In writing my satirical article, “Karl Marx Visits Occupied Wall Street,” I reread the Communist Manifesto several times and found it very useful to do so. It recalled for me the wonderful course in Western Civilization taught by the incomparable Professor Carroll Quigley I took more than four decades ago in which we read and analyzed the great works of political philosophy. The fact that there are so few courses like that anymore — and especially not mandatory ones — is an important factor in the decline of American higher education and of the dumbing down of America to the low point of the Obama era.
But I digress. In reading the Manifesto, I was fascinated to see a problem emerge at the very center of the current political-intellectual mess. If we examine how Marx got things wrong on this issue, a lot becomes clear.
As you know, Marx considered himself to be a scientist uncovering the iron laws of politics, society, and history. Up to a point, he does try to take that approach, even if you disagree with him. But at a certain moment he turns from hardheaded realist to starry-eyed utopian. And the key issue is one on which the founders of America got it right: the problem of government.
First, a little background: in attributing history, politics, and society to class struggle, Marx discussed one important aspect of these things. The problem is that he made this the only issue of any importance. Left out were such things as ideology; psychology and human nature; deep-seated drives of some individuals for power, wealth, and fame; family, tribal, and national loyalty; and other things as well. Marx is a reductionist, a man who constantly must reduce complex issues to a single cause.
Yet his biggest blindspot — the one that has cost millions of lives and that is steering much of the Western world in the wrong direction today — is the role of government.
The founders of America knew very well that every democracy in history had failed. They knew that unless they understood why this had happened and remedied it, the United States would soon become just another monarchy or dictatorship.
They found the answer in this principle: No one can be trusted with power; every individual, party, or group will inevitably abuse power. Thus, the solution they proposed was to divide up power, to ensure that nobody got too much of it. They did this in several different ways:
–Voters elected political leaders and could vote them out of office.
–Laws constrained officials.
–Federalism divided power between the national and state governments.
–On both the national and state level, power was split among the executive (president or governor), legislative (Congress or legislatures), and judicial branches.
–The Constitution limited the power of the central government and also reserved certain rights for the states and for the citizens.
–The Bill of Rights further strengthened the ability of citizens to protest and criticize governments and limited government’s ability to repress the citizenry or order it around.
In short, the founders looked at government as a wild beast that could never be tamed but had to be penned up and trussed up in order to use it for beneficial purposes without being devoured by it. George Washington put it in these terms: “Government…is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
As further safeguards, there also developed an independent media and an academic system, part of whose job was to be critical of any abuse of power, the pretenses of politicians, corruption, and incompetence rather than being largely boringly consistent cheerleaders for leaders.
At different times, the mainstream of liberals and conservatives disagreed over precisely how to set the balances, with the two groups taking different stances at different times. Indeed, the history of liberalism was based on expanding the sphere of liberty — both political and economic — in battle against states controlled by conservative monarchies.
True, about 1900 American liberals concluded that the federal government had to be strengthened somewhat to balance the rise of big corporations and big city political machines. They were ready to shift the balance but only to maintain that balance. Those reforms were necessary and beneficial. But if the sphere of government kept growing endlessly, the system on which America’s success was based would be destroyed.
Consider the example of environmentalism. That was a needed movement and policy because the welcome development of advanced industrial society also brought certain problems that needed to be solved. And advances in technology made it possible to solve them. The difficulty is that once the balance was righted things kept on going, to more and more strangling demands and regulations that had an ever-smaller positive effect on the environment and an ever-larger disastrous effect on jobs, the economy, spending, and freedom. Now add in dozens of other issues to the same effect.
That’s why so many liberals have been fooled and seduced into supporting today’s far left wolf in liberal clothing. On one hand, they are told that it is still in efect the 1880s, a time when rapacious rich and greedy corporations exploit the country without limit. Yet shouldn’t the effect of all of the changes already made be taken into account? And isn’t the main difficulty today in this regard that the rich and greedy take advantage by exploiting their connections with government to get bailouts, subsidies, and special treatment? Thus, building up government even further has the exact opposite effect of what it did a century ago.
On the other hand, they are told that government programs can abolish poverty, ensure complete equality, save endangered species, and produce the required energy without drilling for oil or building pipelines. In short, that everything is affordable, everything is possible, and that the failure of previous such programs must be ignored. That only a mean, evil person would oppose the new project to feed hungry children, stop man-made global warming, save obscure species, prevent evil oil pipelines and drilling from making a big mess, and so on. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel; a false do-goodism is the first refuge of the power-mad, money-mad, and incompetent.
What’s essential to understand, however, is that our problem today is not due to old liberal-conservative debates over precisely how to set the balances but to the rise of radical forces that simply reject that framework altogether.
They accept no limits on the power of the central government and smugly refuse to consider why that is such a dangerous notion. And so when a radical speaks of the government, he or she has no trouble saying that it embodies the people and their welfare. The will of the people is embodied not in actual, living millions of people but rather in their embodiment by the department of this or that in Washington, D.C. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said the voice of the people is the voice of God; they say that the voice of the government is the voice of the people, when in fact it is the voice — and to the benefit — of those who run the government as politicians and bureaucrats along with their favored clients.
Now, let’s return to Marx. He understood nothing of the wisdom that went into constructing the United States.His approach to government was utopian and philosophically idealistic (meaning it all came out of his head and wishful thinking).
After having described all of history as a struggle between classes, he posited that it is possible not to have classes and also asserted that once you didn’t have classes you wouldn’t have history. Magically, all conflict would disappear and the government would be this mechanical, automatic force in which no actual human beings participated. No actual human begins would shape it with their own selfishness, greed, ambition, or personal perspective.
Next stop, Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong.
I would do to Communists what they would do to me.
“On the other hand, they are told that government programs can abolish poverty, ensure complete equality, save endangered species, and produce the required energy without drilling for oil or building pipelines. In short, that everything is affordable, everything is possible, and that the failure of previous such programs must be ignored.”
Yet the communists and the far left never seem to tell us who will pay for all of this. I thought the Soviet Union had a “classless society” with no rich people, but what happened to them? Oh, that’s right, it collapsed and is now in the dustbin of history. Funny how that worked out. Yet here in the United States, the far left want all of the same “benefits” they claim were so “great” in the Soviet Union, yet expect a different result. And they wonder why they’re hated so much by the defenders of the Constitution and the supporters of captalism. I wish the far left would just come up with an original idea for once, instead of constantly recycling those ideas which have brought other nations to abject poverty, like the Soviet Union and, more recently, Greece.
They will never learn because they can never admit that they are wrong.
A very good article, as far as it goes. The founders and framers of our republic and Constitution not only recognized the faults that brought down the Greek democracies and Roman republic. They also recognized the need for government. While internally the Greeks and Romans started out democratic, externally they were tirants, robbing those without or with a weaker government. Both socieries ended their days under despots.
But eventually it was the government that failed the people. It is always the government that fails the people.
The need for government was because of the failure of the Articles of Confederation, but also the balance (along, crucially, with checks on arbitrary power)responded to a belief that human nature was not amenable to utopias, of which there had been many proposed in the West. You will find Benjamin Franklin’s view of human nature in this blog: http://clarespark.com/2011/11/21/cormac-mccarthy-vs-herman-melville/. But consider too the antagonism between Jeffersonian agrarians and Hamiltonian financiers and enthusiasm for manufactures. That dispute still plays out in our intellectual history, with many environmentalists looking backward to Jeffersonian agrarian life.
