Statesman vs politicians

Here are six current serious issues, if not pressing crises, that confront America today:

Global warming – the scientific evidence is overwhelming that human activity is producing a massive and rapid worldwide climate change that will in the next few decades displace hundreds of millions of people and probably eventually starve billions.

Medicare/Social Security – the actuarial evidence is overwhelming that these two programs, as currently constituted, will in the next few decades cost more than our economy and tax structure can possibly bear, so that we will eventually have to massively reduce benefits to our older citizens.

Nuclear proliferation – the world, and particularly parts of the old Soviet empire, is awash in poorly protected nuclear materials that can be used by any of the thousands of terrorist or nationalist groups to assemble an unsophisticated yet still devastating nuclear weapon and detonate it in any major city of the world.

Petroleum products – the evidence strongly suggests that we are currently pumping about as much oil and natural gas worldwide as we ever will, even though demand will continue to increase massively over the next few decades. As a result the price of oil and natural gas, upon which the first world economy and food supply depends, will almost certainly continue to rise steadily over the next few decades.

Pandemics – Although avian flu is getting most of the current attention here, the problem is wider than that. Modern high speed worldwide transportation has made it possible for any new highly infection disease (and new ones will appear from time to time) to spread globally within days, far faster than our current medical infrastructure can adapt to it.

Demographics – many of the European and Asian developed and developing nations now have reproductive rates that have dropped below replacement level, so that some countries, like Russia and Japan, will be heavily depopulated in the next few decades, disrupting their economies and societies and therefore probably ours as well.

Now think about your favorite political office holders or candidates for Congress or the presidency, of either party. How many of these issues do they even mention in their speeches? How many do they take seriously enough to sponsor legislation about them? For how many of them do they seem to have any effective suggestions, as opposed to vague promises?

Politicians attend to what gets votes. Statesmen attend to what needs to be done for their country. Have you seen any statesmen lately in either political party?

The death penalty in America

The interesting issues are the hard ones, such as whether or not America should have the death penalty. And what makes such issues hard is that there are so many intersecting and conflicting aspects that it is difficult to decide which ones should be the basis for a decision – at the core it is the task of deciding which of all these many aspects ought to be the overriding ones that shapes the decisions, and also what makes the whole issue so difficult.

No matter what anyone may say, vengeance is certainly one of the aspects to this decision. It is all very well to pontificate from a distance about the immorality of putting a murderer to death so long as it was not our own dear ones who were murdered. But I will readily admit that if someone raped and murdered my spouse or one of my children or grandchildren, a large part of me would ache to see them very, very slowly and painfully put to death, and I suspect I am not alone in this feeling. Polls have consistently shown a substantial majority of Americans in favor of the death penalty, at least for the most inhuman and vicious crimes.

Nor is religious morality really any help here, since despite their words and writings (or perhaps because of them) the world’s major religions have shown no hesitation through history to putting to the sword or rack unbelievers and heretics and anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Indeed the nightly news overflows with people killing other people in the name of religion.

Nor is killing humans really the issue, since in other contexts we do it all the time. Every country trains its soldiers to kill, and whatever the morality of the political decision to go to war, for the soldier in the front line killing the enemy is the only way to survive. Nor do we expect our police to face armed killers unarmed. And of course we condemn humans to death all the time when we make the political or economic decision not to intervene in an ethnic cleansing or not to attend to a famine somewhere in the world or not to make a medicine available to the ill in some poor nation. These are pragmatic decisions – we couldn’t solve all the world’s problems even if we tried – but nevertheless these decisions doom some people to their deaths just as surely as if we put the noose around their neck or gave them the lethal injection.

The argument that the death penalty deters others from committing murder has no convincing support. Indeed, it would appear that most people who commit murder do so either from passion (in which case the death penalty is no deterrent) or because they are sociopaths with no empathy for their victims (in which case the death penalty is no deterrent).

In the end, and after years of thinking about the issue, I think I am against the death penalty for two primary reasons:

1) It is not reversible, and there have been too many innocent people executed because of failures in the judicial systems – ambitious prosecuting attorneys, poor representation, prejudice, unfair media coverage, sloppy forensic work, and the like. If the accused is still alive and in jail when these failures are finally uncovered, there is a chance to make at least some amends.

2) A friend of mine gave me the second convincing argument: if the perpetrator is really guilty of a heinous crime, such as cold-blooded premeditated murder or distributing drugs to masses of people and ruining their lives, then a quick, fairly painless death isn’t nearly enough punishment – spending the rest of their lives in a dreary prison cell seems far more fitting.

No Child Left Behind - Football Version

Re the No Child Left Behind initiative, one of my daughters just sent me this, and I thought it was too good not to share

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NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND---THE FOOTBALL VERSION

1. All teams must make the state playoffs and all MUST win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable. If, after two years, they have not won the championship their footballs and equipment will be taken away UNTIL they do win the championship.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time even if they do not have the same conditions or opportunities to practice on their own. NO exceptions will be made for lack of interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities of themselves or their parents.

ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL!

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own, without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren't interested in football, have limited athletic ability or whose parents don't like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th game. It will create a New Age of Sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimum goals. If no child gets ahead, then no child gets left behind.

Change and lifecycles

Humans seem to like to think in terms of static, unchanging situations. That’s too bad, because in nature (which certainly includes everything humans do and build) nothing is static. Everything is always in flux, moving through a lifecycle from birth to maturity to death. Stars, human institutions, relationships, living creatures, empires, galaxies, religions, planets, philosophies -- they all have births, they all grow to maturity, age, and eventually die away. None of them is ever static – all are always changing, maturing, aging, whether their lifecycle is measures in microseconds, millennia, or billions of years.

