The Politics of Hope

On this day, March 23rd, 1775, Patrick Henry rose and gave one of the most powerful speeches in the history of our nation. While the speech is most famous for his last line, there is more to the speech than just that. One short section worthy of review is this:

“Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation?

For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth -- to know the worst and to provide for it. I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”

The Founding Fathers were concerned, beyond all other issues, with the dangers of unchecked government. They constructed a system which not only had multiple checks and balances, it was also a system that called for deliberate – slow and deliberate – process, all built on a framework of a federal government of limited powers.

The history of the last 80 years of our republic is one of expanding government powers, until today we see the federal government taking control over 1/6th of the economy of the nation, in the form of the healthcare industry. It is sadly ignored by many that the dramatic rise in healthcare costs in this country followed the creation of Medicare, that is has been government presence and government actions, more than any other single force, that has made healthcare as expensive as it is today.

The federal government has, over the last 35 years taken a controlling position in the housing market through a complex set of quasi governmental organizations and rules and regulations, steps which were the principle drivers in causing the housing bubble and the current recession. Did the government seek to undo its actions? No, it chose instead to create new and more extensive regulations and oversight.

The federal government has already asserted the right to seize control of the auto industry.

The federal government has already assumed de facto control over the banking industry and new legislation is being introduced monthly to tighten and expand federal oversight and control over the entire financial industry. Where will this effort stop?

Discussions continue on government taxation and regulation over emissions and carbon ‘footprints.’ Is there any reason to believe that this effort is simply another step towards control of the energy industry?

We have a federal bureaucracy that has inserted itself into the education of the youth of the nation. Does anyone believe that the presence of $60 billion per year not sway how history and politics is taught in our public schools? Does anyone believe that this is anything other than subtle pressure to teach what the bureaucrats and their mentors believe?

In every case the justifications have been the same: these actions will both improve the lives of our people and make our economy more stable and solid. FDR stated that Social Security would help restore the economic basis of the country when he signed that legislation. Now it represents a $50 trillion unfunded annuity.

Patrick Henry was right when he said that: “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.”

The federal government will continue to take: to take our wealth, our rights, our freedoms. It will do so with smiles and with subtlety. But it will continue. To hope otherwise is to indulge in an illusion, as Patrick Henry noted. We must push back.

How? Simply put, we must limit the bureaucracy. Remember: we are the real power. Governments “…derive(ing) their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ The Constitution is ours; the Bill of Rights is ours. The bureaucracy has long trampled on selective elements of  both, in particular the 9th and 10th Amendments. We need to reclaim them.

We need a national debate on the limits of government. Let us use this moment as a call for a Constitutional amendment to limit federal spending and a second to limit federal regulation of industry. Write your Congressmen and Senators. Write your candidate. Use this election year to begin the debate.

Healthcare Costs, Government Accounting and Accountability

The Congressional Budget Office has just released an estimate that the Health Care bill before the House of Representatives will actually reduce the deficit over the next 10 years. In fact, the numbers they give are:

a) The bill will cost $940 Billion over the next ten years

b) The bill will reduce the deficit – by raising more money – by $138 billion during that ten-year period.

c) The bill will reduce the budget deficit another $1.2 Trillion over the following ten years.

To which I have one question: Does anyone believe this?

First, take a close look at the numbers above. The first issue is that this bill will mean that the new healthcare plan will distribute $940 billion over ten years, while increasing tax revenue $1,078 billion. Then, according to the CBO the plan, which will ostensibly cost roughly $1 trillion over the following ten years, will result in $2.2 trillion in additional revenue.

Maybe I’m confused, but it seems to me that Americans are being told to spend an additional $3.3 trillion dollars over the next 20 years. As individuals, whether the money goes out as tax or a healthcare bill, it still goes out the front door. That works out to $165 billion more per year going out the front door. Or $550 per person per year more out the front door. Not per household, per person. For the average household of 4, that’s $2200. Per year.

Didn’t they say the point of this was to reduce costs to Americans?

But the point will be made that this will be paid by the wealthiest Americans. The ones who already pay the bulk of the taxes. And it will be paid by taxing their savings and investments, which provide the money for economic growth.