The only people finding good in a “Jeffersonian agrarian life” are the people who’ve never done it. Having been born and raised in the waning days family subsistence farming in The South, one of the happiest days of my life was the day we decided to quit farming and subdivide the place. I certainly can’t say that everything is good about the Hamiltonian world either, but the single family subsistence farm was good only when compared to the life of the landless peasant in Europe.
Ah, yes. The agrarian life. Environmentalists seem to think that the world was pristine before fossil fuels came along. I wonder how they would handle the reality of the conditions in 1890s New York City: forty thousand horses on the streets every working day generated four hundred tons of manure, twenty thousand gallons of urine, and almost two hundred carcasses. (Burrows, Edwin G. and Mike Wallace, “Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898″ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p.948.
This surely would send the environmentalists into a spasm. ELF would have to start setting horses on fire and the bureaucrats would need to tax horseowners to kingdom come, which points out the idiocy in which we live now. Some people (the utopians) believe that there should be no distasteful consequences, discomforts, risks, or even tragedies attendant to life on earth. Normal, reasonable people (including our predecessors) accepted life as it was, while trying to improve it and finding ways to cope with the less tasteful aspects.
There’s a reason why the word “mental” is in the word “environmentalist.”
Mr. Rubin, sorry, but the danger of allowing the government to regulate ANYTHING is that it will begin to think that it can regulate EVERYTHING. You’ve stated the flaw above, but even accepting the reasoning that the government has a role in private affairs opens the door for the government to become enmeshed in everything. If the Founders thought that the government had a role to play in protecting the environment it would have mentioned it in the Constitution. However, the “environment” as we have come to find out is a broad term and the current government regulates everything associated with the “environment”: water, land, air. Is it any wonder we are in so much trouble?
Chris: the environment wasn’t an issue at the time of the Founders when the country had about 3 million citizens. Come to Colorado if you want to see the results of industrial activity without any government regulation. We still have polluted land and polluted streams from the mining activities of the 19th century. When the mines played out, the operators simply walked away and left their messes. Because of government regulations, such acts usually aren’t possible today.
So…increased government regulations have sorted all that out, right? Of course not. Do you know if those businesses set out to utterly destroy the “environment”? No, you do not, Steve. However, as the state of Colorado has gotten richer, you was able to clean your environment by going back and replacing much of the damage that was done in the name of economic growth, right?
You can’t have it both ways. An enlarged government obviously did not solve your problem. On top of this, the environment WAS a problem during the Founders’ time (no doubt a lot of America was left in tatters after the effects of the Revolutionary War. Ditto the effects of farming on the lands). Again, if the Founders that it the responsibility of the government to protect the “environment” they would have granted that power to Congress. It’s a wonder that future generations instead depend upon a flawed interpretation of the Commerce Clause to justify meddling with the environment.
” We still have polluted land and polluted streams from the mining activities of the 19th century.”
And yet Colorado is also populated by Americans unaffected by the mining activities of the 19th century. Were it so that we could be able to mine today. Another side effect of protecting the “environment”.
One other thing, SteveB, it’s one thing for the state of Colorado to regulate its own environment, but why exactly must the federal government do it?
“So…increased government regulations have sorted all that out, right?”
Bingo! Exactly right!
Read about the environmental situation in the former Soviet Union and you’ll see that this Marxist state, which in theory should have lovingly protected the environment, in fact devasted it with little if any concern for it whatsoever.
I still remember an anecdote by a Soviet citizen in which he was a assigned to fetch 100 tanker loads of liquid fertilizer from a distant chemical refinery and bring it back to the collective farm where he lived. The Soviet chemical industry, in the infinite wisdom of Gosplan, the central planning agency, had decreed that all of the country’s fertilizer needs for a year were to be manufactured in the space of a couple of days to maximize efficiency. Then, the fertilizer needed to be drained from the output tanks immediately and distributed to where it was needed. The individual sharing the anecdote was commanded to bring all 100 loads of fertilizer back to the collective farm and was given 24 hours to do so. Given that the factory was a couple of hours drive away, he immediately wondered how he could possibly accomplish that directive but set out anyway. He soon realized that every other fertilizer user in the country would have the same dilemna and decided to see how they handled the problem. When he arrived at the factory, he waited in a long line for his term to get his first load of fertilizer and simply followed the tanker ahead of him to see what it would do. He soon had the answer: it drove to a nearby river and immediately drained the entire tankerload into the river, then returned to the factory for its next load! All the other tankers were doing the same thing. He followed this pattern all day and dumped 99 tanker loads of liquid fertilizer into the same river. Then he drove back to the collective farm with the 100th load. When he got back there, no one actually wanted the fertilizer because it was apparently awful stuff. He poured the entire tankerful on his own small plot, thoroughly destroying it in the process. He only averted starvation by being called into the army for his military service that year. Strangely enough, no one in the administration of the chemical industry or the collective farm even noticed that he only brought back 1 of the 100 loads he had been assigned to get and no one in government had any concern whatever for the river which must surely have been rendered hugely toxic by all that fertilizer. Anyone who thinks government is the surefire answer to environmental problems doesn’t know what they are talking about.
“If the Founders thought that the government had a role to play in protecting the environment it would have mentioned it in the Constitution.”
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I don’t think that’s reasonable. I don’t think the Founders, in the late 1700s, had a lot of concern about the environment. They were in one corner of an immense and bountiful country that seemed to have unlimited resources. They also had little in the way of industry or technology that would dirty that environment. I doubt it would have occurred to them to worry very much about the environment in those days and if it did, I expect it would have been perceived as a relatively minor matter that didn’t need to be enumerated in the Constitution.
While I understand and respect the concerns that people have with the whole “living Constitution” idea, the idea has SOME merit. After all, over 200 years have elapsed since the nation was founded and a lot has changed in terms of technology that the Founders couldn’t reasonably have anticipated. For example, the Founders had thoughts about a postal service but surely never anticipated email and never discussed what rules should govern it in the new republic. We could rationalize treating email just like paper mail and operate an email service the same way as we do the post office but I think a reasonable person will realize that email and paper mail are sufficiently different that they shouldn’t be treated the same.
By the same token, simply because the environment wasn’t perceived as sufficiently important to be mentioned in the Constitution, doesn’t mean it isn’t important today. The Founders didn’t anticipate invasions from outer space either but there’s at least a remote chance that such an invasion could happen some day.
Again, I think the Constitution has many vitally important principles and is a work of brilliance. I’m just not quite ready to believe that it anticipates every situation and problem that might ever exist until the end of time. Some things simply couldn’t be anticipated yet still need to be addressed somehow. Looking to the Constitution for the best way to handle that situation is a very good starting point but it may not provide a complete answer….
The idea of a “Living Constitution” has no merit. It is a dishonest bit f propaganda. It is an excuse to just ignore it at will. If you think the Constitution does not cover something and that it should, then AMEND the effing Constitution. That’s how the Constitution is flexible. It can be changed. One does not get to do an end-run around it!
