The Man of System
Leo Linbeck III
President Obama, in his State of the Union address this week, proposed myriad programs to, as he put it, “to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth” in a way that “are fully paid for and fully consistent with the budget framework both parties agreed to just 18 months ago.”
Among the systems he listed over the course of an hour:
– A network of 15 manufacturing innovation institutes
– A bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change
– An Energy Security Trust for auto research and technology development
– A “Fix-It-First” program for our most urgent infrastructure needs
– A home mortgage refinancing assistance program
– A program to make high-quality preschool program available to every child in America
– A competition to redesign America’s high schools
– An increase to the minimum wage
– Federal support for the 20 hardest-hit towns in America to help them get back on their feet
– A non-partisan commission to improve the voting experience in America
This is not a comprehensive list. But how could it be? There is a virtually limitless list of needs where The Man of System is called on to supply a program, a solution, or a system (take your pick).
Of course, any time such a list is proffered, there will be those who ask: how we will pay for it? But worry not, dear reader, for the President “assured his audience that “nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.”
Whew! That’s a relief.
But wait a minute: this stuff may not increase the deficit, but the deficit is already $1 trillion. Shouldn’t we be looking for ways to decrease the deficit before adding new initiatives? And what about future deficits? Won’t they be a problem when “the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of health care for an aging population”?
Again, not to worry: the Man of System already has his plans in place. The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is in place and starting to work. Costs are being controlled. Waste is being eliminated. Ill-gotten profits are being disgorged. And it was designed by experts, so we know it’s right; we simply need to give it time, give it a chance.
This might be hard to do, however. We’re told by the folks over at Talking Points Memo that there are still obstacles to Obamacare’s success. Serious obstacles.
TPM highlights four obstacles in particular, or as its heading put it “Four Ways Obamacare Could Still Fail.” Here are the four (the possible solutions are mine):
1. Ongoing Disapproval of the Law. According to TPM, two leading health policy experts argue that the overarching threat to Obamacare is the fact that many Americans continue to disapprove of it.
2. States Declining to Expand Medicaid. Obamacare relies on states expanding Medicaid. Not every Governor is on board with this expansion.
3. States Refusing to Build Insurance Marketplaces. As is the case for Medicaid, Obamacare relies on states to set up health insurance exchanges. Some states appear to be reluctant to do so.
4. Nullification of the Medicare Cost-Cutting Board. The architecture of Obamacare requires the hard decisions about what is covered and how much is paid to be made by a 15-person Independent Payment Advisory Board. Health insurers hate the IPAB, as does Congress, including some House Democrats.
So, other than Governors, Congress, and the people, everyone’s on board and things are looking up!
Seriously, this is just the way these things always seem to go. A problem is identified by experts; those experts convince the central authority to create a system to solve the problem; the system, because it is centralized, is understandable only to other experts, so other views are ignored or dismissed; unintended consequences ensue, along with complaints by the aforementioned experts that there was poor implementation/irrational behavior/corruption/etc.
The simple fact of the matter is that for health care there is no workable centralized solution. It’s not that the experts came up with the wrong solution – it’s that no such solution exists. Not Obamacare, not the Ryan Plan, nothing. That’s why an approach like the Health Care Compact – now passed in 7 states and being considered in more this year – is the only rational way forward. The enormous, intractable problem must be broken down smaller, tractable parts.
But, alas, the Man of System never sees this as an option. He knows the right answer, and the people/governors/industry simply need to get with the program. His program. Now.
Of course, the Man of System is not a 21st Century innovation. It’s been with us for a long, long time. Adam Smith wrote about him in his Theory of Moral Sentiments:
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess–board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
Some general, and even systematical, idea of the perfection of policy and law, may no doubt be necessary for directing the views of the statesman. But to insist upon establishing, and upon establishing all at once, and in spite of all opposition, every thing which that idea may seem to require, must often be the highest degree of arrogance. It is to erect his own judgment into the supreme standard of right and wrong. It is to fancy himself the only wise and worthy man in the commonwealth, and that his fellow–citizens should accommodate themselves to him and not he to them. It is upon this account, that of all political speculators, sovereign princes are by far the most dangerous. This arrogance is perfectly familiar to them. They entertain no doubt of the immense superiority of their own judgment. When such imperial and royal reformers, therefore, condescend to contemplate the constitution of the country which is committed to their government, they seldom see any thing so wrong in it as the obstructions which it may sometimes oppose to the execution of their own will. They hold in contempt the divine maxim of Plato, and consider the state as made for themselves, not themselves for the state. The great object of their reformation, therefore, is to remove those obstructions; to reduce the authority of the nobility; to take away the privileges of cities and provinces, and to render both the greatest individuals and the greatest orders of the state, as incapable of opposing their commands, as the weakest and most insignificant.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Adam Smith: a man of remarkable insight, even 250 year later.
Being without a party affiliation, I hereby offer my non-partisan program to improve the voting experience, to wit, eliminating 47% of voters from eligibility and placing all ballots in English only.
L3,
Thank you for AS’ TMS. It was on my list.
Consider how would they measure the costs and presumed benefits of their slew of programs to justify to the public Obama’s SOTU line “nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.”
3. The salaries of the bureaucrats will be spent and count as a Stimulus.
2. All the union workers, academics and teachers involved would have been sitting around anyway.
1. We flat out lie. What does it matter? We won.
The real costs, in opportunity costs for what the capital could have been used for, are never considered.
