Having just starred in Girls Gone Wild photos, I now attempt to reassert my credentials for seriousness (you know, for being boring).
I’m late on getting into this tool Mike Gundy, head coach (for the moment) at Oklahoma State. That's him above, presumably explaining to team owner Boone Pickens how his team, playing at home, choked away a three touchdown lead to Texas this Saturday. But to do that we’re going to need to get some things straight about responsibility and failure. Namely, that we need to let people fail and not shield them from the consequences of their mistakes. Here I finally show my “grumpy old man” self.
I’m going to need you to think back to college and remember your first economics class. You know, the one you used to skip because it was at 9 a.m. and you needed to sleep in after the Thursday night Fiji keggers? Yeah, that one. I had noted Vietnam War architect and hawk Walt Rostow as my first semester economics professor. It always struck me that it must have been some sort of living hell for a former Rhodes Scholar, OSS policy planner, Oxford and Cambridge Professor, and National Security Advisor to close out his career trying to teach hungover teenagers and makeup-primping Tri-Delts about gross national product and inflation. Sometimes you’re a lot better off just buying a boat and sailing toward the horizon.
Where was I?
What most people don’t get, or don’t want to get, is that there has to be a price for failure in life, if for no other reason than to make our economy work. If you do something useless, or do something useful but poorly, it doesn’t help society at all. That sort of behaviour has to be discouraged somehow, or people won’t be putting their time, energy and capital into useful pursuits. No one needs the Pony Express or Braniff Airlines anymore. Simply put, we need you not to suck. The only way we can do that is to make you pay the price of failure, so that you’ll be motivated to do something else with your time and money that might actually be useful, like creating Federal Express or Southwest Airlines. The price of failure has to be bankruptcy, or having to make do with less money.
Failure is an incredibly instructive and valuable condition. I know all about it. Failure teaches you that what you’ve been doing isn’t benefiting anyone, including yourself. Failure directs you to do something else that will benefit society. Failure punishes you for having wasted valuable time, energy and capital on something not socially useful, or as useful as what resources you’ve invested in it. Hence, fear of failure can be and often is just as important to allocating and ordering society’s resources as the lure of profits. If you never have to worry about going without, you lack any real incentive to do socially useful things. Now, your sense of altruism might motivate you, but sadly that does not generally get the job done-signed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All the rest of us have to carry you through subsidy programs.
Avoiding failure is just another way of saying “responsibility.” I don’t particularly want to lose my job, so I do everything I reasonably can to keep it, which generally means actually doing my job. I know that if I don’t do my job, my firm will find a way to do without me and find someone else who will do my job. I learned that lesson very early in life, yet some people never seem to get it. Even if I were to start my own business, I still know that if I don’t provide some useful service, or if I do something that 50 million other companies do, no one will just give me money and my business will cease to be a business. Still others, like farmers, car manufacturers, and airlines, don’t get that either.
Now, read carefully future Senate Nominations Committee members (who hopefully didn't see my last blog entry). Some people can’t provide for themselves. Others truly are victimized, disenfranchised, or otherwise not capable of self-support. Likewise, application of these principles requires that everyone everywhere have the same shot at wealth creation as everyone else, i.e. no discrimination. The notion that society should provide assistance to the unable, incapable, disadvantaged and others, completely unthinkable as little as 80 years ago, is commonly accepted. Nor would I say you shouldn't help your family or friends when they need it. Helping family and friends is another way of investing, when you think about it, and you expect a "return" in the form of helping your relative or friend to regain his or her footing and resume a productive life. The question is how to separate those who truly cannot support themselves, or more importantly, are incapable of supporting themselves, from those who just want to drink Shiner Bock and watch The Price is Right all day. I submit that in the last 80 years, that line has been drawn ever more increasingly towards the latter than the former.
