Limits on government power

George Washington’s greatest monument

Dec 272007

The above is a slide from the very first Black Hawk talk I gave, almost 6 years ago. The brick house in the lower left was built by a man who served in the militia at the time of the Black Hawk war scare. Later in life, one of the most significant events of his life that he recalled for the local county history writer was that he had once seen George Washington. It had been at a distance, when he was a very small boy.

While I wished he had had more to say about what happened during the Black War, there was a good reason to attach such significance to George Washington. A Christmas article in the Wall Street Journal reminded us of it.

It’s titled, “Washington’s Gift,” and is written by Thomas Fleming. It looks like Mr. Fleming has written a new book about Washington that I need to be reading.

When I started on the article, I thought it was going to be another one about the Newburgh Conspiracy. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It’s a story that needs to be told often. It was an event that I had once rated as one of the most important of the preceding millenium. George Washington defused a coup d’état in the making and refused to have any part in such a thing himself.

But no, this article is not about the Newburgh Conspiracy. It turns out that that affair wasn’t quite the end of the matter. Even after that close call, Congress wasn’t acting any more responsibility. Some thought Washington might have a change of heart. But instead, he resigned his commission, just before Christmas. When King George III heard about it, he said that if it was true, George Washington was the greatest man in the world. Years later John Trumbell saw fit to capture the moment in a painting. And Thomas Jefferson saw the significance, too, when he wrote:

The moderation. . . . of a single character probably prevented this revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.

That single character was of course George Washington, who was strong enough to resist the temptation to do what almost every other revolutionary leader has done.

I hope the brick house in Lenawee County is still standing and remains standing as a monument to George Washington and his act of self-abnegation.

Over-do-gooder

Limits on government power No Responses »

Nov 202007

Yikes! Well, I wasn’t planning to vote for any Republican candidate for president this year, anyway, but Jonah Goldberg is right. Mike Huckabee is one scary guy. (Jonah Goldberg in the LA Times: Ron Paul isn’t that scary: It’s that over-do-gooder Mike Huckabee who should be making conservatives nervous.)

In this respect, Huckabee’s philosophy is conventionally liberal, or progressive. What he wants to do with government certainly differs in important respects from what Hillary Clinton would do, but the limits he would place on governmental do-goodery are primarily tactical or practical, not philosophical or constitutional.

I’ll probably vote for Ron Paul, but would I do so if he had a chance of winning? I’m not sure.

(Thank you to Joshua Claybourn’s post at In the Agora for referring me to this article. )

Bob Lewis

Free markets, Health care reform, Limits on government power No Responses »

Nov 172007

My favorite IT pundit is Bob Lewis, who has an Advice Line blog at Infoworld. I’ve been reading him for years, since long before there were such things as blogs. (I liked Bob Metcalfe, too, as an IT pundit, back when he was punditing. But now that he’s gone, it’s just Bob Lewis.)

Before he got into IT, Bob got a PhD doing behavioral research on electric eels, which means he got off to a good start. He has amazing insights into the way businesses can and should work, especially but not only on the IT side. Anyone who believes in the conservative values of free markets and limited government will find a wealth of information to help one understand why we do not want the usual leftwing solutions of centralized planning and welfare-police statism.

Unfortunately, Bob has not allowed his business insights to inform his politics. He leans way too far to the left in politics, and often acts like a frustrated political pundit who looks for any excuse to talk politics rather than business. He draws connections between business and politics, sure enough, but is usually oblivious to the real import of what he is saying. Some people find his politics annoying. But that’s no reason not to read his columns and use them as a valuable resource for libertarian-leaning conservative politics.

Here is an example, from his latest, titled “The magic formula for IT budgeting.”

I know practitioners who claim it allows them to estimate projects with high levels of precision.

My personal opinion: The best way to estimate projects is to break them into small chunks with go/no-go gates in between. That allows you to avoid estimating how long it will take to build a system before you’ve decided what has to go into it.

That’s a great argument for not letting the government design a massive health care system for our country, which if it was to work would require knowledge that no government bureaucracy could ever hope to attain.

An alternative, which I increasingly like as I grow older and less energetic, is to assign one programmer/analyst to a business change effort. The P/A sits with the end-users, learns their job, helps them think about the next logical and easy-to-implement process improvement, and makes whatever system changes are necessary to make it possible. Then they do the next one.

It’s business improvement through the removal of small annoyances. It can be surprisingly effective, and makes resource planning easy. What it doesn’t let you do easily is predict when you’ll reach the point of diminishing returns on the improvement effort so you can redeploy your P/A to the next one.