Obama as the Man of System lacks the gravity of Stalin the Man of Steel. He even lacks the mustache. He lacks the work ethic and the jawline of Il Duce the Man of Chin. Mussolini as a youthful socialist Editor actually wrote and edited his journal and books. Obama is so unaccomplished and unproductive as to be liable to be revealed as like the basketball player who admitted that he had not read his own autobiography. Obama is merely the Man of Styrofoam. Perhaps we can get Bloomberg to ban him from New York.
How to improve the voting process and secure the Republic.
1. Make staffing the polls a form of Jury Duty. Eliminate almost all absentee ballots.
2. Eliminate votes by federal civil servants in federal elections, and by state/local civil servants at their level.
3. Allocate congressional seats after apportionment according to the number of citizens eligible to vote for Congress resident in each state.
The Democrats constant reuse of demands to fund “infrastructure repair” without ever actually fixing the bridges makes me think that they studied budgeting and negotiation theory under the Palestinians, who expect to be paid repeatedly to not honor the same agreement. May I make a modest suggestion? Audit the already flushed away Stimulus I, II, and III funds and noisily throw recipients in jail, “pour encourager les autres”.
“A market-based solution to climate change”
Which is code for: the state creates artificial scarcity. Producers fight over the remaining resources. The smaller “less efficient” competitors (who may not happen to be Obama donors) go out of business or seek protection from the state. The cost is passed on to the consumer, i.e. you. Regular people get poorer. The state escapes the blame. The state blames producers. The surviving producers can live with that. The state gains power and opportunities for trading favors and “standing up for the little guy”.
This is not a comprehensive list. But how could it be?
Here is everybody’s comprehensive list for medical care:
“I want the best medical care in the world, and I want somebody else to pay for it”
Obama is sticking that “somebody” to the next generation, and got elected as a result. Look out, next generation, just after you’ve paid for your degree loan in your fourties and emerged from your parents’ garage, Obamacare awaits.
ADE
Manufacturing improvement centers…Oh yeah government sponsored technological projects have worked out so well these past few years. Those 15 centers would end up being controlled from one center. Over the past years government sponsored tech seems to suck up money for crony’s and drones and place obstacles in the way of innovation by private enterprise.
The “Liberals” and “Progressives” are shooting themselves in the feet.
http://www.michaelzwilliamson.com/blog/item/the-post-in-which-i-piss-off-everybody
The President “assured his audience that “nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.”
The key word as Mark Steyn astutely points out is should:
If Obama had confidence in his own proposals he would have said “nothing I’m proposing tonight will increase our deficit by a single dime” …
We are increasingly seeing how prescient the Founders were in creating the Senate as representative of the individual States. Two popularly elected houses added nothing to the system and eliminated a major check. The national government has sucked up the tax revenue source and doles it out to the States to effect big government control. Even so, the little remaining independence in the States illustrates in stark contrast the incompetence of the national government acting on the micro level. The States that are failing are those that have mimicked the intrusive government approach and extended it even further. The damage caused by our Dear Leader is magnified in scope and unchecked by any institution on the national level. Having both houses of Congress and the executive popularly elected merely allows the entire national government to be a self-perpetuating and entrenched tax-supported business for politicians who shift between Congress and K Street. A Senate selected by State governments would stand a chance of breaking up this obscene circle jerk.
I’d offer Obama his new higher federal minimum wage in exchange for repealing “prevailing wage” laws, in essence, repeal of the Davis-Bacon Act, as applied to work on federal “shovel ready” infrastructure jobs.
Over at Ace of Spades http://ace.mu.nu/archives/337616.php there is a tip to follow back to this (and other) 1934 cartoon in the Chicago Tribune http://www.bearishnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/new-deal-cartoon1.jpg
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Philadelphia @ 7: “We are increasingly seeing how prescient the Founders were in creating the Senate as representative of the individual States. … A Senate selected by State governments would stand a chance of breaking up this obscene circle jerk.”
Amen! One of our long term goals should be repeal of the 17th Amendment. Imagine: with 30 states currently controlled by Republicans, we could have 60 Republican senators right now.
– Federal support for the 20 hardest-hit towns in America to help them get back on their feet
= Federal taxpayer bailouts for Democrat Run towns on the verge of insolvency – Detroit, half of California, etc.
John Gall Systemantics (1975 or so, with later and larger but not better editions) explains that failure is an intrinsic feature of systems.
It’s a great read, except he felt occasionally that it ought to be another “Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown,” among the serious and eternal truths.
Good old Adam Smith — evidence that “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”. Which should be worrying to someone somewhere, since the same forces Adam Smith described have ended every civilization the planet has ever seen, except the current one (yet!).
What has to happen before people sit up & notice that the situation is approaching critical?
The designers/creators of obamacare were extremely slick.
They knew that if it worked it would expel capitalism quickly installing socialism on the way to Communism. They also knew if only parts of it worked they got chaos another must for socialists/communists hell bent on destroying a once capitalistic nation. It appears they will soon be getting the chaos they thrive on.
We should never underestimate an administration where everything is politically based.
Bingo Visitor,
“Federal support for the 20 hardest hit towns” is just a bailout for the failed blue model cities and towns.
Buraq is a master of one thing- he is a master high minded, what seems obviously beneficial sounding, but in reality empty and more often than not, destructive rhetoric.
“…is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.”
R. Strange MacNamera and the F-111 program. It was such a great idea that the fact that it was not working out HAD to be the fault of the idiots who were implanting his fabulous vision. So he took direct control of the program.
