Play Nice

"Treat people kindly but ideas harshly."

In a recent article by Sandy Ikeda on The Freeman web site, he addresses Friedrich Hayek’s approach in opposing socialism in the book Road to Serfdom.  Ikeda points out that by dedicating his book "To the Socialists of All Parties," Hayek was not mocking or assuming his intellectual opponents "were stupid or evil," but that they were "ignorant and mistaken" and there were "things that they didn't know."  In other words, Hayek assumed that his opponents were well-meaning, but misinformed.  He saw it as his job to teach them to think properly.

Ikeda brings this approach into focus for the current political environment:

"In a world of heated ideological differences and partisan political conflict, it’s tempting to paint our opponents as stupid and evil, as calculating opportunists. Again, often they are, and from their point of view often so are we. We need to get past that. We need to keep learning."

"Learning, though, means exposing yourself to ideas that you find strange, perhaps even repugnant at first. Even if we end up rejecting them, we will, having been able to correctly state the opposite case, have a better idea why we reject them. Learning through personal interactions requires dialogue, and genuine dialogue between grownups who disagree cannot begin with name-calling and smirking cynicism. No. Genuine dialogue means treating our ideological opponents as people of goodwill with the hope that they will treat us the same way. Only then can we learn and grow."

"As a young libertarian scholar recently summed it up, 'Treat people kindly but ideas harshly.' Exactly!"

I agree with this approach. I don't believe, however, that it requires compromise of your principles. I also believe that if it applies to your opponents, it should apply that much more to your friends.  The current Republican primary is a case in point.

In a primary, each candidate for nomination works very hard to depict themselves as the the best choice to represent the views of the voters in their party in the general election.  While each candidate is sure that they are the best choice, only one candidate will be nominated...no matter how many run for office.  Knowing this going into the process, I think all of a party's candidates should fight hard for nomination but also plan for what happens if they don't win.  Not being nominated, does not necessarily mean that a candidate has "lost."  They can still win support for their ideas and make a positive impact on the direction of the party and the country.  But, too often, this is not that happens.

"Learning, though, means exposing yourself to ideas that you find strange, perhaps even repugnant at first."

I don't think any of the current crop of Republican candidates are perfect and without fault.  I do, however, believe that any of them would be immeasurably better than Obama.  And, like him or dislike him, Newt Gingrich had the right idea when he said that he would not attack his fellow Republicans because the real opponent was Barack Obama.

What I am seeing now, as the primary season grows shorter, is the knives coming out between  Republicans while the Democrats sit back and laugh.  The Republican Party encompasses a range of people from the  establishment to the libertarian...personified in this election cycle in Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, with everyone else somewhere in between.  And somewhere in between is where I stand, though I'm much closer to the libertarian end of the scale than the establishment end.  The supporters of establishment end call Ron Paul fringe and crazy when it comes to foreign policy.  The libertarians say that Mitt Romney is bought and paid for shill of the big banks.  Libertarians say they can't support the Establishment candidates...Establishment begs the libertarians not to go third party.  None of it is helpful...it only serves to tear down...not build up.

Neither side should compromise their convictions, but, they should plan for what happens next.  If Ron Paul wins, how do the other candidates have an influence to temper what they see as isolationist foreign policy?  How do they keep their supporters from sitting out the election and handing Obama a second term?

If Mitt Romney wins, how do the libertarians make sure that their ideas of limited government and non-interventionism continue to be heard.  How do they keep their supporters from going to a third party and, once again, handing Obama the win?

First, all of the name calling and muck-raking has to stop among Republican supporters.  Then, they need to deal honestly and openly with their ideas and issues.  Many in the party believe that Paul has great ideas when it comes to the fiscal operations of government.  It is widely agreed that Romney brings real-world business experience and understanding to the table.  Gingrich has a good grasp of government's historical role.  Perry and Huntsman have good executive experience  as governors of States that are doing comparability well.  Santorum and Bachman have track records of tirelessly working for conservative principles in Congress.  While no candidate is perfect for every voter in the party, they all have their strong points.

