More on politics (insert mild depression)

It's nice to hear from some folks to the right of my own particular views, particularly when it's well thought out as opposed to just crazy mob stuff. Anyhow, my first proposal for killing off bloated programs...the military. Guess what. It's inefficient to try and control the entire world under your thumb. It's expensive. Hell, let's cut through the crap. We still spend way more than China, our new perceived rival on the military. And, guess what? If we go to war w/ China we're all effed anyway, so we might as well cool it. The future for humanity is probably not best figured out on the other end of a rifle butt. That said, I'm find with the U.S. maintaining a strong military, but I don't know that we need to far outstrip everyone else in the known world because we're AMERICA.

The budget problem. As my cousin aptly pointed out, budgets are a problem. You should not need to spend your whole budget in order to maintain funding. I get that that's how we do things, but some kind of reform is necessary. It's dumb. Hell, my office at American University does it. It is not in fact wise to spend all your money if you don't have to. It's wasteful and asinine. Would it take some figuring out to allocate budgets more effectively? Yes. But dammit, I'd rather spend the extra time/money on that than on a bunch of initiatives/unnecessary work hours to justify the budget for the following year.

The firing problem. Listen, while I've heard that the Fed has issues firing people, perhaps more than most. In general, at almost every job I've been at, many private, it's hard to get fired. I hope that answer is giving more incentives to high achieving employees and leaving the folks who don't give a damn lower on the totem poll. Why? Because it's awkward to fire people. Doesn't mean it can't be done. However, I get that it's tough for anyone.

Are private companies more efficient than the government. Sometimes. And sometimes they are actually the greedy SOB's they're portrayed to be. The best model is the non-profit model, find funding, do great stuff to help people/ spread the gospel of arts and culture. The only problem is that non-profits are always groveling for cash from wealthy private citizens and the government, so I guess that doesn't work. The tough part for me is figuring out how we can find some sort of melding of the ethical and the profitable. There are some good models out there but also a hell of a lot of bad ones. The government provides services, probably not with hyper efficiency, and for profit companies like big pharm or oil and gas, provide services and attempt to rape the environment/your general consumer in the process. I don't know much about Wall Street, so I won't step in that pile of s. However, I suppose I will, I have literally been shocked at many of the conversations I've overheard/remotely been a part of while I was working at the U of Michigan B school that were so directly about acquiring wealth as a good way to live your life that I found it morally repulsive. So yeah, not so much a big fan of that as your raison de etre. So yeah, some sort of melding of ethics, profitability, etc. but corporations and government always involve individuals who are sometimes good and sometimes shitty. The ideal model is probably a corporation with some ethical people running it who can make the finances work along with the service provided. Service here, meaning literal service, ie production etc.

What to do with big projects? Are we capable of getting them done w/o the government just mandating it? We have a shitty train system. Europe pretty much kicks our ass on this one. Guess what? It's cheaper to ship freight by rail than it is by truck? It's more environmentally/just good for the soul, and I do think stuff like that is important, than driving by car, and we don't have good options right now. So, we need to have a massive project to restore our rail and make it a better option. Can any single company take this on? Probably not. I've got no problem w/ the government taking a bunch of unemployed folks and putting them up to useful stuff like the Civilian Conservation Corps. I read an interesting article complaining about the stimulus package that basically intimated that it would have been better to just put people to work on infrastructure projects, improving national parks etc. rather than allocating money, which, as we all know, bogs shi- down in bureaucracy.

Subtending this whole thing is the idea that we need a growth economy and that things will always be getting better. This may be patently untrue. We may not be able to continue "growing" (hate that usage) our economy indefinitely. I mean, it's obvious, even if you don't give a crap about the environment, which, we're practically the last civilized country who disputes the science, you're better than that America, that we're going to use up all of our natural resources in a fairly short period of time if we continue down a path of 70 percent consumption economy. ((We're wrapping Christmas presents as I write this)) (((I'm making an assumption that humanity will be around for a bit longer and that we have some sort of responsibility to folks who come after us. It's been two thousand years for religious folks, and even longer that we've avoided asteroids, volcanoes etc. for the non-believers. Either way I'm making a dangerous assumption that we're capable of thinking long term))). So yeah, we might not/okay are not capable of continuing in this manner forever, which calls into question the whole idea of productivity. ((((A recent trip to visit a friend of ours in Michigan who is running a small farm and who said, "I don't know why there is so much talk about jobs. People can find work," was a sort of wake up call about other options for productivity than conventional knowledge based ones we're operating with now)))).

I suppose the last caveat in this whole thing is whether the capital W work we're doing right now is necessary or not. I'm beginning to think that it might be from a Biblical perspective. But the secular part of me keeps thinking that perhaps we overrate work in general. Perhaps we can scale back on the economy, and the hours at work, and find other important outlets like family, our own damn backyard, etc. that aren't all about work. However, I have a job, so it's sort of unfair of me to talk about other options. Anyhow, everyone go read Then We Came to the End and ask yourself if that doesn't mimic the curiously ambivalent world of work.