In my limited experience and education, consisting of 25 years on active duty in the USAF, including 4.5 years at the Pentagon, as well as 13 years in private industry and considerable private study on my own, I have concluded that the Feral Government MAY be able to do a good job of meeting its OWN requirements – as long as there is not a MacNamera around to ‘eff things up. But it can NEVER do a good job of meeting someone else’s requirements.
A recent AP article began thusly: “President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul is unfolding as a national experiment with American consumers as the guinea pigs: Who will do a better job getting uninsured people covered, the states or the feds?”
Guinea Pigs. Lemmings would be more like it. Perhaps Wretchard will forward the whole article to LIII.
The problem with medical care is there is more demand than the market can possibly supply, and we are so pleased with our capabilities that we feel compelled to spend ten million dollars to save a life, but when we present the bill to the patient, he wonders what he’s supposed to do about it.
The best “solutions” to this are to reduce the cost of supplying this care, and growing the economy so more people can pay that $10m bill when it comes in. Neither is going to be 100% solved anytime soon.
Therefore it is fraud and foolishness for the feds or anyone to try to fix everything today. It is not possible. It is not even close to possible. It has the perverse effect of concentrating all the failure in one place, on the federal government and particular panels of 13 doctors who cannot possibly win no matter what kind of rationing, policies, or economics they recommend.
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Adam Smith was very wise and jumped right to the solution. First we have rigid, closed-form solutions. Most people see that as the end-all of rationality. Then along comes something like quantum physics and says that some uncertainty is essential, you will NEVER do away with it. People scratch and hem and haw and try to ignore it. Then along comes something like deterministic chaos that says even your closed-forms can be completely unstable – while at the same time, dynamic systems you can hardly predict, can be the most capable. Capitalist markets can supply that dynamism which can be more robust and efficient than any closed solutions.
Now, that’s not a guaranty. Capitalism ran right off the rails in 2008. It happens. Not every dynamic system is wonderful and magic, and like any system they can be hijacked or broken. You might expect an invisible hand to grab for your wallet on occassion, and that can be a problem too, even if it’s still the best game in town.
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The surfer rides the wave, he does not flatten it. It is done with skill and finesse rather than brute force.
Well, someday we’ll have robots that can surf as skillfully as people, so rationality (if that’s what it takes to get a robot to surf) is not forbidden in these problems, but it’s rationality that learns to use skill and finesse.
15. RWE: Robert Strange McNamara indeed. I remember systems analysis courses in grad school where Mcnamara was spoken of with reverence by the prof. His academic admirers probably caused a lot of damage.
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Adam Smith spent time thinking about civic republicanism and how it hindered the growth of free commerce and wealth creation. Today, the left sometimes seems to push a distorted version of civic republicanism as part of their anti commerce anti wealth creation verbiage.
Adam Smith had plenty of arguments to skewer today’s lefties. In his lifetime I think that he was more famous for “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” than for “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”.
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15. RWE
But didn’t the F-111 ultimately prove to be an excellent warplane?
Longtime lurker with an interest in aviation
@19…
Not really.
The F-111 had to morph into the FB-111 — which was really a B-111.
It never was a fighter. Trying to make it such blew up the whole program.
That a genius like Strange couldn’t see that the performance dynamics of fighters and bombers were machs apart…
Then, not so smart after all.
MP @8
You’re entirely wrong.
Lifting the minimum wage is its own catastrophe that savages an even larger segment of the working — attempting to work — population.
Just don’t do it.
Politically, there will never be such a swap, anyway.
As for Davis-Bacon…
I believe this has been covered here before: permitting the Federal Government to abuse its monopsony power is all that you’ll get by waiving the act.
You’re aiming your ire at the wrong target.
The problem is that the government continues to permit unions to function outside the law.
Every single ‘union problem’ is a consequence of their universal get-out-of-jail card.
Stop posting about what’s irrelevant — and go after union RICO criminality.
Even if your fantasy (the end of Davis-Bacon) occurred — the massively corrupt unions and their bedfellows would carry on their ’cause.’
No matter how popular railing against Davis-Bacon is — particularly in conservative circles — it’s the wrong target.
Proof: Even before Davis-Bacon was passed, the crony-corruption gambit was already in full swing. The law was passed to stop the big players from roundly abusing the actual tradesmen at a time of horrific unemployment/ zero wage negotiation leverage.
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As a general rule: never give the statists a n y t h i n g in their agenda. You’ll never get your ‘tat’ — just lose your ‘tit.’
Just ask Reagan how those ‘spending cuts’ worked out. ( $1 of tax increases were to bring $3 in spending cuts — which just turned into $1 in tax increases and $3 in spending increases )
The F-16 could fly rings around the F-111, as could almost all of the MIG models. As blert said, it was a decent high speed bomber, almost an updated B-58. but nothing more. To try to pretend it could be a fighter as well was the ultimate accountant’s folly.
Josh @16…
Far more than we wish to acknowledge…
America has adopted Cost-Plus as its economic model for health care.
Hence, our national budget resembles that of 1940s wartime — with the Pentagon replaced by the Medical-Pharmaceutical Complex.
(Ike never saw it coming.)
During WWII the open-ended spending was to save GI’s lives by better bombing, etc.
Now, it’s to save the GI generation with better medicine.
————
We’ve also ‘militarized’ civilian living.
By that I mean that Bloomberg, et. al. intends to induct our children into boot camp (Bloomkamp) with soup Nazis ladling out politically correct calories.
(“No simple carbohydrates for you!”)
More generally, boot camp is of Procrustean dimension: every trooper must be re-molded.
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And, like all drill instructors, there is the official way, the right way, and HIS way.
So much for empaneled experts.