We must then find our common ground and stand united.  There will plenty of time to continue the discussion after Obama is defeated...

Each candidate should strongly promote their views and say why they may disagree with the views of their fellow candidates.  But, lets all look to the good of the country and plan for what happens next...once one candidate is chosen.  We must then find our common ground and stand united.  There will plenty of time to continue the discussion after Obama is defeated...if we have not made enemies out of each other in the process.

For the good of our republic...for the future of our children...let's play nice with each other and defeat the failed ideas and policies of the Left.

Serfdom? ... Or Worse?

This video by Stefan Molyneaux of Freedomain Radio puts our national debt and the oligarchical Federal Government in grim focus.  It asks the important question, "Where is your government going to get the money to pay off its creditors?"  The answer is chilling..."Governments have only one asset that they can use as collateral. Your leaders are selling you."



For text of video, CLICK HERE.

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Once again, Andrew Klavan has hit the nail on the head.  In this short animated video, he shows that both the Wall Street Occupiers and the Wall Street Crony Capitalists want, in effect, the same thing...taxpayers' money.   Both want the government to subsidize them, and for that subsidy, they will give all power to government...which is what the politicians want.  So, everybody's happy...right?  Well, everybody except the vast middle class, the honest entrepreneurs, those of us who pay the taxes.

Both are evil...both must be stopped.

Artificial Stars

Meet Aimi Eguchi, member of the popular Japanese band AKB 48. Cute girl, right? Well...cute, yes, but she's not a girl...not a real girl anyway.  In their Odd News section, the United Press International (UPI) reported that Aimi "was recently revealed to the public as computer generated."  That's right she is CGI (see Aimi on YouTube).

She is not the first "artificial star" in Japan, however.  Aimi "joins the company of Hatsune Miku, a pop singer who is actually a computer-generated cartoon with a realistic voice synthesized using Yamaha's Vocaloid program."  And, believe it or not, "Miku regularly sells out 'live' concerts featuring 3-D holographic images of the singer performing on stage."

 The closest thing we've seen to this in the past is lip-syncing groups (remember Milli Vanilli) or presidential politics.  And yes, it would not surprise me if in the not too distant future, that we get a CGI Presidential candidate.  It seems that this is what the voting public really wants.  As a whole we seem to want the perfect, artificial candidate...not real statesmen who have real convictions and ideas...along with real human flaws.  We want perfect hair, perfect soundbites and to be made to feel good about ourselves.  We have been building an image of the perfect candidate since the television era began.

This trend of image over substance began with the very first televised Presidential debate in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.  According to an article on the Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC) web site, "In August, Nixon had seriously injured his knee and spent two weeks in the hospital. By the time of the first debate he was still twenty pounds underweight, his pallor still poor. He arrived at the debate in an ill-fitting shirt, and refused make-up to improve his color and lighten his perpetual '5:00 o'clock shadow.' Kennedy, by contrast, had spent early September campaigning in California. He was tan and confident and well-rested. 'I had never seen him looking so fit,' Nixon later wrote."  But, what about the essence of the debate?  Once again, from the MBC article, "In substance, the candidates were much more evenly matched. Indeed, those who heard the first debate on the radio pronounced Nixon the winner. But the 70 million who watched television saw a candidate still sickly and obviously discomforted by Kennedy's smooth delivery and charisma. Those television viewers focused on what they saw, not what they heard. Studies of the audience indicated that, among television viewers, Kennedy was perceived the winner of the first debate by a very large margin."

This first debate has been studied and studied over the decades.  Everybody knows that you don't want to be like Nixon on a televised debate...you want to be like Kennedy...regardless of substance.  John F. Kennedy's image, though, was not only formed by the debate, but also through endless photo-ops, interviews and fawning magazine articles.  From the very beginning of his political career, the image of Camelot was carefully crafted step-by-step.  This also has been studied and emulated by politicians.