When we humans succumb to the temptation to see things as static and unchanging, we blind ourselves to the most important aspects of what is going on around us. It’s like trying to understand a two hour movie from a single random frame of the picture. To really understand anything around us, we have to understand the movement of events – what they are coming from and what they are evolving toward. We have to try to discern the whole lifecycle, rather than the single moment we happen to be seeing.

Most people find it easier, and certainly more comfortable, to think of the world around them as essentially unchanging. But it isn’t, and those who blind themselves to the dynamic nature of events miss most of what is really happening.

More No Child Left Unharmed

Others have thought of the "No Child Left Unharmed" name too. See the wonderful and thoughtful No Child Left Unharmed post by special education teacher Linda Schrock.

No Child Left Unharmed

As is so often the case with government, the No Child Left Behind initiative started from a perfectly reasonable concern that there ought to be more accountability in the public schools. But at least in our state it has morphed into an unreasonable monster.

This week my grade-school grandchildren are supposed to spend four hours a day all week long in intensive testing. The testing is not designed in any way to help the individual students, but simply to help the school administration meet bureaucratic guidelines. And in preparation for these tests, their teachers have been forced to spend most of the year to this point cramming into them the narrow field of facts covered on the tests, instead of nurturing their curiosity and creativity and problem-solving skills and writing skills and the other things which really matter in education.

Proponents in Washington may delude themselves that these tests are for the benefit of the students. A friend of mine who is a teacher told me how the teachers in her school just got back the test results for the children in their class, so that they could use the results to guide remedial work with those students --- except that the results were for LAST YEAR’S class, students who have already moved on to another school.

Just today I heard about a local mother whose third grade daughter is home ill with anxiety. It seems she is an outstanding student who dearly loves her teacher, and that teacher has made it plain to this little third grade girl that her job depends on the girl doing well in the tests, since her results improve the class’s standing. THIS IS SICK!!!

The politicians in Washington may think this program is doing great things. Maybe it is somewhere in the nation, but not anywhere I have heard of, and certainly not here. This is a classic case of a government agency undertaking a perfectly reasonable initiative, and then botching it thoroughly in the execution. It’s also another classic demonstration that government bureaucracies – local, state and federal – will always, by their very nature, care more about their own internal politics than the public – in this case our children – that they are supposed to serve.

Parents who are paying attention and who care about their children ought to be up in arms about this. I’m proud to say one of my daughters is rebelling, and has been holding her children out of school during the testing periods so they can do something more productive and educational. I suggest more parents need to be proactive in defense of their children.

Why government can’t get it right

There are those who think the answer to many social questions is government intervention and government control. There certainly are things which seem to be appropriate for governments to do – maintain the streets and provide police and run the criminal justice system and maintain armed forces, among other things.

However, I am not convinced that government is the answer to all ills. I’ve worked with government agencies, and in general I’m not impressed with either their efficiency or their effectiveness. I was not particularly surprised at the poor state and federal response to hurricane Katrina. I’m not surprised at the inevitable cost overruns on government programs, not at the proportion of them that are abandoned as hopeless after spending millions or even billions. I’m not surprised that the No Child Left Behind bureaucracy has produced such absurd requirements. I’m not surprised at the constant turf battles between the FBI and the CIA, nor at the number of times both agencies have fumbled their tasks. I’m not surprised the effort to “nation build” in Iraq has gone so poorly. And I expect most future government programs to be equally ineffective and overpriced.

Government agencies are institutions with a dynamic all their own. All large institutions have inefficiencies and incompetent members and meaningless activities, but business institutions have at least some level of restraint because they have a bottom line – at the end of the day they have to produce a profit for their shareholders or owners. At the end of the day they have to satisfy their customers or those customers will go elsewhere. So for businesses there is some forcing function, though not always as much as one would like, to fire the incompetent and eliminate useless work and improve processes and products.

Government agencies don’t work like that. There are indeed forces in a government agency that produce winners and losers in the organization, but these are far more often political forces or office politics forces. At the end of the day, government agencies don’t have a bottom line; they don’t have to show a profit. At the end of the day, government agencies really don’t have to satisfy their customers to stay in business, only their Congressional sponsors. When they make mistakes, generally they don’t suffer serious consequences because it is in the interests of their political sponsors not to impose consequences. If they overrun a budget, Congress gives them more money. If they make a really bad mistake, a few lower-level scapegoats are found but the upper management generally escapes the scandal undamaged. If an agency launches a program, as often as not it takes on a life of its own and runs for decades on inertia, whether or not it is effective.

Thus far we have been a rich enough country that we can afford the vast wealth government agencies waste, and the additional costs they impose on everyone – individuals and businesses alike – with their interference and regulations. And they do get some things done, if inefficiently and at enormous cost. But the European Union model, with a massive bureaucracy in Brussels trying to regulate the tiniest details all across the EU is, not surprisingly, proving cumbersome, expensive and ill-equipped to handle many of the member country’s individual and unique problems. One size does not fit all. I don’t think we want to follow that model.

Government agencies by their very nature are not very flexible, not very efficient, and not very effective, and they are always very expensive for the services they offer. Government agencies by their very nature will always be more responsive to the political masters who fund them then to the public they are supposed to serve. There certainly are a core set of services that are appropriate for government agencies to deliver, but for anything beyond that small core set of services, we ought always to look first for other, more responsive and efficient ways of obtaining those services outside of government, ones which will be properly accountable for the money spent and the results received.