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WWII histories are filled with Pentagon ‘management mistakes’ — horrifically so.
But, at least America had an opposition that made even bigger errors.
However, in medicine, disease and frailty can’t surrender, get demoralized — they carry on the bad work without doctrine or theory, without management of any kind.
Hence, humanity is not forestalled from hyperbolic expenditures on trendy nostrums.
Like bad advertising, macro-managed medicine throws good money after bad.
A sort of ‘base-line budgeting’ for bleeders.
If one pint of blood didn’t restore health — then tap another.
It’s enough to make one faint.
The world is a messy place. Our desire to make it less messy is one source of motivation for innovation and improvement. Want to avoid traffic? There’s an app for that. Want to bake your own bread with minimal hassle? There’s an appliance for that. Don’t want to put up with chronic back pain? There’s an apparatus for that. Worried about rogue nations? There’s an appeasement for that.
We know the extremes don’t work. You don’t want to be the obsessive compulsive cleaner who spends all day washing down the garage floor so that, in the off chance your kids drop their PB&J as they exit the car, you can be sure they don’t ingest some nasty strain of bacteria. You also don’t want to be the guy who had 45 dogs and 60 years of old newspapers taking over the place.
Places without a government are nasty places to live. So are totalitarian dictatorships.
In dynamic systems, the trend matters more than the current state. What is so unsettling about America today is dy/dx, not y(x). The trend is toward centralization, cartelization, and corruption. Where we are today is not so bad, particularly on a relative basis (which is why we don’t see a massive diaspora of US citizens). But we can’t let the trend continue, or it will kill us. And the point of no return comes well before you see the cliff.
The trends are not good. Still, The Man of System remains confident that his plans will work. He just needs more time. Or money. Or obedience. Or control. Or spin. Which just goes to show that Nigel Tufnel was right:
There’s a fine line between stupid and clever.
L3
Prejean #19:
It did turn out to be an excellent bomber, and the FB-111 model did in fact replace the B-58 for SAC. But bombing is what the F-111A, F-111D, F-111E, and F-111F models were used for as well.
And that was what the USAF wanted. Admittedly the industry had great difficulty in meeting the original specifications, which called for supersonic very low altitude long range flight – and that should have been a big warning right there.
Going in very low and very fast was a very good idea – but doing it supersonically was more than a small waste of time, money, design effort, and fuel. The afterburners make the airplane very noticeable at night, so much so that they were more likely to get shot down going supersonic than subsonic. Going fast and low at night was stealthy, and that was the whole idea – unless you lit the burners.
In reality for the actual use of the F-111 – as envisioned by the USN and employed by the USAF – an A-6 probably would have been cheaper and had fewer problems. The USN originally wanted a flying subsonic Phoenix missile platform and the USAF a supersonic attack aircraft. Trying to combine the two missions was nuts and that aspect failed when the USN abandoned the B model. And the idea that different versions of the F-111 could do every fighter or attack mission the DoD required was insane. Ironically, the F-111 ended up doing fewer types of missions than other aircraft not originally designed to be multi-role.
But the 111 did a fine job in the attack on Libya in 1986 and really shone in Desert Storm, where it did things that just about no one else could and did not lose a single airplane due to enemy action.
I worked on the F-111 air cond system and some other things quite a lot in 1974-78, and I fixed a tricky problem with the air cond controller – and after that the air cond system just seemed to settle down and start working properly.
It was a great airplane but could have been a lot better if the basic idea had not been designed by Dr. Strange.
But it was never meant to dogfight or do air to air, and it was a good thing it did not have to, because I found out that the Anti-G suit control valve was a POS. What happens when you design a valve designed to come into action under high G loads and do not realzie that the valve itself will be affected by those same G loads?
But perhaps the worst thing was that the controversy and complications associated with its SECDEF-driven nature mean that it took years to correct thinsg that should have been fixed right away. And the USAF even had to suffer the effects of flying a lightweight version of the TF-30 engine intended to solve the USN’s weight problem. You could wear out an F-111F’s new engines so badly they could not be overhauled in only 20 hours of flight time if you tried.
Stevesmith #17:
McNamera actaully deserves a lot of credit for rationalizing the Pentagon’s
procurement approach, focusing on formally defining requirements and proceeding from there: PPBS. Before, it was the Services saying to industry, “What’ca got coming next? Wow! Cool!” The main problem was that if programmatic and political concerns drove the requirements process rather than actual military needs, things did not work so well.
25. RWE
Thanks for the detailed info. Very interesting. Thanks also for you service.
Re the B-58, Walter Boyne told me that was his favorite plane to fly and he considered it one of the greatest aircraft in operational service.
blert @ 21 – Have you seen the Republicans hammering Obama on the sequester? They repeatedly TRUTHFULLY report that sequstration was his idea. So now Obama is on the defensive. Go out on the South Side of Chicago, Obama’s home turf, and tell blacks that the federal government will fund “shovel ready” infrastructure projects awarded to the lowest bidder, without any restrictions requiring paying the union “prevailing wage”, and non-union Black and Hispanic contractors will leap forward looking for the work. Would you rather pay $10 per hour for young black men with shovels and brooms cleaning up their neighborhoods, or pay for food stamps? Getting total employment rising is the most important mission in the current climate. Jobs, not welfare.
Do you seriously think “Leading From Behind” Obama is going to fight non-union black construction contractors supported by Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition? If he tried, Jesse would carry through on his threat to “cut his nuts off”.
You obviously are unfamiliar with organizations like the “Democratic Hispannic Organization” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_Democratic_Organization , the fronts for white masterminds entrenched within the Daley Machine.