But, even more to the point, ask yourself some simple questions: when was the last time a government program stayed on budget. Medicare, started in 1967, has grown at a 13% compounded rate (on average) every year since then. That was in no one’s forecast.

Medicare was supposed to address a host of issues in the healthcare field, yet it seems that the situation ahs not only gotten worse since 1967, it has done so at an accelerated pace.

Healthcare is not alone in this regard. The Department of Energy, founded some 32 years ago – To Reduce US Dependence on Imported Oil – has done no such thing, has not been able to produce a viable national energy policy, our dependence on foreign oil grows and so does the DOE budget.

The Department of Education was founded in 1980. The Department states that its mission is ‘excellence and access.’ The Department of Education’s budget has grown from $14 billion in 1980 to $64 billion last year (it actually spiked in 2006 to $100 billion). Yet the problems of poor standardized test performances and high dropout rates among the poor continues; the problems the Department of Education was supposed to address. (For those who are curious, the US spends roughly $1.1 trillion per year on education, mostly at state and local levels, considerably more than is spent on national security.

We as a nation have spent a great deal of money on the Department of Education, on the Department of Energy, on Medicare and Medicaid. More to the point, we have spent a great deal more on these departments and programs then anyone ever suggested we ever would. The budgets have grown at truly prodigious rates over the years. But two things are also true: in no case have they successfully addressed the problem for which they were created, and two, having failed in their mission, no one has ever stopped (or even slowed) the funding of these programs.

Now we have the CBO telling us that the healthcare bill will reduce our deficits. I suppose one could argue that one of these days they are going to get it right. But I for one am not willing to bet on it.

Leadership in Government: Why it is so Rare

Several ‘key’ leadership positions were just filled in the government over the past week or so. What was interesting is that a number of them are, if not friends, at least acquaintances. In most cases both they and the folks they are replacing are not what one would consider superior leaders.

This is not meant to be pejorative. All of them are bright, hard-working, dedicated people. But there are lots of bright, hard-working people. But to read the biographies and resumes of the senior leaders of the various agencies and departments in Washington is to review the ranks of what appears to be the most brilliant, talented, clever, and imaginative people this planet has ever known. Every one of them is gifted with multiple degrees, participation in a wide range of leadership seminars, and a raft of experiences that truly boggle the mind.

Yet the agencies and offices they oversee seem little changed from one end of their careers to another. How can this be?

There are some who would argue that this is a testimony to just how horribly broken is our government; that if these paragons of virtue and learning are unable to fix it, clearly the system is beyond salvage. The truth is more mundane.

First, the fact is that, in most cases, despite the stellar resumes, these people simply aren’t brilliant. Brighter then average? Perhaps, perhaps not. They may have a wonderful education – on paper, but that alone is rarely a mark of either intelligence or success, and even more rarely a mark of real leadership.

Second, and more importantly, despite the fact that these people often go from one agency to another, sitting on top of ever larger numbers of people and larger and larger budgets, most of the people in Washington are decidedly not very good leaders. They may be good managers; in fact, many of them are quite accomplished managers, particularly of budgetary processes and procurement programs. But, their ability to establish goals, communicate those goals, and convince people and motivate people to pursue those goals – to lead – is usually limited.

So, how did they get there?

There are a lot of elements to it, which include issues such as political appointment, quotas and the like, but all of that is window-dressing for the real reason. The fact is, it is the nature of government to select ineffective, even mediocre people. In effect, they were chosen because they ‘look better than they are.’

Now, this is not to say that these people don’t ‘look good;’ they do. They have impressive resumes, they speak well, they are well educated. But they are thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people in this country with impressive resumes. Why then do the same people keep turning up in Washington? Because that is what governments do.

Several hundred years ago an English philosopher – Thomas Hobbes – wrote a treatise on government titled “Leviathan.” It is a difficult book to read, but in it Hobbes identified the process that drives the behavior of governments (and any other large organization that has outlived its founders and settled into a condition of simple existence.) At its heart, governments – all governments – claim to do one thing: improve the life of their citizens. But for those who work within the government organism – the Leviathan – the government does in fact improve their lives, and usually more than the nominal improvement it provides to all other citizens.