Today we know that almost everything about the Kennedy mystique was indeed mist...fog and mirrors, if you will.  The virile, athletic young man we saw in the "home videos" was actually nearly incapacitated a lot of the time from a back injury suffered during WWII.  He couldn't function without almost constant pain killers.  The loving family man turned out to be womanizing, serial adulterer.  And, the white knight from Camelot turned out to have tarnished armor through his association with organized crime figures.  But, he was pretty...not that Nixon turned out to be a gem himself.

Since that time, politics have become almost completely about image.  High powered image consultants, spin-meisters and media moguls are all employed to make sure a candidate's image is polished to a clean, shining luster.  In a culture that is more concerned with the latest celebrity divorce or rehab story...who know more about the plot of the hot "reality show" than the operation of their government...this is now the criteria on which we base the election to the most powerful office in the world.  Who looked best...who had the best comeback...who seemed the most concerned?

Images that can be so easily crafted, can just as easily be destroyed. There are hundreds of press vultures circling out there for a slip of the tongue, or an unsubstantiated accusation to swoop down and feed on the carcass of another dead or dying candidacy.  With the number of cameras focused on the candidates every day and the circus that is the presidential debates, candidates are almost assured to make a faux pas, a misstatement or just exhibit mental flatulence.  Let's be honest, after the hours and weeks and months on the campaign trail, the candidates get tired.  They have to keep an enormous amount of information on the tips of their tongues.  They are going to slip.  Rick Perry forgetting a department of government in the middle of a televised debate is no more an indication that he is stupid, than Barack Obama's statement that he was in 57 states during his campaign makes him a moron.  But...The vultures care little for reality...they only smell death.

This all unfortunately leaves the spin machines and media with a lot of power in picking our leaders. We don't take the time to really understand the issues. We don't really find out which candidates offer the best ideas. We just listen to the edited, 30-second sound-bites and judge their image. Barack Obama came to the office with no resume...with very questionable associations. In the prologue of his own book he wrote, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." He also says "my treatment of the issues is often partial and incomplete."  But he had an unbelievably adept media spin machine.  Once he got in office and began to show his real stripes, many voters found themselves with a bad case of "buyers remorse."

Where does this leave us?  The depth of statesmanship has given way to plastic veneers.  Ideas and values are supplanted by quips and comebacks.  We don't even know what government's role should be...and don't care, as long as we can still afford our $4 cup of coffee.  

Will we wake up?  Will we take control of our own destinies?  Or will we just continue to choose "artificial stars" to represent us?  Will we pick leaders in the future?  Or will it be...Max Headroom for President!

The Value of Higher Education

There was an excellent column in the Washington Examiner recently by Gene Harlan Reynolds that discusses the higher education"bubble" that has been building over the last few decades.  Just as with the housing bubble, college education has become "an overpriced good, propped up by cheap government-subsidized credit, luring borrowers and lenders alike into a potentially disastrous mess."

This is a subject I have been talking about for a long time.  With tuition increasing at more than two-and-a-half times the rate of inflation over the years (1), we have to ask ourselves when it will stop.  Additionally, we have to ask what it is we're paying for and if it's all worth it.  Especially when the real-world value of that education is dwindling, as reported in a NY Times article: "...a college degree is no longer the guarantor of a middle-class existence. Until the early 1970s, less than 11 percent of the adult population graduated from college, and most of them could get a decent job. Today nearly a third have college degrees, and a higher percentage of them graduated from nonelite schools. A bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability."

I have particular interest in this subject on two fronts...my own educational history, and the fact that I am now paying for my son to go through an engineering degree program, probably/hopefully culminating in a master's degree.

As for my own story, my parents had no money to send me to college. Neither of them were very well educated themselves. When my father graduated high school, it was the very intelligent, or privileged who ever got to go to college. At that time, with a high school diploma and some good skills, a person could do okay for themselves...maybe even some low to mid-level management position.

By the time I was in high school, the game had changed. You now needed some additional schooling to obtain the same kind of life-style. I tried college for a year, but changed my major 3 times in that year and was getting ready to change it again. I was also the one going into debt to finance the education. I could not justify growing the debt even more if I had no idea of what I was going to do, so I dropped out. About a year latter, I enrolled in a two-year electronic technology program at a local technical school...which I completed. I also took additional college-level courses over the years, but never did get a bachelor's degree.