The thing to remember is that none of these guys actually mean anything they say. The first thing the Statists do after taking power is kill off all the true-believers. That’s why Trotsky was purged and got an icepick.
Those who seek power for its own sake must lie. They cannot get what they want any other way. They cannot just come out and say I want total power and have the folks just give it to them. They have to wrap it all in pretty lying packaging.
“Both liberalism and conservatism have made sense as long as they have been involved in dialogue and compromise about achieving that balance.”
Bullshit. Liberalism is another lie. The Statists hijacked the term and perverted it. Conservatives of today are the Liberals of a hundred years ago. They have infected our language with so many lies, perverted so many concepts. This creates ignorance, an inability to think properly, because words lose their meaning, fundamental truths get clouded.
I’ll give you an example. “Moderate” Republicans are not moderate. They are Democrats. They believe in an active government with some limitations. Big government Republicans. They are left of center. Conservatives are the old liberals. Liberal meaning liberty-oriented. They believe in more limited government, although not in minimalist government like Libertarians believe. Conservatives are just right of center. Conservatives are the actual ‘moderates’ as contrasted with the extreme Libertarians.
So, the center is within today’s Republican Party, between the center-right and the center-left. These two sides can find common ground in a number of things, and we get pulled to the exact center as a result, and folks are content.
These “moderates” are Republicans, because the Statists have totally hijacked the Democratic Party. There is no room for real Dems in that Party. So, these mini-statists moved into, and took over, the Republican Party. Thus the huge growth of government, because of Left and Lefter, Dumb and Dumber.
All our problems rectify themselves the moment all the “moderates” move back into the Democratic Party and the picture becomes clear to folks. Look at Romney. Wouldn’t he make a fine Democratic Presidential candidate? Of course! He’s an effing Democrat!
Our problems get solved when the just-left-of-center Repubs become Dems, and the just-right-of-center Conservatives are the Repubs. This them reflects the vast majority of America, and we get governed accordingly, to the satisfaction of the great majority.
The lying, subversive Statists have just effed it all up!
You describe it exactly. When I was a child, a liberal was something to be proud of, it meant liberty and free thinking. When I came to this country I had difficulty accepting the term liberal, because of its false meaning. Still it continues. Even alleged conservatives throw it around as though it were a legitimate term for Dems, Progressives and just plain lefties.
How can you state the founders were’t interested in the environment, when that is precisely what they were pouring their lives into, and giving their lives for.
It is a haughty anlysis, if not down right grade school to suggest the founders were indifferent to the environment.
It is completely unreasonable to to suggest it! Are you not aware of historical seweage problems? Man has been trying to manage it’s waste since the first stone tool.
Thee bounty you speak of didn’t just magically appear under a tree!
Yep, the possibility that we’ll be destroyed by pollution is about the same as that we’ll be invaded by space-aliens. I’m just taking a quick break here from scanning the skies for UFOs to read a few posts. Why are you guys talking about the colonists? The aboriginals had already altered the natural environment by using large-scale fires to drive herds of Pliestocene mega-fauna (many more than they intended to kill/eat, which is why it went extinct before the white men arrived) over cliffs. There was some primitive slash-and-burn going on too (probably not correctly called ‘agriculture’ yet). The thing about Jefferson was that he had an (dare I say it?) almost instinctual sense of the normal natural human social order, especially in scale. You didn’t have to know what a ‘behavior-sink’ was to know that Philadelphia and New York were too big and too crowded for people to live there humanely. That was then; of course all major American cities are cess-pools of aberrant behaviors today. That’s why folks who want to live normal, decent lives headed for the suburbs, and then the ex-urbs, and soon for Alaska. The only possible role for government to play in any of this would be to screw up the ability to migrate within the US. They’ll try, of course, but don’t bet on success. Even the Soviets had dachas out in the boondocks, for the successful Party hacks.
Here’s one vote for wise regulation: If Glass-Steagall wasn’t repealed in 1999, I doubt we’d be in such an epic mess today.
What, pray tell, did Glass-Steagall, a regulation that prevented the commingling of investment houses with traditional banks, have to do with the mortgage mess? Indeed, were it not for a partial repeal of Glass-Steagall, 2008 would have been a lot worse. You see, it was precisely traditional banks, such as Chase and Wells Fargo, that was allowed to buy up Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns, investment houses.
Glass-Steagall is a red herring to throw people off the trail of the massive failure that is government’s role in the housing markets, as manipulator (tax code), buyer (HUD), insurer (FHA), lender (Fannie and Freddie), and regulator (all of the above).
I think the author misses some important points. One is that I haven’t seen a widespread philosophy of unlimited debt, unlimited spending, unlimited government. But it is present on both sides of the political aisle; as evidenced by the failure of the recent “super committee.”
Dems don’t want entitlement cuts; even though the Medicare Part D (drugs) is basically unfunded except from general revenues. Repubs don’t want more taxes, even though Reagan raised taxes several times and we still had prosperity. Mitt Romney wants to increase defense spending, even though 40% of the world’s spending on defense is done by the USA. Newt Gingrich wants to impose a “personhood” federal rule to define human life as beginning at conception; even though Colorado has twice rejected such a rule by large margins, and conservative Mississippi voters just rejected a personhood amendment to their state constitution.
Two, the author is somewhat correct in blaming the left for our current national predicament (but, guess he forgot Dick Cheney’s famous quote: “deficits don’t matter”). The right is equally to blame. With the failure of the “super committee,” the Denver Post carried the usual lament article about “what will happen to the children” when Medicaid gets cut by the mandatory cuts coming January, 2013. The Post also carried laments from the right about what will happen to “all those good jobs” with defense contractors when defense spending gets cut.
If our country is going to escape our current bad fiscal situation, everyone has to take a haircut, not just the beneficiaries of entitlements.
Ah, so the effect of the Obama plan is coming into effect. Obviously 2009 and 2010 does not matter to you, SteveB/Colorado. The only thing that matters is that the GOP did not follow through on the “super committee”.
It’s funny that you mention that Medicare Part D is basically unfunded. All of Medicare is essentially unfunded. Medicaid is definitely unfunded and Social Security is starting to run deficits. Our problem is not that we don’t have enough “revenues” to cover these things; our problem is that these things have such large deficits that no amount of revenues will be able to fund them. All three combined are more than three times our GDP which at last calculation was about $14 trillion. Never mind that we also have $15 trillion in debt.
Another tactic you guys on the Left like to engage in is that somehow if we raise taxes we will have prosperity. Yes, Reagan agreed to some tax increases, but overall he lowered taxes and prevented regulatory creep. That is not true about the current crew in the White House: Obama wants both more regulation AND higher taxes. It’s ironic because I just got through reading a couple of deceptive articles on the WaPo that stated that government regulations aren’t that bad because economists said so. Yeah, these are the same economists that said that if we spent gobs of money unemployment would be below 8%. At what point do we stop listening to the economists and go with our instincts?
Actually Chris, I’m a life long conservative Republican. But a secular conservative; a Goldwater conservative. Everything these days is all about Obama and how the national debt has increased from $10 trillion to $15 trillion. But posters here conveniently forget that Bush increased the debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion in his 8 years. And he never vetoed a single spending bill passed by the spendthrift Republican-controlled Congress during 2001-2007.