Read up about the “Hired Truck” scandal for more context http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hired_Truck
RWE @ 25 – Grumman and the Navy got it right eventually, the A-6 for low level all weather attack and the F-14 with Phoenix missiles for long range fleet defense. The supersonic Phoenix combined with a powerful radar gave the F-14 the ability to engage head-on at ranges way beyond what any opponent could reach. And then installing the more powerful engines originally intended and adding FLIR pods created the “Bombcat” that put more LGB ordnance on target in Afghanistan in 2001 than the B-2s flying from CONUS.
You may have seen video of the F-14 as an air superiority fighter in Top Gun or against Libyan fighters over the “Line of Death”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e3Fu2zeido
ADE (#4):
Back in 2005, I formulated what I called Jamie Irons’ Three Ironclad Laws of the Medical Marketplace:
I think they still hold:
(1) Everybody wants everything, from chemotherapy to cosmetic surgery.
(2) Everybody wants someone else to pay.
(3) If you’re under thirty years of age, and have no children, you are immortal, and you should not have to pay for health insurance.
Jamie Irons
#24 said “The trend is toward centralization, cartelization, and corruption. Where we are today is not so bad, particularly on a relative basis (which is why we don’t see a massive diaspora of US citizens). But we can’t let the trend continue, or it will kill us. And the point of no return comes well before you see the cliff.”
In established businesses, an overall strategy, structure, and culture is established. There may be some “system man” who comes in and tries some new programs, but they are always within the boundaries of the existing structures. It may be “process improvement” but it is never “scrap the existing process and create a whole new one”. The only time something really drastic like that occurs is when external events force it to occur.
The only recent example I can think of is IBM. They were once the dominant player in the computing field. Their primary product was hardware (mainframes) and they sold software principally to support their hardware. But then new hardware technologies started to encroach on IBM’s dominance. IBM under Lou Gerstner transformed the company so that now it is primarily a services company that also sells some hardware.
This kind of turn-around is rare. Most companies just continue with their old ways until competition buries them and they fold. Are their any lessons to be learned from IBM’s turn-around? Or was it just a one-off? Or maybe we can’t compare the business world to politics and government at all so the example is irrelevent?
As I remember it, the Boeing design for the F-111 was superior to the General Dynamics version, so I was surprised when the award was made to GD. Then I learned GD was Texas based as was Lyndon Johnson!
We have got to get over being reflexive and dogmatic about the role of government. For example, there is a role for the federal government in interstate commerce.
Where would we be if Eisenhower did not start the Interstate Highway System? So let” throw out some infrastructure work that deserves federal attention. I’d suggest remediation work on the St. Clair River spanning the international boundary between the United States and Canada (a good companion piece to the Keystone XL Pipeline). Obviously being an international project, it needs federal supervision. The goal would be to reduce the flow of fresh water out of the upper Great Lakes http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/great-lakes-losing-25-billion-gallons-per-day-due-to-manmade-drain-hole-near-detroit-58094902.html
“Waste not, want not”. That’s good advice and very, very simple. Even a low information voter can understand it.
The water level in Lake Michigan http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/now/wlevels/levels.html is getting so low that the flow of the Chicago River may soon reverse itself and undo the sanitary improvements of Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Sanitary_and_Ship_Canal
As Daniel Burnham put it, “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.”
Make Obama look tiny by comparison. Articulate real “Hope and Change”. Spend money on a real infrastructure project, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Water Reclaimation Project!!! Named in honor of the man behind the St. Lawrence Seaway! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lawrence_Seaway
That will stick a knife in Obama’s back!
@blert 21,
Spot on.
Reagan had to deal not only with the Democrats, but also with the national GOP, which was a false-flag operation even then. The purpose of the RNC is to keep conservatives out of Washington DC, and to continue the growth of centralized government power.
@blert 23,
“America has adopted Cost-Plus as its economic model for health care.
Hence, our national budget resembles that of 1940s wartime — with the Pentagon replaced by the Medical-Pharmaceutical Complex.
(Ike never saw it coming.)”
Yup.
And here’s the upshot.
#31 — regarding the interstate highway system. Some facts are here http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/programadmin/interstate.cfm
1. Planning for the interstate highway system began in the late 1930′s (before Eisenhower)
2. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 called for interconnecting highways between industrial centers and large cities. Routes were chosen by the States. But the Act did not appropriate any money.
3. “Under the leadership of President Eisenhower, the question of how to fund the Interstate System was resolved with enactment of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956″
Was the Federal government needed to do the work of designing and constructing the roads? No, State highway agencies developed the construction standards. And private contractors actually did the construction work. What did the Federal Government do? They provided the money. Apparently that is one thing the Feds could do well. But now they are tapped out. So what exactly are they good for?
2. Blast From the Past
I like your ideas for reforming the voting system but I hear cries of disenfranchised voters.
My own preference would be to set an absolute maximum of twelve years a person could be employed by the Federal government whether elected, appointed, or civil servant and a maximum salary of 4X the minimum wage. In other words a person could serve two terms as senator or one term rep, one term senate, and one term president or any combination thereof. He could even spend ten years cleaning toilets in a National Park somewhere, decide he’s ready for real sewer work, and run for a term in the House. But after twelve years he’s done with no pension.
Let’s emphasize the service in public service and give Nancy Pelosi some real dignity.
CBDenver @ 34 – The feds are STILL good for providing the money, and for negotiating with Canada! We went to the Moon in a Grumman LEM that was paid for with federal money, but designed and built by a private corporation, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. We also beat the Jap Zeros over the Pacific flying Grumman F-6Fs, which had a kill ratio of 31 to one.