One of the things I really appreciated about my tech school program was that there were no "useless filler" classes, as I referred to them. I was there to learn electronic technology, and that's all we studied, along with applicable mathematics. There were no history, or psychology classes...no basket weaving or art appreciation...just technology. Now, don't get me wrong, I think a person needs to know how to communicate well to succeed in business. That is why I took two writing classes in my first year at college and a technical writing class later at another college. But this really should be taught in high school, if you ask me.

With my measly little tech school diploma, I have traveled to Europe where I sat in a room of master's degree and PhD  engineers and gave them advice on how to design their product...which they had  largely followed when I checked back a year later.  I have been a regional engineering manager for a large telecommunications company.  And, I currently work in a position where many of my peers have bachelor and master's degrees in engineering...and by all accounts, I'm doing well without such degrees.

What I have found over the years is that a degree does not impart intelligence or ability.  Would Bill Gates or Michael Dell be even more successful if they had just stayed in college instead of starting their businesses?  I doubt it.  Yes, there are good reasons for education to train you for a chosen field...yes, good language skills are essential, but, are all the extra classes that are packed into a degree program in the name of a "well rounded" education...the useless fillers...necessary, or even useful?  

My lack of a degree has not undermined my abilities, though it has restricted my opportunities.  And that is the question, should a lack of a piece of paper stating that I completed a course of study be the major requirement for success and promotion?  It wasn't a diploma that made the Scarecrow smart, just as Reynolds points out that because "professional basketball players have expensive sneakers...it's not the shoes that make them good at dunking."  And a degree, "on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability."  If we're honest with ourselves, it never really did.

Now, with a kid of my own in college, I am living the pain of years of  educational hyper-inflation.  We are happy to be able to provide him with an opportunity that I was never given,  to get his engineering degree.  He has worked hard all throughout his schooling.  He is very intelligent and a great student...better than his old man ever was.  But, I'm glad I only have one child to put through college.

Many families are not fortunate enough to be able to provide for their child's college as we have. What this means is that more and more students are forced to begin their working life with huge education debts, and less prospects for good paying jobs. And, just as with the housing bubble, more and more of these students are defaulting on their debt.

I have advocated for rethinking our higher-education system in this country for years.  But now, I think, we are soon to be forced into such a reevaluation.  Colleges and universities are going to have to curb their spending and control their costs.  No longer can they continue to build huge, elaborate monuments to their magnificence.  A little more practicality in their building designs will be required, if any expansion is needed at all.  They also cannot continue to subsidize programs with little or no real-world applications and very few students.  Any course who's title ends in "Studies" needs to be seriously assessed...and probably most eliminated.

Not only do the institutions of higher learning need to be questioned, but businesses also have an important role to play.  If corporate America did not place such a high, artificial premium on the degrees designed by academia, colleges and universities could not charge such an artificially high price for their product.  The business community needs to reevaluate their requirements for employment and promotion.  What education is truly needed for an employee to perform their job?  As I have seen in technology companies, most jobs, unless they are high-level design or theoretical positions, do not really require four or six year degrees.  And, an MBA certainly should not be a prerequisite for positions in management...don't even get me started on that.

The final part of the puzzle is us...families with children.  We need to realize that college is not necessarily right for all kids.  Technical and trade schools are a great choice for many.  We are losing skilled trades people in this country.  The demand for these trades will grow in the next decades.  As Reynolds states in his column, "We need people who can make things, and it's harder to outsource a plumbing or welding job to somebody in Bangalore.  Of course, the thing about skilled trades is that they require skill.  Even with training, not everyone makes a good welder or machinist any more than just anyone can become a doctor or lawyer."

But, one way or another, the change must happen.  The bubble is about to burst.  Government can no longer afford to subsidize the current system.  The game is changing...again.

(1) Source: InflationData.com - Sky Rocketing College Costs, 10/19/2011