My solutions are real simple. 1) implement Bowles/Simpson as proposed. Or 2) a. roll back spending to the 2008 level b. repeal most of ObamaCare (part of it does give more authority for pursuit of Medicare fraudsters) c. repeal Medicare Part D d. return taxes to the 2000 level (instead of raising taxes to pay for two wars, Bush cut taxes, thus starting the debt spiral that we remain on today)
Republican does not equal Right. But no worries, you are by no means alone in making this mistake.
I get it now; all we have to do is elect Ron Paul and the Libertarians and their allies the mighty RINO-hunting “true conservatives” will set all things right. That’s good news.
I put myself, basically, in your camp SteveB of Colorado. The title of this piece to me is misleading–statism IS always a threat, but I don’t see how anyone can look at what’s happened since around 2002 and not recognize that the larger threat RIGHT NOW is corporatism.
Mike Lofgren’s article (see: http://www.truth-out.org/goodbye-all-reflections-gop-operative-who-left-cult/1314907779)back in June or thereabouts was final catlyst for me. BOTH parties (and the statism/corporatism each embrace) are equally rotten but corporatism (aided by that insane Supreme Court ruling that money equals free speech)is tipping the scale against socialism toward corporate fascism. And SO, I’m opting for a third party, specifically Americans Elect, to scare the hell out of both camps.
Meanwhile, Buddy Roemer is the only candidate for those of us who DO want that balance. Republican Establishment is keeping him out of all debates–BECAUSE he has the message (when it comes to trade and the economy) that WOULD resonate with all sensible centrists. Will he get a chance between now and January 8 (as Herman Cain and Jon Huntsman and Bachmann, et al have had) to take his message to the mass of Republican voters??
Pray, I say. America has always been lucky at critical moments–pray for Buddy. And if that doesn’t work, pray that Americans Elect turns out to be as high-minded as its founders say it is.
“The problem with Marx” (and hence, with socialism) is, as one wag once put it, “that unfortunately he wrote before Freud.”
SteveB and Chris.
I think you both have it wrong, about 80% wrong. A little history here. From inception until the middle of the 19th Century, boilers, you know, those infernal furnaces that make steam for steam engines and electricity generation, blew up and killed people on an altogether too regular basis.
The river boats plying our inland rivers and waterways were very dangerous. How to fix them? Today we would write several thousand pages of regulation, hire inspectors, fail to recognize improvements in technology and stifle the boiler industry and everything it serves; which is almost everything we do. But that isn’t how they did it in 1840. Governments (this was a state led issue) simply required full liability insurance policies. Hence the Hartford Insurance Company and others. Still today, in order to operate an industrial boiler you must provide the appropriate insurance…meeting codes developed by, wait for it, insurance, industry and their engineers. No insurance, no license to operate.
Most of the major technology improvements in boilers occurred as the industry sought to reduce public risk.
Elevators and several other things that were controversial in their day are regulated this way.
The above is so 19th and 20th Century, and the technology so simple, yet in its day so deadly.
Today’s application? Petroleum production. Drillers and producers supply a bond for environmental clean up. When that happens, that is the cost of the potential clean up becomes part of the cost of business, a non-productive cost at that, business and insurance companies will look for ways to lower the both the cost of the insurance (self regulation) and very actively pursue risk reducing technology. The STATE governments need to set reasonable limitations on the liability (Sorry Greenies, this is not a pot of Gold)
The downside? Without massive federal regulation, Congress and its minions are no longer beings to be wined, dined and lobbied. No longer will there be so many K Street sycophants pumping up already full egos. No more bureaucrats to jump at your mere presence. Less free golf at the Congressional Country Club as part of an ‘outing’. Perks ya’ know.
ta
The problem with relying on private insurance is that the premiums for some disasters can’t be accurately calculated in advance. And if they’re set too low and the disaster happens, the cost may be so huge that the insurance company may go bankrupt without paying off the policyholders’ claims.
In the case of the 9-11 terrorist attack, the losses were so huge that insurers barely managed to pay off the claims without going bankrupt. But they got so burned that they don’t offer terrorist insurance policies anymore.
In the case of the Japanese nuclear disaster this past year, the cost of the losses was so enormous that the Japanese government had to step in with aid.
Going further back: In the 1950s, the magnitudes of the risks of operating commercial nuclear reactors were unknown, since that technology was so new. And so private insurers refused to insure commercial nuclear reactors. To have any kind of commercial nuclear capability in the U.S., Congress passed the Price-Anderson Act, which limited the liability of utilities and also provided them cheap government insurance.
More accurately calibrated than dealing with gov regulation for certain. For a large enough premium, any insurance/ bond can be purchase. Leave the blinders behind. Maybe they have to bet the company.
Further, having executed and managed environmental clean up work, I can testify that most of the cost is the extra work done to feed regulators power trips.
OK, good story as far as it goes, but today we have very highly paid, unionized “Stationary Firemen” watching over highly automated, remotely operated steam boilers all over the Country.
The other big users of steam boilers in the 19th and first half of the 20th Centuries were the railroads, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into every safety measure they took and whose answer to strict liability laws was buying state legislatures and even the US Congress.
It took government intervention that many decreed the death of the Republic to get automatic couplers and air brakes on trains. Thousands of railroad “brakemen” were killed or maimed by link and pin couplers that had to be set by a man standing between the cars as they were switched or by falling from the icy catwalks on the tops of freight cars as they ran down the tops of the cars to set the wheel operated brakes. Train wrecks were more common than auto accidents are today. I don’t know that Casey Jones was high on cocaine as the “Dead” postulate, but he was sure driving that train like a bat out of Hell, and the Wreck of old 97 as he “was goin’ ’round the curve making 90 miles and hour when the whistle broke into a scream” says something about the safety standards of the day. It took the Interstate Commerce Commission and ultimately the Railway Labor Act to rein in that industry. And if you think that it can be handled strictly as a state matter, you’ve never lived in a state where BP is your primary corporate citizen and views state officials about the same way the officialdom of British India viewed the natives.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m a rape, ruin, and run guy compared to the typical greenie, but I have no illusions about what it is like to deal with big multi-national corporations. They do just as much as they can be made to do, and they’ll try to buy their way out of doing anything that costs them money. And if your government makes the price too high, they just find somebody more easily bought.
Couplers and air brakes are boilers not. Nor were RRs ever required to insure the safety of the braking system. Point scored.
Boiler technology is all about safety. Boiler automation is all about labor.
That would be the “Hartford Steam Boiler and Insurance Company” an entirely different company then the Hartford Insurance Co. and totally unrelated.
Correct. Damn fingers.
I’m not sure where your saying chris bolts is wrong.
Summerizing your statement; We have a learning curve as does the product of invention. Failures and improvement occur in time from use in the course of man trying to even further his lot,at the risk of life and limb, rather than in a lab until such time that the product is perfected. And insurance helped solve the problem while creating a recipe for corruption.
We need to be regulated to protect us from ourselves while we go for the brass ring? It appears so. That’s why ethics are so important in a market driven Great Experiment.
Can man rule himself? Sure. But what that looks like will depend upon the humility of those men and the men that follow.
You won’t like my answer. Government cannot provide ethics. That is God’s area. Government can only require a certain level of civil obedience and order for each of us to work in.
