Danish castration act from 1929, and urged by asylums that were overcrowded by sex offenders, the ethics of the surgery had been discussed for nearly a decade amongst theologians, (forensic) psychiatrists, jurists and politicians, mostly in the context of eugenic sterilization. Discussions of conflicting Catholic, Protestant and non-denominational points of view vis-à-vis eugenics resulted in consensus about ‘therapeutic’ and ‘voluntary’ castration. Sexual deviancy, according to some, was like a tumor located in the testes, which could therefore be removed without moral objections and the person was thus cured of his disease. Although obviously related to forensic psychiatry and concerned with issues like protection of society and treatment of offenders, discussions were never held in a strictly forensic context. Unlike in other countries in which castration policies were enforced, in The Netherlands the surgery was never embodied in law but subject to an informal protocol that covered political accountability. To satisfy Catholic objections references to eugenic aims were omitted from the documents, as were references to castration as a penalty.