More to the point, the Leviathan awards those who help the Leviathan; the more you help it, the more you benefit. The more you make government strong and secure, the more the government rewards you by promoting you, giving you more authority.

How then does this apply to people of perceived competence but de facto incompetence? Government must, in order to keep the general population quiescent, at least appear to be trying to make things better. Little real progress is necessary as long as everyone appears to be working diligently. However, at the same time, government bureaucracies recognize that their continued survival is dependent on maintaining the status quo. Dramatic changes can mean not simply that one agency receives more money, but that another loses money. The gaining agency gains more money and more power and thereby threatens other agencies. Accordingly, government agencies continually struggle for more money and authority, but with that struggling, few gain, and none lose, status quo is maintained, and the system grinds on; all at the expense of the taxpayer.

What happens if a truly capable figure takes charge of one agency? Very simply, the apple cart is upset. Agency X receives more money, more authorities, and others suffer. Power shifts. And power shifts – real change - are feared by the bureaucracies. In those cases where the government takes power from the populace, it will usually distribute it widely throughout the various bureaucracies, minimizing the amount of change within any one agency, which ensures the least infighting, and also making it that much more difficult for the power to be recovered by the people at some later date.

This has been seen in the US government over the past few years with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Some departments lost some authorities – and budget – and then further rules and regulations resulted in tighter controls over elements of DHS, the result being that DHS was less effective then initially planned and the budgets of the other agencies recovered, compensating for the “losses” to DHS. The same is true of the Director of National Intelligence, who was charged with ‘integrating’ the various elements of intelligence throughout the various departments, then was not given the real authorities to do so; more money is spent, more positions of ‘great responsibility’ are created, but no real authority was given to these new offices and the problems which motivated the creation of the office remain with little substantive change.

An excellent example of how government responds to cries for change is the Department of Energy (DOE). Created during the Carter administration, the DOE was founded to develop a comprehensive national energy policy that would break our dependence on foreign oil and lead us to a robust but sustainable energy infrastructure.

In more than 30 years since its creation it has yet to produce a comprehensive national energy policy, the DOE has enacted more constricting regulations on US energy companies, while US dependence on foreign oil has increased from 6.6 million barrels per day in 1977 to more than 10 million barrels per day today, US refining capacity has nearly stagnated and the US oil industry continues to age, non-carbon power generation (such as nuclear power) has nearly frozen in place, and the DOE budget continues to grow. To those who will point out that the DOE now must manage the US nuclear weapon arsenal, it is worth pointing out that the US nuclear arsenal has shrunk in size from well more than 20,000 to less than 5000, while spending has continued to increase and there are growing concerns about reliability. In short, the taxpayer has spent a great deal of money, “brilliant” people have moved in an out of the department, and very little that it was tasked to do has been accomplished in more than 30 years.

So, to return to our original question: Why do government organizations routinely, frequently pick mediocre leaders? The answer is an essential element of Hobbes’ political model: figures in leadership positions are chosen for a number of criteria, but the two most important are nominal experience, and ‘pragmatism,’ which in bureaucratic terms means precisely that he or she is willing to negotiate away any position. In short, they must be committed to preserving the organizations, and not be – in fact – committed to change. This doesn’t prevent changing and reorganizing to beat the band, as long as real change doesn’t take place. And that is why you can look at certain agencies in the government that go through regular and frequent reorganizations, yet the ‘folks in the trenches’ (the ones who do the real work), remain doing the same thing, often at the very same desk, though their titles may have changed and they have new bosses. Every appearance of change is provided, but there is little to no meaningful change.

Real leaders recognize certain truths about leadership. The most important is that leadership is about taking an organization ‘someplace,’ about having meaningful goals. At the same time, accomplished leaders understand that every organization must be focused to move forward. Having more than two or three goals translate quickly into having dozens of goals and then no goals. Effective leaders choose to focus on the two or three goals they wish to achieve; lesser leaders believe they can achieve many goals; and in believing so they invariably fail, and the organization remains fundamentally unchanged.

And that’s why they were chosen in the first place.