Regulation, by whom? By what superior knowledge? Sorry, I just don’t buy the default answer pushed into university graduate heads by people who feel they that they are exempt.
If all those highly ethical, morally superior, technologically brilliant, sainted regulators joined the fray and “led” us all on the path of industrial righteousness, regulations not needed. Duh. But no, get a gov job and tell others how.
ta
Two concepts, unknown to Washington, Jefferson, or Marx, dominate our social ills today. They are technology and population.
In the late 19th century, through last night, man has experienced technical revolutions which are either demonic, or miraculous, depending on your viewpoint. The above authors lived in an age of muzzle loading rifles and canons; they could not comprehend a satellite controlled thermonuclear weapons. Moreover, much of our technological progress has been intensely concentrated in vertical organizations. There are no garages which hold tomorrow’s nuclear power plant advance or a cure for cancer. Yet, within the massive organizations are highly trained experts who produce breakthroughs such as the transistor, or chip. Each one signed a paper on the first day of work which gave all rights to their creations to the organization. The accretion of economic power, begun when our nation was born, has intensified into a black hole of wealth, all economic gain has been sucked into the control of the 1 percent, or the government. (This is the common contribution of both the Tea Party and the Occupiers.)
The other characteristic is that man no longer is an agrarian being, he lives in cities. Objectionable activities that once could be accommodated by moving a few miles, is no longer possible with a common wall. The Chesapeake Bay is dying because home owners hundreds of miles away want a green lawn and dump fertilizer on the ground. Gulf of Mexico shrimpers were destroyed by BP cost and schedule decisions made in unknown offices (and whores given to government regulators.)
These characteristics interact today, with Marx’s/ Jefferson’s theories on social structure. The EPA seeks to regulate every CO2 molecule in the name of the common good. They hold that the common good, or the flip side, the external costs created by private decisions, can not be trusted to citizens. As a result, there is no day light between the EPA and a dictatorship, the end result of Marx’s thinking. But now compounded by the stupidity of attempting to control the periodic table. If government was God, it would work. But such is not the case.
The solution is the re empowering of educated people, the professions. Climate change is probably understood by less than one hundred true experts. They should convene just like the Continental Congress, each person being funded by some source. They, not regulators beholding to one faction, should guide our complex society. Otherwise, it makes no sense to earn a PhD, then be unemployed for a life time, because your discipline, e.g. coal mining, was made to ride in the back of society’s bus.
The private sector is suffering a real unemployment of circa 20%, while the sovereign federal government has gotten larger, but is unable to pay its bills. This is unsustainable; the nation will collapse, fairly soon.
If the third way did not work, we must find a fourth. Or cease to exist as a free nation.
“The solution is the re empowering of educated people, the professions. Climate change is probably understood by less than one hundred true experts. They should convene just like the Continental Congress, each person being funded by some source. They, not regulators beholding to one faction, should guide our complex society. Otherwise, it makes no sense to earn a PhD, then be unemployed for a life time, because your discipline, e.g. coal mining, was made to ride in the back of society’s bus.”
Here we part company! I have less faith in a congress of “educated people” than I do in a Congress elected by whatever interest threw the most money at it or in a congress of regulatory bureaucrats. Few today are “educated,” they are indoctrinated. You WILL accept the doctrines of the academy or you are not likely to get that piece of paper that says you’re an educated person, and you sure as Hell ain’t going to become a tenured professor whose job it is to produce “educated” people. At least there is competition between various interests to buy a Congresscritter, not enough, but some, and NO competing interests are tolerated in the Academy. And the bureaucrats have to respond at least to some degree to the elected officials. A major part of the intractibility of government is that Republicans simply can’t run a government made by Democrats to employ the maximum number of Democrats, but Republicans are generally so anti-government that they don’t know enough about it to reform it. In his eight years WJC built networks of leave-behind Democrat activists not just in the federal government but in federally funded sinecures in state and local governments as well. In his eight years, GWB did what Republicans do at every level; he put in a thin applique of nominally loyal and somewhat competent Republicans and left the government in the hands of the Democrats. And we wonder why the government just gets bigger and bigger and more and more intrusive and why Republican governments are constantly leaked, thwarted, and sabotaged.
Agreed. Faith in government by “professional experts” is just Marx’ faith in government of the proletariat moved onto a new class of guardians; faith that “Government is a value-neutral machine made up of those who merely mirror society’s desires. They have no ambitions, no institutional interest, no greed or lust for power.”
If you have such faith, just read the Climategate emails (there’s a new batch just out) and consider whether all those professional experts turned out to be unmoved by ambition, industrial interests, or greed or lust for power.
I’m afraid your suggestion may be one of those scenarios where the cure is worse than the disease.
I agree that genuine experts – not just those who have been deemed experts by those who know nothing of the field in question – should be involved in decision making at a high level. But I think they need to be consulted by less technical decision-makers, not placed in charge. Of course the decision-makers need to actually listen to them, not just pretend to, but the decision-makers may need to weigh factors over and above those considered by the experts.
Experts typically have a deep level of knowledge over a relatively narrow field. For example, a civil engineer may know everything there is to know about the process of designing, building, and operating a hydro-electric dam but he may know very little about raising the money to build such a structure. He may also put the priority on the dam inordinately high and not even think about the impact that the cost of the dam may have on other things paid for by tax money. If that engineer was in charge, he might well build a top-notch dam but not leave any money for things that are much more urgently needed.
I would much rather have the experts report to democratically-elected politicians than to be running everything directly. A democratically-elected politician may be unskilled in practically everything and his motives may be suspect at best or blatantly corrupt at worst but at least there are ways to get him out of office via recall elections or whatever if he is beyond endurance. This Congress of Engineers you describe sounds like the Engineers would basically have their jobs for life, like Supreme Court justices, and that scares me if the Engineers have undisputed control over all important decisions.
I understand the temptation to bypass those who don’t know what they are doing and replace them with people who are experts. I’m sure we’ve all been in positions where a clueless manager or executive directs us to do something that makes no sense. There is an essential nugget of truth in recognizing that most people simply aren’t qualified to make decisions outside of their own expertise. Your remarks remind me of the scene in the film Remains of the Day where Lord Darlington (?) asks his butler, played by Anthony Hopkins, for his opinions on various matters of high finance. Hopkins politely declines to offer an opinion on any of these matters saying, in effect, that he simply doesn’t know anything about such things. It’s hard to watch that scene without seeing something profoundly right about it: the people who don’t understand a particular matter are declining to be involved in the discussion. This is a stark contrast to the real world where it seems our politicians constantly meddle in things outside of their expertise in constant living reminders of the old adage that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.
But I think that a world where only self-selected experts made all the important decisions would be a very frightening place. I say self-selected experts because it’s hard to picture how they could be anything but self-selected. After all, how does a layman assess the expertise of someone in a field in which he is not expert? Any such assessment would be meaningless. For example, I’ve often heard Stephen Hawking described as a brilliant scientist but as a non-scientist, I have no ability to rank his scientific expertise; only another scientist from the same or related field could possibly have an informed opinion on this subject. I can’t think of a plausible way for non-experts to choose experts so they would inevitably have to be chosen from amongst themselves. Even then, there is no assurance that such selections would be made dispassionately by those qualified to make them. All of those who might vote to select the 100 best engineers are subject to rivalries, professional jealousies, and all the other normal things that humans experience. We simply can’t assume that only the best engineers would be chosen in a totally unbiased and dispassionate way. I fear that it would be more like the selection of Oscar recipients where various pressures are brought to bear on those who are eligible to vote until the “right” people win.