The 20th century took us from a society where government performed only those public tasks that could never be profitable if performed by private individuals, to one of redistributing wealth, supplanting private enterprise, making economic choices for people, and making it nearly impossible to suffer failure. This began with the New Deal as justified by the now discredited Keynsians, an overreaction to a recession brought about in the first place by government failure to reduce interest rates after the stock crash, aggravated by imposition of trade-killing import tariffs. For the first time, government began taking your money and gave it to others deemed somehow “worthy.” The New Deal also initiated the now rampant government practice of socializing certain goods and services, and restricting personal freedom to make certain economic choices. Social welfare programs initiated at first to help only the truly destitute, as a temporary measure, became entrenched as permanent redistribution programs taking from the rich and giving to the poor. “Safety regulations” and the birth of the personal injury lawsuit industry (largely allowed by politician-judges) limited economic choices. Corporations were not far behind in the handout line, seeking tax breaks and other subsidies from all levels of government for taking actions they would have taken even without government money. The Democrats basically rode these programs to 50 years’ of electoral dominance, as Americans proved that they could indeed be bought and would elect politicians who bought them. Government now permeates every imaginable pursuit, regulating the most banal and arcane subjects, in the name of the “public interest.” The cumulative tax burden of paying everyone off and policing everyone's economic choices has been staggering,with the ratio of government spending to overall GDP rising from 10% in 1929 to 35% in 2004. That means 35 percent of all dollars spent in this country were spent by the government. National debt as a percentage of GDP in the period 1980 to 2003 has gone from 38% to 62%. All these programs are, for the most part, the cumulative price for protecting people from the consequence of their own choices, and the government taking over significant portions of the economy. Defense has its part, but generally defense has been about 16-17% of the federal budget, and remains less than 5% of GDP.
This is not a Democratic party phenomenon. They were just the first party to figure this out. Witnessing how well the spending strategy worked for Democrats, Republicans have eagerly jumped on that bandwagon. The federal budget has ballooned while Republicans controlled both Congress and the Presidency. Its gotten so bad that even George W. Bush had to caution the late Republican Congress against spending growth. That’s like Courtney Love warning someone about their addiction problems. When W thinks spending has gotten out of hand, you know you’ve got problems. Republican politicians talk fiscal discipline on the campaign trail, then go to Washington and state capitols and open up the public purse. More alarmingly, the Republicans have embraced the Democratic “nanny state” philosophy, passing all manner of laws interfering in highly personal choices, designed to protect us from our own choices. In Texas, for example, you must now take a “marriage class” in a state-approved course or pay a marriage fee of $60. Who thinks Texas will enjoy a big drop in the divorce rate? Congress, never to be outdone, actually expanded the historic jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear one particular case when it decided that it didn’t like how one Florida judge decided a dispute between a woman’s husband and parents over the husband’s life support decisions for his wife. Can’t wait til Congressional investigators come over to my house to tell me how it should be decorated (I’ve already got plenty of help in that regard).
The result has been, to varying degrees, that failure has become rare. Start some business in which you have no hope of succeeding, and just declare bankruptcy when it inevitably fails. Stick someone else with the cost of your bad decisions. Insist on being a farmer or steel manufacturer or airline when its clear you don’t have the resources to compete, and get your lobbyists to convince Congress to pay you your losses. Fall off a ladder, sue the manufacturer for not warning you that climbing ladders might be dangerous. Firing an incompetent employee has become nearly impossible, with employees possessing ample legal avenues to tie up the employer in court on specious claims. Spend all day sleeping at work, as did one current employee of an organization where I was formerly employed, and complain when you’re fired that you’re disabled because you have sleep apnea your employer should instead be paying for your treatment.
The tail end of my generation was about the last group that seemed to understand where all this was leading us, and tried to do something about it. First electing Reagan in 1980 on promises of tax and budget reform, and more importantly, believing that “government isn’t the solution to the problem, it is the problem,” the 1980s were about the last time that a working majority of Americans had some notion that a smaller, less-spending government was worth fighting for. But that glorious last wave died crashing into the seawall of politicians who found that Americans disapproved government programs generally but loved them when they helped them personally. Whether its expensive defense procurements that resulted in more Pacific Northwest jobs, or paying farmers not to grow crops, or giving subsidized loans to inefficient airlines, or propping up an inefficient and unpopular national train network, government has gone into the anti-failure business. News of some business going out of business, or leaving town, immediately prompts outcries for government to save it. No one thinks, maybe that company needed to go out of business.
Now that I've established that I hate poor people, I will turn to a discussion in part II of this epistle, coming soon, that this “no-fail” attitude for some time now been shaping the way we raise kids. Then I'll talk about Mike Gundy who claims to coach a squad of man-children.
