Over the past few days, I have sat back and listened to my friends and the media opine about the causes and the remedy of the tragedy that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct. All agree that it was tragic, unnecessary, wasteful. I, personally, was shocked by the response of some who, while the events were still unfolding, were willing to judge others, or leverage this tragedy to emphasize a point, especially one which I have heard them advocate frequently. In effect saying, “See, this is why we need ______” where the blank was filled in with various solutions. Gun control, better mental health treatment, armed guards in schools, metal detectors, and on and on and on. Even more disturbing to me were the people on the right and left who were so quick to say that they hoped or wished that peoples hearts and minds should be equally moved to empathize with ____, where the blank might be filled with any cause for people to die needlessly, abortion, foreign wars perpetrated by our government, curable illness, etc. I felt that this was incredibly insensitive, and was shocked at how little empathy these people showed for the victims and their families. I didn’t particularly care for your causes before, and now I could care even less, because you would use one tragedy to attempt to build a case for me to care about a different one. Even worse are those who claim that this tragedy is somehow a judgment for some sin, or claimed wrong that our society has perpetrated or permitted – whether that be gay marriage or violence in media and games or removing prayer from schools. Bunk and Hogwash. Continue reading
Do We Need Term Limits?
One of the topics that has been actively debated on both sides for generations is term limits for public offices.
So I have some questions that relate to this topic:
1) Is holding political office really something that should be considered a career?
2) Are the skills that help someone get elected really indicative of or even related to the skills that will make someone effective in public office?
3) Does it matter by the office? Is our answer different for legislators, executives, administrators or bureaucrats?
4) Does it matter if I limit the term in one office, if there are other offices that a man can be elected to? Continue reading
Liberal and Conservative
Political parties and politicians like to paint themselves with broad brushes. This is probably so that they can appeal to the broadest segments of the population, especially those who are not motivated enough to dig in and understand the finer points of a candidates belief system, or platform – identifying as a liberal or a conservative is one way to signal to potential voters.
But I am aware that fewer and fewer voters and perhaps politicians understand or can articulate what it means to be liberal, or conservative or, in fact, WHY they favor one over the other. Continue reading
On Parity
As we approach the November presidential election, I see a greater number of facebook posts from young friends decrying the economic disparity between the wealthy and the poor. So I want to bring the counterargument saying that parity as a goal, has issues too.
I find it most amusing, that most conservatives will claim to believe in a God of justice and love, but also believe that economically, Darwin was right – it is a game of the survival of the fittest. I find it equally ludicrous that most liberals who disavow any religion or God think that the best economic system is one of “enforced parity”, that some outside force should limit how rich the rich should get. This amuses me mostly, because those who believe that Darwin was right, should also be “OK” with opportunistic economic systems in which the poor are crushed, and the wealthy increase without bound, while those who believe in a God of justice and love should find such an opportunistic system distasteful or simply unacceptable. Continue reading
Parenting and Family
It’s Mother’s Day. I am sitting on my screened porch listening to my seventeen year old son play the guitar. My wife is preparing for a final exam in a subject she doesn’t like, so that she can get a certificate that might help her get a job to help our son pay for college.
My wife has been a “stay-at-home” mom for all of our son’s life. Not to say she didn’t work outside the home, we simply arranged our schedules and finances so that we did not need others to help raise our child.
We have known since he was born that he would go to college. We probably could have done more to save money. We could have a 529 plan, or a simple savings or investment account or educational IRA. But we chose to plan to pay for college this way, because we did. Part of the issue is simply that the cost of college education has risen faster than the cost of living every year since I graduated in 1985. Part of the issue, is that we had to choose between private school education, having mom at home, having me work without regular travel, having vacations, having a reasonable retirement savings, and this is what we chose. Like most American families, we can’t afford to have it all. We have to choose. Continue reading
Definition of Marriage
Recently, the Barack Obama became the first sitting POTUS to endorse same sex “marriage”. Let me walk into the zone of controversy by stating my own personal moral convictions. I fully expect that anyone who reads this will be ticked off by something I say here.
First of all:
1) Homosexual intercourse is sin.
and lest you think that I am just opposed to homosexuality – let me share the rest of my list.
2) Fornication is sin. For those of you without a clue, this is sex outside of a marriage relationship.
3) Adultery (having sex with someone who is married to someone else, or conversely, having sex with someone who is not the one you are married to) is sin.
4) Masturbation is sin.
5) Lustful thinking is sin. Thinking about sex with someone other than your spouse is sin. (that makes the entire industry of pornography a sin)
This doesn’t prevent me from having friends who do these things. This doesn’t prevent me from caring about and for people who do these things. This doesn’t cause me to judge or condemn people for doing these things. Why, because at some point in my life, I, myself have done many of these things. I, like every other human currently on this planet, am a sinner. Continue reading
Hear me out or shut them up?
Having been off over the holidays, I spent some time taking vehicles to get serviced. One of these was at a new car dealer. While I don’t often take cars to the dealer for repair or maintenance, I did this time.
While the appointment was successful, as I left, the service consultant asked me to mark “tens” on the customer satisfaction survey. Then when I arrived home, I got an e-mail from the service department, asking for the same thing. This is not the first time, I have been asked to “bias” the results of a customer satisfaction survey – The same dealer asked the same thing when I purchased the car – related to the sales experience survey.