I am afraid that a Congress of Engineers would be almost indistinguishable from Stalin’s Politburo in time. Even if it started well, I think it would eventually develop its own agenda, which might not be remotely palatable to anyone outside the group, much like the Bolsheviks, once in power, soon steered the Soviet Union in a direction that few would ever have approved if they’d had the choice to oppose it.
I think we really need to make sure that genuine experts are consulted but I would not be comfortable having them in charge of things. Now, if you could devise a set of checks and balances to ensure that the selection process was truly dispassionate and picked the very best of men and that the group, once selected, could be kept from taking on a life of its own, I _might_ be persuaded to change my opinion. Then again, I’m skeptical enough that I’m not sure you could ever reassure me sufficiently….
Let me emphasize that I don’t doubt your good intentions in making such a proposal. I’m sure you mean only to make the country a better place and bypass the frequent absurdities in how the system works. But I just don’t think it would work out in the long run.
What nonsense! One may be an expert in technical field without having any wisdom about how to apply that knowledge in an ethical manner. Technocrats may cause the trains to run on time, but (to mix allusions to dictators) the trains may be carrying people to concentration camps.
Professional Engineer; Wow, that is the first time I have heard an engineer fall into the “Post Normal Science” trap in years. You will note that your call for rule by an educated intellectual elite is 1. Exactly what the self proclaimed intellectual Marx proposed and 2. Is just a change of occupants in the halls of power.
Most PhD’s are granted in semi-literate ‘studies’ programs. Per my direct experience, engineering PhD’s are well sought after, assuming the willingness to show up for work and attack the technical problem for which I have hired them. When I managed RDT&E programs (as an engineer) my PhD’s needed to be reminded, almost daily, why they were hired, but after that 5 minutes everyday, they did amazing things, which then needed a good engineer to translate and execute.
Finally, Post Normal Science is very scary. It assumes that the over educated, under trained, decider actually has a clue, can predict the future and has thought through all the unintended consequences of a really big program. Baby steps by those of us who are unwashed straight stick ME’s and EE’s etc. is much less risky.
As above, Wow, what an unusual and somewhat internally inconsistent point of view.
Happy Thanksgiving to you.
ta
Marx believed that only “crimes of passion” couldn’t be blamed on the capitalist system, and created an economic model that assumed personal traits like envy or avarice were the result wholly of surroundings, and that genetics only played a small part, via emotions born of a person’s sex drive. Which means Marx pretty much outlined a society not for Earth, but for the Planet Vulcan, where all emotions are supposed to be kept in check except when the Pon Farr rolls around.
While that might make Marxism a great system to show off at the next Comi-Con Convention to the other geeks dressed up as the ueber-capitalist Ferengi, it’s a horrific system to actually put into real world economic and political usage, with the nastiest thing the fact that there was never a time frame placed by Marx on the transition to his communist utopia. What that means is that the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” becomes the “Perpetuation of the Dictatorship”, in that those who are on top can justify remaining there in perpetuity by simply claiming they are the leaders of the proletariat shepherding the transition from socialism to communism.
A Stalin or a Castro can justify their continued leadership of the USSR or Cuba by claiming to be leading the masses to their egalitarian Shangra-La, under a system that never specifies if that’s going to take 10 or 10,000 years. As a result, anyone who by nature is drawn to the acquisition of power and status, who might end up as one of those evil 1 percenters here may simply be driven towards becoming a big government apparatchik under Marx, where people at the top can wield more power over their world than a CEO could ever dream about simply by claiming to by doing everything in the name of the people.
A canny article and one that points up the flexibility inherent in our system of governance. When we employ simply common sense this is a good thing and when men like Obama hold the reigns a disaster.
The problem is that we as a country have almost risen to the level of the proverbial benevolent dictator or king. When a good man is at the helm, things are good and a bad one bad. This points up to what extent our Presidents have figured out ways to circumvent or simply ignore congress. The fact that congress is an entrenched and corrupt entity doesn’t help matters.
In the end, our government is only as good as the people who comprise it and vote for it and we’re not doing very well on that score.
One small addition to the article: Federalism isn’t just the division between national and state governments, but between national, state and local governments, according to the principle that decisions ought to be made as locally as possible.
BR: “they are told that government programs can abolish poverty, ensure complete equality…”
This is the biggest and most sinister lie of the not-to-be-equalized Marxist equalizers. George Orwell and the Soviet dissidents understood that Marxism (and other forms of collectivization such as Medieval Feudalism) is a self-serving governing system where some (the Marxist Ruling Class – the Pigs of Animal Farm) are “more equal than others.”
“The usual understanding of “equality,” when applied to people, entails equality of rights and sometimes equality of opportunity. But what is meant in all these [Socialist] cases is the equalization of external conditions [social and economic outcome] which do not touch the individuality of man. In socialist ideology, however, the understanding of equality is akin to that used in mathematics, i.e., this is in fact identity, the abolition of differences in behavior as well as in the inner world of the individuals constituting society. From this point of view, a puzzling and at first sight contradictory property of socialist doctrines becomes apparent. They proclaim the greatest possible equality, the destruction of hierarchy in society and at the same time a strict regimentation of all of life, which would be impossible without absolute control and an all-powerful bureaucracy which would engender an incomparably greater inequality.” Igor Shafarevich
http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property” [Communist Manifesto] meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before… In the years following the Revolution it [The Socialist Party of Oceania] was able to step into this commanding position almost un-opposed because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization… It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionably the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc [Socialist Principles of Oceania], which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell – 1984
Happy Thanksgiving to all here. My belief in the silent majority is further enhanced with all of these thoughtful, intelligent responses. The question is how to ultimately restrain(or minimize) govt in the face of new technological discoveries? As an example, The Clean Air Act did some really good things as I remember sitting with mom in a traffic jam becoming asphyxiated. However, this Act is now the basis for perpetual overreach from an unelected body of what now is made of environmentally religious, rigid zealots. That is what needs to be fixed and it hasn’t in 40 years. Limits.
There is more content in these comments than has come out of Washington D.C. in the last ten years.
I, a forty year P.E. would be the last to promote giving the sole reins of power to unchallenged technocrats, e.g. engineers. I have just returned from New Orleans, seeing the 17 th St Canal levee breach site, the still existing roofs with broken escape holes in them, and vast areas of abandoned structures. The protective levees and water works were lethally built by a technical monopoly, the US Army Corps of Engineers. Congressional oversight was a joke. The hurricane Katrina destruction killed over a thousand Americans in this metro area, yet not one executive engineer, or political leader has been sanctioned for his performance. That is the result of our current governance. We have two bistable poles of power, government and concentrated vested private interests. Government consists of legislators and vast bureaucracies who do not respond to any Administration, because the employees can never be fired. Technical people in the private sector are employees, subject to master-servant laws, and are regularly terminated, e.g. the scientist who proved that cigarettes were killers worked for a tobacco company. They fired him. No profession or government structure, has a monopoly on ethics.