I’m late on getting into this tool Mike Gundy, head coach (for the moment) at Oklahoma State. That's him above, presumably explaining to team owner Boone Pickens how his team, playing at home, choked away a three touchdown lead to Texas this Saturday. But to do that we’re going to need to get some things straight about responsibility and failure. Namely, that we need to let people fail and not shield them from the consequences of their mistakes. Here I finally show my “grumpy old man” self.
I’m going to need you to think back to college and remember your first economics class. You know, the one you used to skip because it was at 9 a.m. and you needed to sleep in after the Thursday night Fiji keggers? Yeah, that one. I had noted Vietnam War architect and hawk Walt Rostow as my first semester economics professor. It always struck me that it must have been some sort of living hell for a former Rhodes Scholar, OSS policy planner, Oxford and Cambridge Professor, and National Security Advisor to close out his career trying to teach hungover teenagers and makeup-primping Tri-Delts about gross national product and inflation. Sometimes you’re a lot better off just buying a boat and sailing toward the horizon.
Where was I?
What most people don’t get, or don’t want to get, is that there has to be a price for failure in life, if for no other reason than to make our economy work. If you do something useless, or do something useful but poorly, it doesn’t help society at all. That sort of behaviour has to be discouraged somehow, or people won’t be putting their time, energy and capital into useful pursuits. No one needs the Pony Express or Braniff Airlines anymore. Simply put, we need you not to suck. The only way we can do that is to make you pay the price of failure, so that you’ll be motivated to do something else with your time and money that might actually be useful, like creating Federal Express or Southwest Airlines. The price of failure has to be bankruptcy, or having to make do with less money.
Failure is an incredibly instructive and valuable condition. I know all about it. Failure teaches you that what you’ve been doing isn’t benefiting anyone, including yourself. Failure directs you to do something else that will benefit society. Failure punishes you for having wasted valuable time, energy and capital on something not socially useful, or as useful as what resources you’ve invested in it. Hence, fear of failure can be and often is just as important to allocating and ordering society’s resources as the lure of profits. If you never have to worry about going without, you lack any real incentive to do socially useful things. Now, your sense of altruism might motivate you, but sadly that does not generally get the job done-signed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All the rest of us have to carry you through subsidy programs.
Avoiding failure is just another way of saying “responsibility.” I don’t particularly want to lose my job, so I do everything I reasonably can to keep it, which generally means actually doing my job. I know that if I don’t do my job, my firm will find a way to do without me and find someone else who will do my job. I learned that lesson very early in life, yet some people never seem to get it. Even if I were to start my own business, I still know that if I don’t provide some useful service, or if I do something that 50 million other companies do, no one will just give me money and my business will cease to be a business. Still others, like farmers, car manufacturers, and airlines, don’t get that either.
Now, read carefully future Senate Nominations Committee members (who hopefully didn't see my last blog entry). Some people can’t provide for themselves. Others truly are victimized, disenfranchised, or otherwise not capable of self-support. Likewise, application of these principles requires that everyone everywhere have the same shot at wealth creation as everyone else, i.e. no discrimination. The notion that society should provide assistance to the unable, incapable, disadvantaged and others, completely unthinkable as little as 80 years ago, is commonly accepted. Nor would I say you shouldn't help your family or friends when they need it. Helping family and friends is another way of investing, when you think about it, and you expect a "return" in the form of helping your relative or friend to regain his or her footing and resume a productive life. The question is how to separate those who truly cannot support themselves, or more importantly, are incapable of supporting themselves, from those who just want to drink Shiner Bock and watch The Price is Right all day. I submit that in the last 80 years, that line has been drawn ever more increasingly towards the latter than the former.
