Mike Myer writes at the Wheeling Intelligencer:
Very few Americans really care much what happens to a coal miner’s family in West Virginia or Ohio. Hey, the government will take care of them if they lose their jobs, right?
But what about household electric bills skyrocketing in Minnesota and Michigan? What happens when a New Jersey or South Carolina plant closes after its employees are informed management can’t pay the power bill?
And you are OK with that? Anything is OK if you can get away with it? The only evil is getting caught? Rob a gas station, murder an innocent, bankrupt and enslave a nation, genocide? Do you have any line you won’t cross if you think you can get away with it?
PolySci 101: How to make bad decisions [and get away with it]
All political decisions are bad because they require non participants to make non-voluntary payments and to live with the consequences without choice. They are doubly bad because all political decisions are based upon the notion there are no principles that cannot be compromised, traded away, or ignored to make the sacred *decision*. No matter what the decision, nothing but short term, range of the moment, out of context, good can come of them.
“I see. You insist there is no such thing as a “bad” political decision.”
You catagorize ALL political decisions as bad. That is preposterous.
I see. You insist there is no such thing as a “bad” political decision. It all depends upon what “is” is and who is who. The whim and deal of the moment rules the universe! In any event, the invisible, unintended, and collateral consequences can always be blamed on the victims. Especially if they are dead as a consequence of the *sacred* decision.
The reality that the information to make the top down command and control decision is either nonexistent, incomplete, inaccurate, misinterpreted, distorted or not timely is irrelevant to you. The fact that to reach a specific goal you must enact the specific means to reach that goal is not a consideration. That knowing the specific means requires a massive amount of correct and timely information does not even rise to the level of your awareness.
Any old decision will do as long as you have enough boots on enough necks, enough knives at enough throats, enough guns to enough heads, and enough whips to enough backs. The decision will be implemented as stated or you will take names and kick butts. The important thing for you is that the decision is made. It is for everyone else to make it happen and pay for the doing of it.
Sorry, I don’t call that working and the decision that brought it about is anything but a good one.
Politicians make political decisions. Characterizing them as “bad” is fallacious.
Only if you ignore the unseen, the unintended, and the long run effects on all the people involved. There is always a steep price to pay when you attempt to fake reality. As time progresses, the price continues to rise. Remember the old saying: “Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive.” It is very real and still in operation. Its worst effects are invisible and pervasive.
Was loaning Solyndra a bad decision? Of course not. Obama’s friends got vast amounts of cash. Rewarded for supporting his presidential campaign. Obama will always have rich friends, because he got lots of them millions of dollars each. The “Stimulus Bill” was just a giant slush fund. Bad idea/bad decision? Depends on who you ask.
I see. I made you uncomfortable. The truth has a way of doing that.
Perhaps you should engage in a bit more discovery before you decide to label my words as a salad.
Word salad.
No. Even the so called good decisions are necessary bad for the reasons stated. They can’t even reach their own goals consistent with their own standards – such as they are. Even their corrective actions will be unerringly wrong and fail to achieve their desired goal.
At ANY level of management, if the manager believes his job is to make decisions, he has no job to perform. He is only play acting. What ever the goal, it depends upon enacting the causes that will attain that goal. Knowing what those actions are takes a massive amount of discovery and absolutely no measure of decision. To think otherwise means to assume there is a universal cause that can reach any desired end no matter what. There is no such critter.
Without the requisite discovery in place, the decisions are nothing but guesses. Since there are vastly more ways to be wrong than right, the overwhelming majority of decisions will be wrong in one or more ways. By relying on guesses, the effort will eventually fail by any starting standard you set. This is an inescapable fact of reality.
Without applying the requisite intelligence, entropy will always win. Wait long enough, entropy will win anyway. Fortunately, that time is many billions of years away. Meanwhile, men can think, choose, act, and achieve their goals IF they are individually free to perform and rely upon the requisite discovery. There is no column B to choose from.
I was going to observe that government evolved into human groups and has persisted over time. But Robert B Bregman made an even better comment.
“Central control decision makers can only make bad decisions.”
