Lies make a politician more "authentic"

 GEORGE TEMPLETON 

        COMMENTARY       

By George Templeton

Gazette Blog Columnist

Together Again

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately." – Benjamin Franklin            

Taking Chances

Sometimes things just happen that way.  It’s like the flip of a coin.  We have to make a choice without the facts.  When things work out well we take credit, even though the outcome is coincidental.  When we do poorly, we fix the blame, even though our choice was arbitrary.   When we don’t know the truth, we claim the opposite of what our antagonist is saying.  Lies make a politician more “authentic”.  They are a protest that is less mind-numbing than the facts.  We don’t choose outcomes.  We select policies that speak for us.  The winner becomes the person who initially set the rules, but that isn’t “the will of the American people”.

It was President Theodore Roosevelt who said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick”.  Can you hear what our government is not saying? 

A Guadalajara Sunday Morning

Homeowners swept the street in front of their home with a whisk broom.  Our factory was full of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of automation.  But there were parts of Mexico where the streets were cobblestone and filled with potholes.  Beggars with baby in knapsack looked hungrily through the window as we consumed our evening meal.  But in our clean-room factory, workers wore spacesuits.

It was one of the greatest achievements of mankind.  Many of its “secrets” are common to all semiconductor physics.  American schools educated their PHDs.  If they did not know it now, they would learn it in a few years.  It was that way, because of economies of scale.  Things that seem the same can have deep manufacturing differences, such as double-sided vertical instead of horizontal construction, and high power instead of shrunk size.  That renders them incompatible with the modernity that stays in America.

In Phoenix, our product sat waiting shipment to customers.  An American flag and the words, “Made in-America” covered our shipping containers.  But these products were diffused, assembled, tested, and marked in Mexico.  They used wafers manufactured in multi-billion dollar factories located in Japan or Germany.  They received only an overnight bake in an oven in Phoenix, but this obeyed regulations.

You can hire as many as thirty foreign workers for the price of one American.  But when America has overseas factories, we profit from the same low operating costs that foreign countries could ultimately use to compete with us.  It keeps it American.  It grows goodwill and their middle class.

When America Changed

The outsourcing of jobs began helter-skelter in the mid 70’s, but no one paid much attention.  We want access to huge developing markets.  Ownership and control are important.  But business did not take care of America’s workers.  It thought that cheaper prices for consumers would be enough.  It forgot about mergers, takeovers, acquisitions, automation, unions declining, and extravagant pension promises that could not be kept.  Government did not take care of America’s students.  It forgot about vocational education, participation with industry, and student loans.  The despicable forgot about apprenticeships, retraining, and investment.  They thought that Social Security was their bank account.  They wanted freedom from responsibility for themselves, to their fellow man, and to the world.  They bit the hand that fed them.

Healthy Capitalism

Wouldn’t it be great if workers shared in the ownership of the companies they worked for?  Economist Craig Richardson recorded images of Zimbabwe before and after the Robert Mugabe’s land grab.  Within four years, communal properties had visibly declined in comparison to private properties.  When people own, they care.  But they don’t know enough to run the show without management.  Modern high-technology companies realize that this is not 1955.  It’s called “Participative Management” and “Profit Sharing”.

Cynical capitalists used Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” to justify their immense salaries and the poverty of their poor and obscure employees.  But Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act would require large companies to become responsible for their workers in addition to their stockholders.  Workers should get their fair share, but they are also responsible for their future.  “Corporations are people too”.  Was this the intent of the Founding Fathers?

Most of us march to the beat of a different drummer.  If we could plot a distribution we would get a bell curve.  Mathematicians know that this is because human nature is imperfectly aiming at a target.  It is a consequence of our collective situation and the fact that we overlap with each other.  But Leviathan in politics skews the curve in an abnormal way.  It is about power, us versus them, winning, and not people.

Ned Cross not Red Cross

Both were humanitarians.  Ned owned a famous bar near Falcon Field in Mesa during the WWII area.    The Red Cross did not take sides during the war.  They treated the wounded from either side.  To do otherwise, would confound their mission.  Does America have a calling?  Is it “no more nice guy”?  The world needs an accepted leader.  Countries like China, India, and Brazil are too focused on themselves to become economic leaders.  Should we cancel foreign aid as conservatives have long argued for?  Don’t we benefit when we help others?  The more we learn to understand each other the more we value others and ourselves.