Too may conservatives confuse paying low wages with productivity. Paying fair wages for productive workers is the way out of this mess. Henry Ford paid workers on his production lines well enough to buy the cars they built. It was the unions and the shop stewards that he did not want to pay. Today Japanese automakers pay workers more than domestic manufacturers carrying the overhead of UAW union shop stewards. So who is your fight with, the workers or the shop stewards?
Back in the Seventies, a McDonald’s restaurant cost a lot more to build than a Burger King because Ray Kroc had guys in his Advanced Engineering Department design high productivity kitchen equipment. One such item that I worked with them on was the “pass through sandwich bin”. If you went into a McDonald’s in those days, I’m sure you saw one in action. It was placed between the grills in the back and counter in front. The people working the counter merely had to reach in to grab the sandwich the customer wanted. You could go in, place an order, and get out in about one minute flat because the sandwichs were already prepared. The back of the bin was also open, so the flow of sandwichs was from back to front, which produced a de facto First In First Out (FIFO) inventory control. By using an air curtain rather than a radiant heat lamp, we avoided drying out the sandwichs. We put the FAST into fast food. Because the intelligence was in the equipment, we could use relatively low cost high school kids to run the electronic push button cash registers. The kids didn’t even have to be able to add (just like current Ivy League Liberal Arts Majors!!), they just had to be able to make the exact change the register told them to.
We substituted capital investment in productivity for wasteful educational bureaucracy spending. Pay the people who make kitchen equipment, not education bureaucrats! Pay LESS for “Education” that is actually indoctrination. Make teenagers employable, INVEST CAPITAL IN PRODUCTION EQUPMENT. GET KIDS OUT OF SCHOOLS AND INTO JOBS! That way you EXPAND the economic pie, which brings in more payroll tax revenue to pay for the things the feds can do well and that are constitutional, such as Interstate Commerce.
In addition to repealing the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis-Bacon_Act , repeal the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Patman_Act
What is all this bluster about de-regulating if you don’t actually repeal Depression Era legislation??? Do we want to live in an eternal depression?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!
Want a campaign slogan?
YOU DON’T NEED AN EDUCATION, YOU NEED A JOB!
Invest in business creation!
MP:
“Where would we be if Eisenhower did not start the Interstate Highway System?”
Someone (I think it was Marshal Mcluhan) observed that America was wrecked by an entitlement/expectation culture created in no small part by a combination of Hollywood/TV and the interstate highways.
TV told you life was always better/more exciting somewhere else and the highways gave you the means to get there.
FWIW.
On other comments of yours…the desire to keep labor costs low is usually a reaction to what most grownups see as a tremendous problem of siphoning off wealth from private industry for little return. We are being vastly overcharged for government and that has to stop, we’re not looking so much for lower wages specifically (aolthough we do need a lot of that) but rather a return of the public work force to a state of living within the framework of the social contract with the private sector that existed prior to the 1930′s. The vast majority of public employees are overpaid, AND the overall number of public employees relative to private is just plain wrong. Both of these things must be addressed.
There’s nothing a public school teacher or a PW employee can do that is worth more than 30K a year. Nothing.
There’s nothing a school principal or cop can do that’s worth more than 50K a year. No, there isn’t.
There’s nothing a school district superintendent or director of a state agency can do that is worth six figures. Sorry, it just ain’t reality. They are not creating wealth or value commensurate with that type of remuneration.
And yet, across much of our once-great nation, vast swaths of all of these individuals make twice that amount. There are eight times as many government workers making six figures now than in 2008. In total violation of matching value with cost, and in total violation of the social contract with the private sector.
The percentage of public employees relative to private in the workforce has increased from 5% in 1960 to 20% in 2012. We are not safer or healthier, and our roads and parks are not in better shape, as a result, at leat not 300% better off. We hit a level of diminishing returns on that in the ’70′s. Now any additional government employees will be put on primarily for affirmative action, and for political hack jobs for loyal campaign workers and relatives (travel to Maine or Massachusetts and you’ll see an open experiment in this).
As I’ve pointed out here before, America will be right again when the now wealthy government boomtowns in the counties around DC are reduced to impoverished ghost towns.
And the number of de facto government employees whose “private” businesses owe their existence mostly or entirely to rent-seeking behavior subsequent to overregulation actually makes the number of real government woekers higher. OSHA consulting is a multi-billion dollar business, with no actual studies to prove that the cost improves life and health all that much. And there are wasteful and sometimes contradictory rules that arise from union contracts. It’s like setting a big pile of money (that could be used to employ real people doing real productive work) on fire. Most of this waste is in the area of regulation, which has a negative multiplier effect because thhe thing they do at the government job they have is actually more damaging than being simply useless – it results in even lower productivity due to compliance costs in the private sector. So not only am I out the money I’m paying the regulator, he’s doing things that make my business inherently less productive with the money that I pay him.
And yes, some of this waste exists in defense as well as the entitlement and regulation and education industries. Yes, there are real enemies in the world and they must be dealt with. But frankly I’m sick and tired of every damn tech and IT person who works on a government contract draping themselves in the flag and saying that if their grants don’t get renewed that the Chinese will be invading my street next Friday. Truly needed programs do not require that sort of hysteria.
Poster majorityofone has the truth of it. Outside of active duty military, no more than twelve years of government service at any level and no associated pension, just SS like the rest of us. I would add to that mandatory random drug testing for all government employees at all levels, with immediate removal and a lifetime ban from government work/grants for failure. And I would apply the same standard to welfare recipients and all government grant recipients as well (suck on that, education industry!).