Exactly. Whether it’s transportation planning or health care reform, nothing can beat the use of the market to let people design solutions to remove small annoyances. Of course, that doesn’t feed political egos, so government has no natural motive to nurture, protect, and foster these market forces. Instead, it tries to force private parties into government-like one-size-fits-all mandates (e.g. mandated benefits) where they will naturally fail, which will give government an excuse and political support to step in, take over, and make the situation even worse. But we shouldn’t be buffaloed when they say, “Well, what is YOUR solution?” There is no one solution — probably no solution at all. There is just the ability to improve our health care system greatly through small, market-oriented reforms. That doesn’t mean there is no place or need for government welfare — just that we do not want it for a solution.

Bob also publishes a column called “Keep The Joint Running” at issurvivor.com Highly recommended. Bob dislikes conservative politics, but that doesn’t matter. His column is one of the best conservative resources out there now that Milton Friedman is gone.

Corporate behavior

Limits on government power No Responses »

Oct 182007

Time to do some reticulating — about corporate behavior and whistleblowing.

First there’s Vinegar Boy by way of Fark. He refused to buckle under when his boss and his boss’s boss told him to apologize to a customer who had lyingly accused him of saying vinegar was OK to drink. He was vindicated in the end, when the boss’s boss’s boss found out what was going on. A heroic whistleblower, you might say.

Then there was Bob Lewis’s Advice Line column at Infoworld, “When your boss tells you to terminate an employee.”

One other point about the termination conversation: When you tell the employee he’s being terminated, tell him “the company” has decided that this is what has to be done. Don’t identify yourself as the decision-maker; don’t identify your manager, either. The company has made the decision and as his manager, your job is to make sure the company handles the termination properly.

If that isn’t corporate behavior, I don’t know what is. People will do things under cover of or on behalf of a corporation that they would never do on their own individual responsibility. I think Lewis is giving good advice in this column, as he almost always does. Read the entire article to see. (Too bad his politics are not informed by all of his observations about corporate life.) But a lot of bad things can be done under that rubric. When people talk about evil corporations, they have a legitimate point about this part.

Of course, the government is the biggest corporation of them all, these days.

Finally, there is Texts for torturers by way of Arts & Letters Daily. It’s about Philip Zimbardo’s famous experiment showing how students assigned the pretend role of prison guards started abusing prisoners. His latest book is about more than that one experiment, though. The reviewer writes:

He is at his best, then, when analysing the current state of our knowledge about the role of situations in eliciting bad behaviour. Research has amply confirmed that people of many different kinds will behave badly under certain types of situational pressure. Through the influence of authority and peer pressure, they do things that they are later amazed at having done, things that most people think in advance they would never themselves do.

and

Zimbardo’s first plea, appropriately, is for humility: we have no reason to say that atrocities are the work of a few “bad apples”, nor have we reason to think that they are done only by people remote from us in time and place. We should understand that we are all vulnerable, and we should judge individuals, accordingly, in a merciful way, knowing that we don’t really know what we would have done, had we faced similar pressures. His second appropriate plea is that we learn to “blame the system”: namely, to look at how situations are designed, and to criticize people who design them in ways that confront vulnerable individuals with pressures that human beings cope with badly.

The reviewer doesn’t completely buy it, btw. The article is written with the torture at Abu Ghraib, but I say these lessons also apply to things like nationalized health care. I say we should blame the system in advance for the atrocities that will result when people can make life or death decisions for other people on the basis of economic efficiency. And there will be no recourse for people like there was for the one who stood up to his boss in the case of the Vinegar Boy.

Federal swimming pool and golf cart assistance

Limits on government power No Responses »

Oct 062007

“Heating assistance more necessary than tax cuts.”

We’ve all seen opinions that are headlined like that during the winter heating season. But what about assistance with the high energy cost of operating golf carts and swimming pools? Isn’t that important, too? Isn’t something like that important enough to discard all limitations on governmental power so it can come to the rescue?

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Something New Under the Sun,” we’re already getting this essential government service:

One of the products shown was the Sunray SX2 golf cart. Made by Cruise Car Inc. of Sarasota, Fla., the cart comes equipped with a 48-volt battery that is charged by electricity generated from a sheet of black solar cells on the roof. The cart can travel as long as three days without having to be charged again, the company says, and retails for about $7,000 — or $6,000 after federal tax credits. That’s in line with the average price of an electric golf cart.

Also on display were redesigned heating coils for swimming pools. Heliocol USA Inc., for instance, displayed plastic tubes that collect heat for pools and come battened down with high-strength alligator clamps to withstand winds from hurricanes and severe thunderstorms. For a typical backyard pool in, say, Arizona, the system runs around $6,000, or $5,000 after tax credits. Since it costs as much as $650 a month to heat pools when the weather cools in the Arizona desert, Heliocol vendors say the system can pay for itself in two years.

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