View 682 Friday July 8, 2011

• The Road To Serfdom
• Firedrills

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The Road to Serfdom

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an op ed essay called “The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt” that ought to be required reading for everyone in the State Department, although I suspect that few in State read WSJ. Fouad Ajami of the Hoover Institution has a good analysis of what is going wrong in the Arab world. He also calls attention to F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s 1944 masterpiece is such an essential part of any intelligent citizen’s education that I tend to forget that there are many who have not read it. If you know anyone who hasn’t, rag them until they do. It’s not a long book, and it’s not difficult reading. One key discussion in the book is “Why the worst get on top.”

I don’t know how you can read the WSJ op ed on line. It used to be that if you reached a WSJ piece by Google, you could read it all, but lately I find that there’s no continuation. I subscribe to the Journal, and I even know how to access it through the app in my iPad, but I haven’t yet figured out how to read the entire contents of a Journal article through Firefox; however I can do it through Internet Explorer. I suppose I ‘ll figure that out one day. Anyway, from the article

In his 1944 masterpiece, “The Road to Serfdom,” Hayek wrote that in freedom-crushing totalitarian societies “the worst get on top.” In words that described the Europe of his time but also capture the contemporary Arab condition, he wrote: “To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds; he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own.”

There’s more. Read Fouad Ajami by all means, but it’s more important that you read Hayek. The Road to Serfdom is one of the essential books of the Twentieth Century.

FALLEN ANGELS is a science fiction adventure novel by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. Much of it is satirical but it has its serious moments. The premise is a world in which The Ice returns: a good part of Canada is under glacial sheet ice, which is moving south. There is Climate Change all right, and human actions affect it. It has just been released in Kindle format by Amazon, and if you haven’t read it, you might like to. There has long been an eBook edition from Baen and that remains – it can even be had free from Baen – but this edition has been prepared with great care as an eBook, and Larry, Michael, and I have done a new afterword.

While we are on today’s WSJ, “Sorting the real from the phony spending cut options” by Fred Barnes isn’t bad. If you believe as I do that much of the economic debate is Kabuki theater – see yesterday’s View – then there won’t be a lot of surprises in there, but it may explain a few things to those who haven’t thought so much about it.

Firedrills

The morning started well enough. I seem to be over the debilitation flu or whatever it was that laid me low from February to May, and I woke up full of determination to get started on a new Computing at Chaos Manor column for Chaos Manor Reviews. Then Roberta went for a walk and twisted her knee, and next thing I knew it was off to Kaiser. That all went well and she’s all right if a bit immobilized, but the rest of the day was consumed by locusts.

Last night when I connected my iPhone to the iMac for synch and charging, the iPhone was dead off. It started itself, and when it came on it showed the charge bar: a very thin slice of bright red. Clearly it had run out of power while in my pocket. All very well – it would charge overnight. But when it came time to go to Kaiser and I put the phone in my pocket, it still showed that red thin slice as if it had not charged at all during the night. When we got to the Kaiser center it still showed that when I turned it on. I had brought the charger and while waiting for Roberta I plugged it into the wall. Then I read the wall Street Journal editorial page. The little “I am charging” icon on the phone came on, but the red slice display never changed. Never. So when we got home, I figured that the battery was deaded, and it was time to get it fixed since I depend on that mobile phone. Actually I headed out for the Apple store with the intention of buying an iPhone 4. I should have got one a year ago, and would have by now except that different things kept delaying me. Time to do that. I headed for Fashion Square. Filled the car on the way. Had a shrimp burrito in the food court. Went into the Apple Store. Turned on the phone. It showed itself fully charged. It worked just fine. Nothing wrong with it at all.

Turned around and came home. It’s time to update my phone, but I sure didn’t need to do that today. But if you wonder whiy this is late and I haven’t got any other real work done today, there was more of the same all day. The day was eaten by locusts.

View 682 Thursday July 7, 2011 – 2

Kabuki Economics

Theirs but to do and die

Kabuki Economics

There is a flurry of activity in Washington about the debt limit. We all know that the United States is not going to default on servicing the national debt. Even if the ceiling were not raised a nickel, there is plenty enough revenue coming into the Treasury to service the debt. What we can’t do is continue to spend at current rates while servicing this debt unless we borrow more money. We could instead choose to stop funding a bunch of things we don’t need, and cut back expenditures to match revenue. Of course that would involve hard choices.

Perfection is the enemy of the good. We cannot cut back expenditures to the point where we don’t need to borrow more money without making hard choices – so we don’t cut back at all, not even on easy choices. If the President and Congress would like some easy choices, let me suggest a few. Start with the Inspectors in the Department of Agriculture whose job is making sure that stage magicians who use rabbits in their performances have a federal license. We can dismiss all those people, dismiss their supervisors, dismiss the people in Personnel and Disbursement and other service employees needed to keep those inspectors employed. Sure, the result will only be ten million a year or so, but that’s ten million a year we won’t have to borrow, and all the interest on the borrowed money. A few million here and a few million there and it adds up to real money.

I can suggest off hand another: the Inspector General of the Department of Education has a SWAT team. We can do without those people, and do without all the service personnel needed to pay and supervise and represent in union negotiations and all the rest of it. I don’t know what that SWAT team costs, but I would be astonished if it were under $50 million a year and it might be more. Save that.