However, in an ever increasing technical world, a co equal society of technical people could effectively offset incompetent or corrupt management. The experts must be exposed to internal policing by peers, and external conflict resolution schemes with management and the government. Some low level employee on the New Orleans levee, the BP drill rig, at three Mile Island, during the generation long, multi billion dollar TVA nuclear “outage”, or at the Challenger launch pad, should have been able to report his bosses by calling a 911 number. And remain employed. Every post mortem commission, normally composed of out of work politicians, has discovered a smoking gun, which some level of management chose to ignore, and top managements who were technically incompetent.
I propose skeleton government bureaucracies, similar to inspector general staffs, to police professional societies for crooks. At one time, the societies would have provided an IG with lots of work; they were/are creatures of large technical organizations. The prime function, as noted in the article, is a divided power structure, among the extant branches of government, wealth centers, and now, technical societies. The advantage is the destruction of vast, ineffective government regulating bureaucracies. Their legal mandate, to ignore costs, has metastasized to larding on massive costs, so as to kill their regulated industry domestically. Drive it off shore. Our national productivity, unemployment, and wealth collapse is the result, due, in large part, to government imposed costs. I do not propose unregulated capitalism in technical fields, but self policing by experts.
I repeat, the US is on an unsustainable path toward advanced technology. The costs for life sustaining commodities will far exceed our ability to pay. People will increasing be impoverished, or be subjugated in a technical tyranny, by either government or private fiefdoms. We must evolve, or fail.
“Government consists of legislators and vast bureaucracies who do not respond to any Administration, because the employees can never be fired.”
This is a myth; the excuse used by supervisors and managers who don’t want to, or aren’t allowed to, deal with the controversy involved in dismissing a public employee, especially in a unionized environment. Let’s take the most extreme situation: dismissal of a unionized merit system public employees. Such employees have two bodies of rights; those articulated in the merit system statute and regulations, usually moreso the latter and those articulated in the union contract. A merit system law will normally set out some sort of disciplinary process, often mandate progressive, corrective discipline, and require that discipline or dismissal will be for cause. Some define cause, some don’t. Most union contracts define discipline in some fashion and often also mandate that it be progressive and corrective. A union contract usually states that discipline and dismissal will be for cause or just cause and may or many not define cause or just cause.
The biggest problem in disciplining or dismissing an underperforming or misbehaving employee is that supervisors rarely deal with problems until they simply have to and then they commonly overreact. Over the years I’ve taken thousands of calls from supervisors and managers who wanted some employee fired right now. My first questions were always whether there was prior discipline on record and what was the employee’s rating on his/her last annual evaluation. The answer was almost always that there was no record of prior discipline and the last eval was acceptable or better. Sorry, unless there is single incident misconduct such as assault, dishonesty, intoxication (maybe), or true insubordination, you ain’t firing that employee and making it stick before a labor arbitrator, a merit system appeal board, or a judge. If there is a record of corrective instruction and prior discipline, you can easily administer either stronger discipline or if appropriate dismiss the employee and sustain the action before a neutral. But you must have done it right. Whatever process the merit system rules or the union contract sets out must be afforded. If there is no explicit process, you must meet the Constitutional minimum process set out in Loudermill v. Cleveland Board which basically is notice of the charges, an opportunity to respond with mitigating or obviating facts, and consideration of any mitigating or obviating facts that are offered. In other words, you can’t obviously have the dismissal memo already written and in your top desk drawer before you talk to the employee. If the employee is unionized and maybe even if s/he’s not depending on the law at the place and time, the employee has the right to have a union representative or another employee with him/her during any interview that the employee reasonably believes might lead to discipline. In twenty odd years of doing labor arbitrations on behalf of a state government, I’ve been involved in hundreds of dismissal or discipline cases. I can count on the fingers of one hand the cases we had in which the arbitrator totally vacated the discipline or dismissal and certainly on my fingers and toes the number in which an arbitrator reduced the penalty imposed.
Is it more difficult than in most of the private sector or in the non-union public sector? Resoundingly, yes! But unlike most of the private sector or non-union public sector, a unionized public employer has scads of people whose sole function is to assist supervisors and managers in discipline and dismissal issues and in sustaining the employer’s acts before the labor board and arbitrators.
The real issue is inability or unwillingness to deal with poor performance. Most unionized public employers are run by Democrats and one phone call to a political appointee from a union rep and it is the supervisor who is on trial, not the employee. Supervisors learn quickly to heed that flashing career indicator light and they stop even trying to get poor performers or behavior problems to improve. And unless you just like people standing around carrying signs and singing songs about you, you aren’t even going to think about firing a unionized employee. If an employee does something really awful or politically unacceptable, Democrats will fire them and the union will look the other way, but decision is made at the political level, not by supervisors and labor relations people. And Republicans can be almost as bad as the Democrats because they’re so afraid of bad press and people saying that they’re being partisan and mean-spirited. I’ll categorically state that no Republican government ever let me use the tools and tactics with unions and unionized employees that the Democrats would use once the union or the employee had crossed then. Since they have the relationship they do, if a union runs afoul of a Democrat government, it is let slip the dogs time.
And it is a myth that you can just let private sector employees go at will. Most courts are going to impose some sort of process and cause burden in some notion of a covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The advantage the non-union private sector has is that there is no union grievance procedure or formal internal appeal process leading to a neutral, so an employee who beleives him/herself to have been wronged has to sue and put up some of their own money and time. Most choose to live to fight another day rather than spend months or years in court proceedings.
We are close, but this is off point, the Proper Role of Government. There are 13.9 million workers who were fired due to lack of work. This is fact, not a myth. Supervisors in large private corporation cut the dead wood first, but then the muscle and bone of the organization. No similar process is ongoing in the federal government, although the blood letting has begun in state and local governments. Why the incredible differences?
The reason is the structure of both government and centers of wealth/power. All have struggled to gerrymander fiefdoms as you note: Democratic management, Republican management, union control, sole source contracts, etc. Their abuses are chronically exposed after every technical disaster. My comments focus on the problem and a possible remedy.
(To your point, both government and private sector managers are very poor at firing people for cause.)
You are conflating two totally different actions: dismissal/firing and layoff. They feel the same when the paycheck stops but they are completely different actions performed for different reasons. The vast majority of the unemployed were laid off for lack of work or lack of funds. While some of them may have been poor performers, they were not laid off because of performsnce or misbehavior. It isn’t uncommon for employers to use economic layoff as a pretext to eliminate poor performers, but if the employee can show that the economic reason was a pretext, it is called a constructive discharge and if the employee sues or grieves, s/he is commonly put back to work with backpay in unionized work and commonly in government whether union or not. Normally, a layoff is an action that does not reflect on the employee’s performance and the employee is eligible for rehire or recall should his/her work be required again.
Dismissal, discharge, firing, they all mean the same thing, is the separation of an employee for cause: poor performance or misconduct of some sort. You said that government employees can’t be “fired.” I said that is a myth and explained why.