You say you want to expand the economic pie – well and good. Where you err is in taking it to that next level of saying that this will increase taxes collected, and that that is a good thing. I disagree. If the private sector expands, that does not necessarily mean that there is a need for more government. Just because a business makes more money does not necessarily mean it needs more roads, bridges, schools, or regulations. We need to get away from reflexive coupling of more government for more affluence. How about I grow my business, government employees do the job they were hired to do at a fair price to me in taxes, and if next year I make a bigger profit I get to keep it all because the government worker didn’t do anything additional in terms of work from year to year and has no business demanding more simply because I have more? Why do they get more for any given unit of labor simply because I made more money? There is no logical or financial or ethical reason for them to expect more compensation for this.
Every public sector worker and grant recipient exists to serve ME in the private sector. Not rule me, SERVE me. The minute that changes we live in an autocracy. Keep public workers’ salaries within the levels intended by the original social contract, hire more of them if the population or other needs for infrastructure legitimately increase, and fire them when such needs decrease – no ratcheting allowed. If we had done that for the past 50 years we’d have a lot fewer problems than we do now.
Aristide #30:
The GD design for the TFX had about 75% commonality between the USAF and USN versions. The Boeing design had about 25% commonality. Boeing looked at the requirements and designed two different airplanes – which was the correct way to do it, but not what MacNamera wanted. Of course, the USN version fell by the wayside, it’s longer wing design being used in the FB-111A and the F-111C, but that was about all.
A story about the Texas connection: When MacNamera rejected the Boeing design, a friend of mine, then in the USAF, said to a Time Magazine reporter he knew, “This is supposed to be the TFX, but it should be called the LBJ!” That got published and the Feds grabbed the reporter and grilled him for hours, but he refused to tell them the source of the quote. Now, there was a real reason to choose the GD design if you consider the commonality issue, but the sensitivity of certain people to that quote tends to show you what was going on as well.
Machais #27:
The F-14 suffered greatly from having far too much of the F-111B in it. It used the same engines, and swing wings. Swing wings were a big deal – everything was going to have them – but today almost nothing does. It was a dead end, a mistake. Swing wings were thought to be necessary to meet both the USN and USAF requirements, and at one time a swing wing F-4 was proposed but they just were not worth it.
The F-111 program and the Space Shuttle show what occurs when things are driven in detail by the Denizans of DC. With Apollo, the Fed Govt defined the requirement and the overall design of the vehicle, even doing detailed design for things like the 1st stage of the Saturn V. For the Shuttle they went a step beyond that level of involvement. “Commercial Crew” is simply getting back to normal.
The 60′s and 70′s were the heyday of the DC Does Everything Era. Everything, down to how local schools were run, was to be done top down from DC. That all failed. Many of the much touted successes of the top-down approach are in fact massive failures.
RWE @ 39 – The F-14 swing wings work fine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-sweep_wing
Exactly, the Bombcat carried the loads that the B-2, based in the CONUS, could not in Afghanistan chasing OBL to Tora Bora with just some targeting info from a few FACs on horseback! What we should have built were Super Tomcat21s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F-14_Tomcat#Projected_variants and A-6Fs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_A-6_Intruder#A-6F_and_A-6G .
Twice the load at the same distance reduces the number of airframes in half.
You want proof of the relative quality of the different manufactuers, go to The Crade of Aviation Museum and look for the bill Grumman sent North American Aviation (Rockwell) for towing Apollo 13 for 400,000 miles at $1 per mile.
FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION
Want a SEAD operation? A-6Es, EA-6Bs, E2-Cs and organic KA-6D tankers with F-14D top cover.
Why do you think the first question a President asks during a crisis is, “WHERE ARE THE CARRIERS?” No need for foreign airbases. The vast majority of all humans live within 1,000 miles of an ocean. Why do you think Obama has delayed the deployments of our carriers? Because he is a traitor.
no mo uro @ 38 – I did not say to increase the number of government employees, quite the contrary. I said use federal tax money (or maybe even better “tax expenditures”) to pay for private sector work, such as infrastructure, that benefits the interstate commerce of the country. Encouraging the Transcontinental Railroads, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Interstate Highway System, the Erie Canal, the Hoover Dam, all of those increased the communication and flow of goods and services between what would otherwise be isolated markets.
A McDonald’s restaurant in Manhattan gets its tomatoes from places like Florida or California. Without trucks and trains that would be impossible. So we can provide useful employment to Columbia Liberal Arts Majors at McDonalds instead of having them make a mess Occupying Wall Street!
How’s that for turning lemons into lemonade?
Or maybe we can have them make the Tee shirts. http://www.cafepress.com/mf/31286131/where-is-this-wonderful-box_tshirt
“Where is that wonderful box that everyone else is thinking inside of?”
Great comments, but like me, many find it more comfortable to talk about Aircraft than healthcare.
One, always advancing, the other, on the precipice, thanks to The Won.
—
“2. The brink of a dangerous or disastrous situation: on the precipice of defeat.”
Paul Krugman Calls for ‘Death Panels’ to Cut Health-Care Costs
Last week New York Times economics columnist and liberal hero Paul Krugman actually said “death panels,” the critique of Obama-care popularized by Sarah Palin and universally mocked by liberals, while discussing the necessity of cutting health care costs.