And I am certain that if some intelligent people were to sit down with the Budget of the United States we could, within a few hours, come up with a lot more easy choices. By easy choices I mean things that might or might no be a great idea when we have lots of money, but which very clearly are not worth borrowing money to do. Every department in the government has such tasks and task forces, and any competent manager knows about them. I would venture that a 5% across the board budget cut would result in finding a lot of such things; but it is cruel and unusual punishment to make a managerial GS 12 or above reduce his department size. It’s painful and it’s way against the Iron Law; so let us do it for them.

Of course that would mean finding things that are not so easy. Take the Head Start program as an example. There is probably not a more popular program in the Federal government. Everyone wants to give a head start to kids from poor families. Give them an educational break. Heck, it ought to pay for itself. If only one in a hundred ends up with an education and becomes a useful citizen when otherwise the kid would just go on to be a gangster or crook or welfare cheat, then it may even save money!  The problem is that in decades of Head Start, with study after study conducted by people who love the program, not one properly conducted study has ever been able to find a dime’s worth of difference between those who went through Head Start and those of similar circumstances who did not. Not one study, and believe me the people doing the studies were trying to find ways to justify the program. Can’t find them. But that is a Hard Choice. We will probably go on funding Head Start because, well, because of all the things the Feds do, that’s the one many of us like the best whether it does any good at all.  OK, so we leave in place the feel good programs. Those are the Hard Choices.

But how many want to stand up the the Education Department SWAT team? Or the Department of Agriculture Pet Rabbit Permit Inspectors? Who feels good about those?

Do the easy things first. Then we can look for hard choices.

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Paul C. Light n today’s Wall Street Journal notes that there are on average 18 layers of middle management “between, say, the secretary of agriculture and the forest ranger, or the secretary of the interior and the oil-rig inspector – up from seven layers in 1960.” There’s more, but you get the idea. C. Northcote Parkinson described the process in which bureaucracy expands without regard to the actual work done. It is all quite real. But is any of this in discussion in the Great Debt Ceiling Debate? I would be astonished if it were so.

Theirs but To Do and Die

This was published some time ago, and I must have missed it when it came out; I found it this morning, and it is spot on, as good a layman’s account of what happened to end the French rule in Viet Nam as any I have seen. As it happens, I was involved (ten years later) in analysis of Dien Bien Phu as part of a team to propose new “brushfire war” weapons systems for the Army and Air Force. Messenger has done this well. The original printed account – I just found it in piles of unread stuff – had some maps and photographs which were useful, but the account remains about as good as any I have ever seen. 

View 682 Thursday, July 7, 2011

Experimenting with Livewriter. This is a running daybook as I experiment with this.

Flying blind.  We are trying to update to using LiveWriter instead of Wor 2007 in Blog Publish mode, and my understanding is limited. I do not much like Livewriter as an editor, but perhaps I can get used to it. Autocorrect seems to work. In fact it works far too well. I do not seem to be able to insert t e h as a single word no matter how hard I try. It will correct to the. In standard Word if you backspace over an autocorrected word and enter the misspelled word again, it accepts that. There seem to be other anomalies.

Meanwhile the odious Firefox is driving me nuts. Does anyone know how to refresh the session manager list for Firefox? And is the latest of Firefox stable enough to let me let the system upgrade?

All this administrivia associated with getting the site working would be fine, but it means an end to creative thought until it is done. I came upstairs with the notion of several essays. They get blown out of my head as I try to deal with this stuff.  I really liked the old FrontPage system which I didn’t have to think about much. I am looking forward to new habits when the machines don’t get in the way of thinking.

Now top see if this will post.

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That worked. The problem is that Livewriter has no recollection of anything previous, so it does not seem to be able to bring back anything older, or to link to anything previous. It is as if today were the first day of the new era. All the old book marks and everything else seem to be history, because when I installed and connected with Livewriter, Word 2007 in Blog Publish mode lost all contact with the site, and Livewrtier does not seem to know that Word Blog mode ever existed. In the old FrontPage the “master” copy of everything was local here, but with the WordPress blogs the only copies are out there in the cloud.  At some point we’ll figure this out, but Livewriter doesn’t seem to recognize anything it didn’t itself create and publish.  But at least we are this far along.

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I suppose I can link to previous stuff by opening it on the web and copying the URL I get, then pasting that into this. For example, this ought to link to the space essay.  Let us see if it does.  And it does.

And that worked. So we have communications with the past, but there is no way to edit any of that until I can convince Word Blog Publish mode to link back up with the old stuff. But of course communications between Livewriter and the old Blog Mode will never be very good. Still, I can live with all this. I have just seen a button here called source. 

A very clean html, cleaner in many respects than any we have seen before.  Now for another test.

The Fireworks seem to be here, and working. The flag is waving.

And they publish and work in publication.  SO far so good. This is a lot better than the old Word Blog mode was. Now to get used to it. It does mean that I pretty well have to be connected on line at high speed in order to do anything, but I can manage that.

I note that many see the fireworks and flag waving. When I view this in Firefox the compass and the cat and mouse work, but the flag is not waving and there is no action in the fireworks. But at one time I did see them working. I don’t really understand, but at some point we can figure it out. It’s progress.

WHAT I have not found is any way to insert a bookmark. With Word Blog I could not put in a bookmark in blog mode, but I could do that in Word normal and cut and paste a line with a bookmark in it. I do not see how we can do internal referencing in this. I hate that. But we’ll keep poking about and seeing how we can make it happen.

As of last publish the fireworks stopped working. I did preview here and they worked. They still work here, but on line the fireworks are gone and the flag is no longer waving. All this is minor stuff. I gave it a whack with an insert of the bottle, and that works, I will now try to reinsert the flag an fireworks.

I’ll keep playing with this, but I have other works to do.