False. Their decisions are usually good. It’s just their goals are different. Nancy Pelosi keeps getting re-elected; she is achieving her goal. Obviously, her decisions are excellent.
You sound like the village idiot, ranting ad raving. Give us and yourself a break. Stop talking nonsense.
Central control decision makers can only make bad decisions. Good decisions can be made only when the correct information is available in sufficient detail and precision. It must be available in time to do something about it. In which case no decision is necessary because the correct action is obvious. Let one detail be late, overlooked, or misinterpreted, the obvious action will not be the correct action. It will be suboptimal.
As time progresses, the system becomes still more suboptimal. This is largely due to the fact it takes time to execute the presumed obvious action and for it to have its effect. By that time, circumstances have changed to make the action even more suboptimal even if the action taken was accidentally correct to begin with.
It takes time to acquire the corrected information and to analyze it for lessons learned. During that time circumstances will have changed even more making the new information less adequate. It is by this cycle that top down centralized control ALWAYS fails to achieve its goals even by its own standards. It is because the correct information is not available. If the correct information is available, it is too late to do any good. The correct corrective action equally depends upon having the correct information available in time to do something about it. The errors accumulate until the system collapses.
Unfortunately, every system of governance so far invented by man is based upon the principle that centralized control can work and, when it doesn’t, you can use enough boots, whips, knives, or guns to MAKE it work. It has never worked, it is not working, and it can never work.
A way out of this mess:
Given a clearly specified urgent and not yet solved objective and adequate time and resources to reach it:
One person can accomplish the work of four.
Two people can accomplish the work of three.
Three people can accomplish the work of two.
Four people can accomplish the work of one.
Beyond four people, it becomes a Tower of Babel and the useful work done decays faster than exponentially as the number of bodies doing the work increases. The information necessary to get the work done simply cannot be generated and distributed well enough and timely enough to get the job done. The wrong things will almost always be done at the wrong time and in the wrong way. To call the final result “suboptimal” is like calling a dripping faucet a good representation of Niagara Falls.
There is more but this is enough for now.
Howdy Lionel
The Founders had in mind a government in which very few things were government business.
Even among people who wish to cooperate and are diligent, there’s a need for some shared resources like roads , for some established expectations like environmental standards, and for an orderly process to ensure fair compliance with contracts. Among the people we actually have on the planet, there’s also a need for shared action on national defense and public safety.
As a libertarian, that’s about as far as I care to go. There are many moral decisions that belong to individuals: adultery, religious worship, viewing pornography, using alcohol, giving to charity, when a daughter or son is due in on date night, how to speak of those who believe differently.
A limited government accomplishes less, but the society will almost always accomplish more. A limited government has appropriate authority in those spheres which are truly public and no other authority. That means it won’t screw up the economy or rob us of our liberties and opportunities.
This goes to the heart of an interdependent economy. Actions in one area influence others for better, for worse, sometimes both. Central control intensifies the failures of bad decisions but rarely amplifies good ones; how many Five Year Plans have socialist nations gone through?
That is what government does. It promises to solve a problem by creating still more problems to solve by doing more of the same. From its perspective, it is a perpetual motion machine efficiently producing more problems to solve. Unfortunately, they neglect to notice they are totally plugged into We the People and are consuming us as they “solve” each problem they have created. It is the broken window fallacy gone wild. The cost of things unseen or evaded is deadly to living beings. Especially to We the People.
Tell me again why we need government. Especially the kind of government we have much too much of.
Maybe the bigger plan is for government to create problems that put it at the center of all things. The more “problems”, the more the perceived need for government and the more the government is perceived as a solution and not – the problem.
The plan is to redistribute America’s wealth to the Third World. Putting Americans out of work and putting the Third World to work accomplishes this goal. Unfortunately, as with everything of the Left the unintended consequences are never looked into. Americans are considered collateral damage since in their minds we have been using the rest of the world. Once we don’t have jobs we can no longer keep buying stuff and so the global economy collapses. We then can all be equally poor. Cheap energy is what has brought this country and the world prosperity.