Over the last few years, many organizations have taken to trying to agressively measure customer satisfaction through surveys like this. Time and time again, I have been asked to “bias” the results. Continue reading
Government as Employer
The US federal government directly employs about two million workers, not including military personnel or the postal service. I think government workers get a bad rap. The phrase “good enough for government work” hints at an attitude that the government employees do not do a very good job. We continuously make fun of municipal maintenance workers “One guy in the hole and four leaning on a shovel”, and other things. I’m from Chicago, and we constantly hear about “patronage” jobs and “ghost payrollers”. I’m not suggesting that there are not abuses in the system, just that we can’t infer anything about government employees from the few examples that make it into the press.
I think that one thing that many people begrudge government employees are their benefits. In an age when few if any workers in the private sector have defined benefit pensions (no employee contributions), our federal government workers, for the most part, have this benefit, and are allowed to “double-dip” meaning that they can collect multiple pensions from different government services. In the private sector, no one would complain about this, because we the tax payers are not paying for it. The healthcare benefits afforded to government employees are much better than most of us have.
In my experience, most government workers are diligent, competent, dedicated, hard-working individuals who see their job as making a difference. My question is not about the value or quality of individual workers, but is the government employment policy.
I think if you took a survey of people who are not government workers that would question:
- Job Security – is it possible or practical for the government to fire workers for non-performance?
- Benefits – does the government provide benefits beyond what is typical in the private sector?
- Political Hiring – how many employees are hired because of political connections in addition to or in spite of job qualifications?
- Workplace efficiency – since there is no profit motive, what mission or objective does the government use to measure its efficiency?
- Accountability – since this is all paid for by tax dollars, and the only accountability we have is through elected officials, how can we the people, assess whether the elected officials have instantiated the correct leadership and operating processes?
We all have these questions. I expect that there is a tremendous amount of diversity in the answers to these questions across the various government agencies and operational units.
The US government is so big, and has so many parts, and is engaged in so many activities, that we, for the most part, are not able or willing to spend the time and mental energy to figure it out. How in hell, can our government employ so darned many people – what can they possibly be doing and why?
I frame the question as follows:
How many of the activities that the government is in are activities that can only be done by the government?
Of the activities that could be done in the private sector, does government involvement add any value? Does it add cost? Why are we paying the cost?
Without getting into the economics of monetary theory and defecit spending. The two questions that I continuously ask are does the government have a clear mission for each of the activities that it is engaged in, and where is the accountability for that mission?
My miniscule example is as follows: A few years back, I moved into an unincorporated area. Since I didn’t have a local municipality to arrange waste removal service, I had to contract with a service individually. I was concerned that I would have to pay much more than I did when my former municipality contracted for the same service, and billed me directly. In fact, the price was within a couple dollars either way. Perhaps competition was at work – there are at least three waste removers that service my area, and their price and level of service varies by about 20%. Obviously, the former municipality had to perform a billing service, and had to pay the service provider, so some staff was necessary to arrange this. What the government did was negotiate for me, but give the service provider a monopoly. Before I moved, I had never really thought about why the local municipality contracted for waste removal service. There is no bespoke infrastructure – water or sewer pipes. Why waste and not phones or cable or gas or electric utilities? What is the difference?
There is nothing that indicates that only government can provide waste removal service, so why do they? Interestingly enough, they do not provide the same service for commercial enterprise – they must contract independently.
Immigration Policy
So everyone knows that the US has a goofy immigration policy. For centuries, people have been coming here from other parts of the world, because we have stood as an emblem of opportunity. People have said to themselves, “If I can get to America, I have a better chance of __________” – fill in the blank.
The slogan of the statue of liberty says “Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses…” America has always welcomed immigrants with open arms, recognizing that most of its residents came from once immigrant families. My own grandfather immigrated from Norway at the end of the 19th century, my mom’s sister has traced their mother’s lineage back to a German immigrant named George Rausch who came before the revolutionary war.
With the exception of the First American population, all of us are the descendants of immigrants, and if you go back far enough, the First Americans immigrated from Asia – so none of us are really “natives”. Continue reading
Justifying The Means
It would be ideal if we could achieve all of our goals without participating in, or sponsoring ethically questionable actions. It would be ideal if we did not ever need to make choices trading one bad outcome for a lesser bad outcome. It is this ethical gray area that conspiracy theorists love. How do we justify doing something that is unethical, to avoid a bad outcome or “to ensure a greater good”.
Recently we heard about an Iranian nuclear scientist who was assassinated. We don’t know by whom – it is likely that it was a US or Israeli governments intelligence community covert operation. Both the US and Israel have national interest at stake in keeping Iran from exerting greater influence in the middle east region, and Iran’s influence is clearly on the rise.
Governments and rulers of nations have been engaged in doing some bad things to ensure the “greater good” for as long as their have been governments and rulers. And it is not just political assassination, but it is taxation, it is putting down protest, it is causing harm to its own citizens, it is engaging in foreign war or other covert military operations. Sometimes it is causing bad things to happen to the citizens of another nation to apply pressure to their government and rulers. This, effectively is how economic sanctions work. The idea is that you take people who are already under an oppressive regime, and you give them a reason for rebellion and revolt, by taking away the little that they already have. Continue reading