| Thursday,
January 17, 2002 I was noodling around in a conference of
no great significance, mostly having fun, and said something about Social
Security and investments. In the course of some skittles I mentioned that
"The purpose of government is to hire and pay government
workers."
A fairly well known author replied:
As always, Jerry, you appear to take the position
there's intelligence behind the beauracracy that's Social Security.
Parkinson's Law.
It's a living organism, that resists change,
dislodgement, elimination, modification, or restructuring.
The reason for it's structure towards conservative
investing has nothing to do with modern social polemics. It has a lot to
do with FDR and Congress creating an instrument that was designed to do
two things, offer a bridge between what traditional American local
charities provided, or worker's pensions, and poverty and, this is the
point everyone seems to be missing, provide a safety net for _people who
had absolutely no experience with saving or investing_. The United States
in 1932 was a different culture than today. Working people didn't have
savings accounts in the main, let alone investment portfollios. There were
no mutual funds and corner investment houses.
None of which is untrue, exactly, but it did goad me into writing a
reply that became long enough that I thought I would put it here:.
Now this is odd.
I point out that Social Security isn't paying me what I get from a few
years of investment in TIAA/CREF. I get sarcastic replies. I reply to
those and I get your lecture.
Look: with all due respect, I do have degrees in political science and
economics, and if I don't understand the Social Security system I can at
least pretend to with credentials. But until the intelligent liberals in
this country stop with the knee jerks about Social Security it will remain
a political third rail that no one will touch.
As to intelligence, either you believe in rational thought or you
don't; either you believe that rational argument in a republic can
sometimes result in rational change, or you don't. If you don't then you
accept what we have or you become a radical revolutionary devoted to
change by means other than rational argument. You hate McVeigh because he
gave blowing up government buildings a bad name.
I'm still back in the rational thought stage, having given up radical
reform by direct action many long years ago. Possony always said you
either believe in rational debate or you don't. If you don't, you have
decisions to make. At my age I don't have much choice.
I knew C Northcote Parkinson and I assigned his books in my political
theory classes (The Evolution of Political Thought remains one of the best
political histories of all time in my judgment, while Parkinson's Laws and
The Law and the Profits are amusing but quite valid observations on the
way government works.)
And the purpose of government remains "to hire and pay government
workers." By 'purpose', which implies intention but doesn't demand it
-- machines have purposes too -- I mean largely that there is an
institution which seeks that goal -- the Civil Service and its unions --
which is quite well organized and whatever other goals it has, that one
over-rides it.
Civil Service is an abomination when combined with Civil Service
Unions. The theory was that we would get better government by insulating
the civil service from politics: no more patronage. The practice is that
we have enduring patronage, and insulated from politics means no control
over the people who affect our lives by those we elect. The end result of
that is India's Permit Raj in which the Parliament can't affect much of
the day to day life of the populace, and getting a civil service job is a
life fix.
You can't fire it and it won't work. We used to call the Bomarc the
civil service missile and that was 40 years ago.
The military industrial complex is nothing compared to the power of the
civil service and teachers unions; and if the military industrial complex
produced $600 toilet seats ( I designed one of them, and there was a
reason it cost so damned much) at least they worked as toilet seats.
Much of the bureaucracy today harasses the people with rules whose end
purpose was long ago forgotten so that the rules sometimes actually get in
the way of the purpose they were intended. Airport security falls in that
category: the purpose is to get people flying safely again, not harass
them to the point where they drive their cars rather than fly and thus put
their lives at greater risk than they would be if there were no airport
security whatever.
But the purpose of airport security is to hire and pay airport security
workers. All else is secondary to that. It wasn't what Congress said it
was doing, and may not have been what most of them thought they were
doing, but any could see that was what they WERE doing.
Now we can say "Parkinson's Laws" and give up. Or we can
watch the Republic become an Empire and our public servants become our
masters, and do nothing about it; or we can actually continue to think
that sometimes we can make a difference.
It's a lot harder to change the education system to something rational
than it was to bring down the Evil Empire. Thirty five years ago when I
set my life goals, bringing down the Evil Empire seemed more important.
That's what I set out to do, and I can lay some claim to the notion that
without Possony, Graham, Hunter, Niven, and me the Evil Empire would exist
to this day. I now understand that was only buying time and the Republic
is probably doomed from the barbarians within the gates (barbarians: see
John Campbell's essay on tribesmen, barbarians, and citizens; an excellent
observation). At my age I am unlikely to play any great role in
transforming this incipient empire back into a self governing republic;
but at least I can try, and more I can try to recruit some people who will
have an impact.
Which is what I do.
Roland reports this morning's Outlook Worm:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.klez.e@mm.html
This one claims to launch from the PREVIEW WINDOW so it's worth paying
attention to it, but it is apparently only in Internet Explorer 5.x, and is
fixed automatically in 6.
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