Words More than the Deed

There are those who prefer the simplicity of a dictator to an independent administration with resources, authority, and the ability to do the job. 

 Trump threatened to punish countries doing business with Iran because that reduces the effect of our sanctions.  They will never again do business with the United States!  They must pay a price for not buying our stuff!  Forget about rewards for being a good customer!  It misses the point, when everything is reduced to a matter of economics, and when people and countries are just a means to an end, coerced to do our bidding.  The proud, infatuated with their power, chastise.  It’s quick and easy, but punishment is soon forgotten.

Positive reinforcement changes long-term behavior.  The great French mathematician Henri Poincare expressed that when he wrote that he, “… does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it.”  Business embraced this when they changed their employee review sheet from, “List everything that is wrong with the employee” to instead discuss goals that were quantifiable and agreeable.  This gave a badly needed focus to the chaos of the workplace.  It will do the same for diplomacy.

Progress may seem like destroying the Government Leviathan, but it should not mean that the previous vanishes.  There are flaws in every large bureaucratic organization.  Fractured groups are easily scattered.  Humpty Dumpty sat on Trump’s wall.  Those with no regard for stability caused his fall.  Once splattered, he could not be put together again.

The Physics of Finance

Facts exist because they are falsifiable, but have never been, even once.  For example, there is a relationship between power and energy, held together by time.   But physics gets in the way of psycho kinetics, the human aura, and the soul.  The law of supply and demand is different.  Its variables are never “realized”.  There are many of them and they interact, making seeing difficult if not impossible.  The market place is like a balloon, pushed in at one spot it bulges out in another.  There are unforeseen unpleasant consequences for tariffs and meddling with the free market.

Economic Instability

Ninety percent of the world’s countries undergo violent regime change a couple of times per generation and they are poor.  The most prosperous ten percent have a median time of sixty years.  The United States is the world’s longest lasting regime, lasting from 1789 and it is rich.  Stability means prosperity.

Political institutions are by far the strongest variable in determining a country’s success.  They include customs and rules and determine motivation.  A universal policy requires a common electorate, but globally there is none.  Fascists, who are least economically entangled, uproot legal and democratic traditions and replace them with their own self-interest.  They do not minister to group needs.

Cutting taxes is a good way to combat economic downturns, but America has become a borrower nation and debts must be repaid.  High taxes (for everyone) raise prices, add to the cost of living, and discourage production.  Low taxes reduce prices and give us peace of mind.  But what is it that we are not investing in?

Republican Prudence

The myth of Reagan’s tax cut, the Economic Recovery Act of 1981, stands in the light of the seventies gas lines and twenty-one percent interest rates.  Its benefits particularly helped the wealthy.  The economy recovered, except for a recession in 1981 – 1982.  A mountain of debt resulted in the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, the Highway Revenue Act of 1982, the payroll tax Social Security deal of 1983, the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986.  We changed from a society that saved to a credit card consumption driven economy.

The Treasury Department estimates that our government will need to borrow $769 billion for the second half of 2018.  It is the highest borrowing estimate since the $1.1 trillion in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis and it projects a 25% increase over the annual deficit in 2017.  The Trump Administration claims that economic growth, stemming from tax cuts, will easily exceed the difference.  Besides our Air Force, he would create a “Space Force” and we would go to Mars.  To further stimulate the economy, Republicans are thinking about making the tax cuts “permanent”.  They would like to reduce capital gains taxes by calculating them from an inflation compounded value.  To increase “stability”, big business would be allowed to abandon the traditional quarterly report for a semi-annual one.

Sovereignty in Conflict

Many Americans believe that big government is a greater threat than terrorism.  The irony is that those same people turn to government when threatened.  In 1802 Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”  But our Federal Reserve System is charged with reducing the frequency and severity of recessions.  It is supposed to be independent of politics.  Trump has indicated that he wants to keep interest rates low to stimulate the economy, but that risks inflation.

The Age of Instability

Domestic politics always trumps international cooperation.  Economics has become political instead of scientific.  The big issues:  our environment, free trade, and terrorism can be solved by no single nation.  When more countries participate, there are economies of scale, but a single hold-out can stop progress.

Nationalism promotes instability, but they say that if you want it done right, you should do it yourself.  The problem is that fast, good, and cheap are mutually exclusive.

Economics is all about “what if”.  Its math suggests that we cannot fail.  A series of events, each improbable, are even less likely.  But this incorrectly assumes that events are independent.  It ignores human nature.