Unless a government has bargained away its right to conduct an economic layoff, and some have, it is easy to lay off government employees for lack of work or lack of funds. Most merit systems have requirements for notice, order of layoff, reassignment rights, recall/rehire rights, etc., but if the rules are followed the employee is placed on layoff and is off the payroll. One reason governments don’t like to do it is that it is VERY expensive. Government employees have accrued leave, some have months or even years of paid leave saved, which in most governments must be cashed out to the employee on layoff. Usually, an employee can ask for a refund of their contribution to retirement or other savings and annuity plans. Usually a government contemplating economic layoffs is already cash-strapped and a government has to carefully manage layoffs so that its payroll checks will actually cash. The other reason is more venal, especially in Democrat governments. The employees may or may not vote Democrat, but their unions and associations do, and if the employee isn’t working, s/he isn’t paying dues, which are normally funnelled to Democrats. In the Blue states, the right to layoff has often been bargained away or severely limited but the willingness to lay off employees is pretty much non-existent because they are a cash cow for unions and Democrats. And the most common scam of all is the threat to lay off cops, firemen, and teachers; any government could absorb a 10 – 20% budget shortfall without ANY effect on direct services to the public. There would be effects, but they wouldn’t require laying off any employee that directly served the public. So, any time a government says it is going to have to lay off employee performing a vital service, they’re lying and trying to get the taxpayers to accept higher taxes so the government won’t face budget cuts.
Thank you for your contribution. Perhaps our colloquy is germane to the structure of government. What you discuss is alien to employment in the private sector, my background. I was a line manager of hundreds of non union engineers, involved is technical study and design of a score of nuclear power plants, and two score fossil fueled power plants. With the collapse of both industries, after Three Mile Island and the issuance of EPA’s New Source Pollution Standards, some 2/3 th of the technical employees, ~ 30,000 white collar workers, in my former employer, were let go. Most were engineers/designers. (I have been trained by lawyers not to assume universal definitions and practice. We were instructed to use the word, “Terminate”, a meaningful term, but I imprecisely use “Fire” here to convey a brutally simple concept, no pay check.)
During this time, since no licenses had been submitted for a decade, the NRC undertook a commission to lay off two – three employees. It met for several years, then disbanded with no results. There are many regulators who have been employed for an entire career, retired, but never worked on a new plant, which was the prime reason for their organization.
We gave notice to an termination employee by hard copy. Today I understand, email is commonly used. In the private sector, the required advance is one pay period, normally two weeks, or a month. There is no long term collective contract among the private professions. IMHO, from uncounted interactions, government regulators could not hold a candle to their counterparts in the private sector, in technical expertise.
I have just read a recent article which states of the 14,000 miles of levees under the jurisdiction of the Corps of Engineers, 11.3% were found acceptable after review, “..starting in the late 1960s…federal policies… inadvertently encouraged the building of levees according to a less protective standard…” This disastrous situation existed with the full knowledge of executives and legislators in Washington D.C.: generals, Sec Def.s and Senators. But not the profession or the public. No “leader” was prosecuted, terminated, fired, or laid off. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the levee system a grade of “D”, and estimate $50 Billion will be needed to make it safe.
I reiterate my initial premise: our system of governance in technology is broken. Unionized scientists and engineers would make it worse. We must reorganize power centers in the life sustaining professions, or suffer massive deaths. Again.
Barry,
You’re always a good read but this was particularly well done. Thank you.
But what really caught my interest is that you took classes from Carroll Quigley. Many years ago I read his “Tragedy and Hope.” I thought it one of the finest history books I’ve ever read. As I say it’s been years but therein you might recall he alludes to a cabal of some kind that he advocated which would solve all the worlds problems.
Can you shed any light on that at all? What was he like in class? What do you make of his book?
Of course the greatest threat comes not from corruption, but from the true believers- the ones who imagine themselves as philosopher-kings. C.S. Lewis warned us of such people, “It may be better to be ruled by robber-barons than omnipotent moral busibodies, for the robber-baron will sometimes sleep, his cupidity will sometimes be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own consciences.”
The article is nicely done indeed, and encapsulates the rather bizarre assumptions made by Marx in getting to his destination. And he wasn’t writing in a vacuum; by the time he was developing his theories, the success of the American model was already evident.
Your last quote, from Jefferson, is an approximation, but you have an earlier one that has an interesting history: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” (Samuel Johnson).
That quote is assumed to mean something about patriotism that is bad, and it is often used against patriots and patriotic notions. But this completely reverses the sense that Johnson was talking about:
http://www.dehavelle.com/2011/11/a-note-on-patriotism-and-a-rare-heinlein-mistake/
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Prof. Rubin asserts that a government centered on the Constitution is the best we can hope for and I agree.
One result of the Tea Party Movement is that we are all learning more about American history and the wisdom of the Founders of the Country. Prof. Rubin, also, demonstrates the difference between an informed amateur, like myself, and a disciplined professional. I can understand what he said; I could not have written it.
This is an outstanding piece that limns the trajectory that has gotten us into the mess we are in. PJMedia is a venue for the exchange of ideas and it may be the Internet and those who use it who save America…and the World.
FormerStudent
“Here’s one vote for wise regulation: If Glass-Steagall wasn’t repealed in 1999, I doubt we’d be in such an epic mess today”
That goes right over everyone’s head as they are too ingrained in partisanship to comprehend damage done to our nation’s economy by repealing that act in 1999.
Glass Steagall was enacted as a response to the equities crash in 1929 which led to the great depression, and we are witnessing the exact same history unravel before our eyes on a far greater scale. The tragedy was completely avoidable but due to legislators beholden to banks and securities firms, our Economy was sold to the highest bidder in 1999 and are paying the price today.
#18 Keith Dehavelle;
Samuel Johnson was referring to False patriotism to defend a Position, specifically by John Stuart the earl of Bute. But the point is well made; those that wrap themselves in the flag to defend a position should be eyed suspiciously and with great concern.
Totally agree about Glass and do remember the rate deregulation of the brokerage industry in the mid 70s.
I blame the various faiths here for the problem, equating compassion with charity. If you really look, compassion is no more a cover for self-pity, and the wiki is good on that definition.
If you spend any time in the world, the only people who demand compassion or will even accept it are the ones who created their own problems and want someone else to save them, at no cost to themselves. One psycho opined that he sure liked do-gooders because they did him no end of good.
I read – I notice!
“amateurs, and a disciplined professionals” – attention to fact – Trotsky was killed by a Pickaxe not an Ice pick !
One professional followed by one amateur equals a change in fact.
I think it was actually a mountaineering ice axe, which is shaped like a pickaxe but smaller and lighter. The “pick” side of the head is used either as an anchor by driving it in the ice/snow or if one falls and is sliding down ice or snow, the Pick side can be used as a brake. As I understand it, the pick side was buried in his brain and he lived long enough to get to the hospital.
I too was fascinated by the author here describing taking a class from Quigley, the author of Tragedy and Hope. I read that a long time ago and it is my recollection that his entire motivation for that book was to unmask the string holders and pullers, not because he thought them evil, but that he thought that what they were doing was so good that it must see the light of day so that we could see how benevolent they were.
Sounds like right up BO’s alley.
What a great piece! and something I will read over and over again, so I can teach the sadly uninformed. Many thanks.
We found this site via Yahoo while looking for cheap international calls abroad related websites is there a way to print this page?
With all the doggone snow we have had as recently I am bound inside , fortunately there is the net, cheers for leaving me something to do