On January 30, Krugman spoke at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in D.C. (Krugman is out hawking the paperback edition of “End This Depression Now!,” his paean to more government spending on infrastructure and other forms of stimulus.) During the Q&A, Breitbart’s Joel Griffith noted, Krugman was asked about the rising national debt. A truncated version of his remarks follows:
We’re going to need more revenue, we’re going to need, and probably in the end, surely in the end it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well. So again, we won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society we want without some increase in taxes, not a huge one, but some increase on taxes on the middle class, maybe a value-added tax…. And we’re also going to do, really, we’re going to have to make decisions about health care, not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits. So you know the snarky version I use, which is, I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble, is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.”
This opens Krugman up to charges of hypocrisy, since he called the “death panel” accusation a “smear” in a March 22, 2010 column and an example of the “dishonesty” of Obama-care opponents in a June 29, 2012 column. Does this mean Krugman accepts Sarah Palin’s argument that Obama-care’s cost containment strategy will require health-care rationing?
Doug @ 41 & 42 makes some very astute comments. The real reason that our Best & Brightest beat around the bush on health care is that it so easily becomes a moral question, not an administrative one.
If a 17 year old gets pneumonia, a cheap shot of antibiotics sets him right, and he can become a productive tax-paying insurance-buying citizen for half a century. If an 85 year old gets pneumonia, he can be cured too — but is it worth it on a cost/benefit basis if that poor old man is going to spend his remaining days with dementia?
Reportedly, about half the money spent on an individual’s life-time health care costs are spend in the last 6 months — putting off the inevitable by days. We could cut health care costs hugely if we simply accepted that we are all going to die eventually. But that brings us to a moral judgment, not an administrative one. And moral judgments are difficult (as well as being not Politically Correct).
Eventually, Krugman and others in the Political Class will start referring to the actions of Death Panels as “Delayed Abortions”. Hey! It is there in the Constitution as a guaranteed right.
Even if ObamaCare were prefect on the day it was signed into law, it would become obsolete in very short order. The world changes – CONSTANTLY! Top-down government systems cannot keep pace with these changes. Instead, they apply ever increasing resources to the problem of forcing round pegs into square holes. (And it sucks to be one of those round pegs.)
Death Panels
The problem is that they are GOVERNMENT death panels. The decision of how many resources to put into the care of an elderly person is inherently complex and difficult on many levels (not least, the moral and religious). Let the individual and family decide what sort of end-of-life care they are willing to pay for in their health insurance policy. It doesn’t make end-of-life decisions any easier, but it is a far better approach than invoking government death panels. I’m OK with the government making life & death decisions for Nazis, Communists, Islamo-Fascists and others who assault our liberty, but let’s limit government involvement in Granny’s end-of-life care.
The government keeps extensive data of healthcare expenditures in the Medical Expenditures Survey available here http://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb.
Surveys over time are available here http://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/data_files/publications/st392/stat392.shtml
“In 2009, 1 percent of the population accounted for 21.8 percent of total health care expenditures, and in 2010, the top 1 percent accounted for 21.4 percent of total expenditures with an annual mean expenditure of $87,570. The lower 50 percent of the population ranked by their expenditures accounted for only 2.9 percent and 2.8 percent of the total for 2009 and 2010 respectively.”
“In both 2009 and 2010, the top 5 percent of the population accounted for nearly 50 percent of health care expenditures. Among those individuals ranked in the top 5 percent of the health care expenditure distribution in 2009 (with a mean expenditure of $40,682), approximately 34 percent retained this ranking with respect to their 2010 health care expenditures”
What this shows is that a small number of very sick people are consuming most of the healthcare dollars spent year-over-year.
This http://meps.ahrq.gov/mepsweb/data_files/publications/st359/stat359.shtml shows the most costly medical conditions:
“The top 5 most costly medical conditions in terms of health care expenditures were for treatment of heart disease, trauma-related disorders, cancer, mental disorders, and COPD/asthma.”
Look at the Wall Street Journal article The Minority Youth Unemployment Act. http://tinyurl.com/ax577zc
Since the new minimum wage worker will get a raise within one year, the total cost to employers for paying $9 per hour would be 2080 hours times $1.75 per hour, or $3,640 for that first year. So rather than raising the minimum wage, offer employers a refundable tax credit of $4,000 for every new employee they hire at $9.00 per hour for one year (the difference covering the employer cost of FICA), payable in quarterly installments. They can fire those that do not work out.
It’s cheaper than welfare or unemployment insurance. Adding 10 million people to the workforce would only add $40 billion. Chump change for 10 MILLION JOBS!
All the Republicans need do is exempt these new workers from Obamacare!
Quid pro quo
Kinuachdrach @ #43 and Radag Brown @ #45: the way I say it is: let each of us decide with our own damn dollar-votes how much we want to spend for the healthcare. Haven’t yet seen any mechanism better than the one old Adam Smith described to allocate insufficient resources among unlimited wants to yield the highest degree of satisfaction ……
To see what this “man of system” is capable of, read this excerpt.
http://tigerhawk.blogspot.ca/2009/11/in-response-to-facebook-version-of-my.html (the original link is originated on Belmont).
Basically these are utopian people. In their own mind they are smart, honest, moral, educated, and right, so they *HAVE* the whatever given right to dictate other people’s life. And to conduct experiments.
My basic view of society and any kind of .*ism is that the ism is supposed to serve society. It is the effects on society which ultimately counts. If the particular ism doesn’t work, then either rework it or ruthlessly throw it away. But for these people, the order is reversed. Their basic tenet is that their favourite ism is right, and it is society’s job to prove it. If it doesn’t work, then they need to beat people until they “prove” that their favourite ism is right.
Vilmos