The 20th century took us from a society where government performed only those public tasks that could never be profitable if performed by private individuals, to one of redistributing wealth, supplanting private enterprise, making economic choices for people, and making it nearly impossible to suffer failure. This began with the New Deal as justified by the now discredited Keynsians, an overreaction to a recession brought about in the first place by government failure to reduce interest rates after the stock crash, aggravated by imposition of trade-killing import tariffs. For the first time, government began taking your money and gave it to others deemed somehow “worthy.” The New Deal also initiated the now rampant government practice of socializing certain goods and services, and restricting personal freedom to make certain economic choices. Social welfare programs initiated at first to help only the truly destitute, as a temporary measure, became entrenched as permanent redistribution programs taking from the rich and giving to the poor. “Safety regulations” and the birth of the personal injury lawsuit industry (largely allowed by politician-judges) limited economic choices. Corporations were not far behind in the handout line, seeking tax breaks and other subsidies from all levels of government for taking actions they would have taken even without government money. The Democrats basically rode these programs to 50 years’ of electoral dominance, as Americans proved that they could indeed be bought and would elect politicians who bought them. Government now permeates every imaginable pursuit, regulating the most banal and arcane subjects, in the name of the “public interest.” The cumulative tax burden of paying everyone off and policing everyone's economic choices has been staggering,with the ratio of government spending to overall GDP rising from 10% in 1929 to 35% in 2004. That means 35 percent of all dollars spent in this country were spent by the government. National debt as a percentage of GDP in the period 1980 to 2003 has gone from 38% to 62%. All these programs are, for the most part, the cumulative price for protecting people from the consequence of their own choices, and the government taking over significant portions of the economy. Defense has its part, but generally defense has been about 16-17% of the federal budget, and remains less than 5% of GDP.
This is not a Democratic party phenomenon. They were just the first party to figure this out. Witnessing how well the spending strategy worked for Democrats, Republicans have eagerly jumped on that bandwagon. The federal budget has ballooned while Republicans controlled both Congress and the Presidency. Its gotten so bad that even George W. Bush had to caution the late Republican Congress against spending growth. That’s like Courtney Love warning someone about their addiction problems. When W thinks spending has gotten out of hand, you know you’ve got problems. Republican politicians talk fiscal discipline on the campaign trail, then go to Washington and state capitols and open up the public purse. More alarmingly, the Republicans have embraced the Democratic “nanny state” philosophy, passing all manner of laws interfering in highly personal choices, designed to protect us from our own choices. In Texas, for example, you must now take a “marriage class” in a state-approved course or pay a marriage fee of $60. Who thinks Texas will enjoy a big drop in the divorce rate? Congress, never to be outdone, actually expanded the historic jurisdiction of the federal courts to hear one particular case when it decided that it didn’t like how one Florida judge decided a dispute between a woman’s husband and parents over the husband’s life support decisions for his wife. Can’t wait til Congressional investigators come over to my house to tell me how it should be decorated (I’ve already got plenty of help in that regard).
The result has been, to varying degrees, that failure has become rare. Start some business in which you have no hope of succeeding, and just declare bankruptcy when it inevitably fails. Stick someone else with the cost of your bad decisions. Insist on being a farmer or steel manufacturer or airline when its clear you don’t have the resources to compete, and get your lobbyists to convince Congress to pay you your losses. Fall off a ladder, sue the manufacturer for not warning you that climbing ladders might be dangerous. Firing an incompetent employee has become nearly impossible, with employees possessing ample legal avenues to tie up the employer in court on specious claims. Spend all day sleeping at work, as did one current employee of an organization where I was formerly employed, and complain when you’re fired that you’re disabled because you have sleep apnea your employer should instead be paying for your treatment.
The tail end of my generation was about the last group that seemed to understand where all this was leading us, and tried to do something about it. First electing Reagan in 1980 on promises of tax and budget reform, and more importantly, believing that “government isn’t the solution to the problem, it is the problem,” the 1980s were about the last time that a working majority of Americans had some notion that a smaller, less-spending government was worth fighting for. But that glorious last wave died crashing into the seawall of politicians who found that Americans disapproved government programs generally but loved them when they helped them personally. Whether its expensive defense procurements that resulted in more Pacific Northwest jobs, or paying farmers not to grow crops, or giving subsidized loans to inefficient airlines, or propping up an inefficient and unpopular national train network, government has gone into the anti-failure business. News of some business going out of business, or leaving town, immediately prompts outcries for government to save it. No one thinks, maybe that company needed to go out of business.
Now that I've established that I hate poor people, I will turn to a discussion in part II of this epistle, coming soon, that this “no-fail” attitude for some time now been shaping the way we raise kids. Then I'll talk about Mike Gundy who claims to coach a squad of man-children.
That is all.
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