TM Lutas

Monkeywrenching Socialism – More inefficiency please

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If we were more inefficient about passing spending legislation, the government would shrink and Congress would grow more powerful at the expense of the bureaucracy. States would also benefit as federalism is renewed. Take your average spending bill, let’s say the defense bill. In the interests of efficiency there are a number of programs that go on autopilot and just ride along, largely unexamined. These program lives are largely determined by the executive.

Instead of 1 bill, why not make it a thousand bills all dealing with much smaller subjects, ideally single line items? The system would have many advantages, not least of which the end of the disgusting practice of having vital spending held hostage, conditioned on passage of dubious items. Presidential vetoes would become meaningful threats.

A further advantage would be that the system would force Congressmen and Senators to prioritize. You pass important spending up front and the also-rans end up at the rear. When you run out of time at the end of the year, the least important spending automatically is zeroed out.

Executive departments end up having their very existence depending on the timely production of documents demanded by Congress. Stonewall Congress and you’re likely to find your program’s appropriation held up, perhaps to the end of the year and your own program’s budget death. Since the bills are pinpoint accurate, neighboring programs are not affected at all.

The system would also tend to push spending down to the state and lower levels. If there’s an issue that could possibly be handled by the states, it’s much safer there under this system. But 50 state competition provides its own check on state level socialism as some states refuse to go along and reap the benefits of increased in-migration and booming economies.

The only real challenge is how to elect a Speaker who would make the rule changes necessary to implement the system, forcing each Congressman to lay out their priorities, and illegalizing the practice of grouping spending items in mammoth bills that hide all sorts of chicanery.

What if we took Alinsky seriously?

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A few questions that I haven’t seen answered, even by the right-wing blogosphere:

Who made the decision to not parallel prepare multiple solutions for stopping the oil leaking into the Gulf?

Who was the Coast Guard officer who decided to stop those 18 barges in Louisiana because he couldn’t get in touch with the owner?

Who stole Alabama’s booms?

Who stamped the denial on each foreign offer of cleanup aid?

Who mis-exercised their discretion and rigorously enforced the Jones Act?

For each incident, who stopped a bright, promising local initiative for cleanup?

Is there any doubt at all that if we took the whole Rules for Radicals thing seriously that we would know the names of the people who are making all these dumb decisions on the Gulf oil spill? But we don’t know them. The right wing should have personalized each one of these bad decisions and made it clear that if you get in the way of the people cleaning up, you are personally going to pay a price for it. That price is not being paid and the spill cleanup is being further hindered.

The blogosphere, and yes that includes me, bears some blame for that. We took a look at Alinsky but are showing now that we weren’t serious about it. We should start.

The Political Bazaar and the Political Cathedral

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Last night I got an excellent education in politics from a local old master at how they play the game in Lake County, Indiana. Halfway through it, I had an epiphany, that the whole internal system, top to bottom was largely based on “Cathedral” style thinking straight out of Eric S Raymond’s influential essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar and I had long ago decided that the bazaar had the winning argument, at least for this generation.

That moment cleared up a lot for me and clarified my thinking. I was having this discussion because the Indiana Republican Liberty Caucus had just organized a Lake county chapter and I was elected chairman. I was calling around and letting the town chairmen know that there was a new player in town on the GOP’s side and oh, could I stop by to introduce myself and the LC-INRLC at their next meeting.

The old master went on and I paid attention but my entire perspective shifted because I had realized that the fight I was in was a different fight than the one he was describing. Imagine building a cathedral in a bazaar. It’s a bit annoying to the rest of the bazaar but if you’ve got the scratch to reserve that much space, the bazaar will accommodate. Now imagine building a bazaar in a cathedral. The cathedral people will hate you because, inherently, your activities often won’t respect the day to day pieties of the cathedral you’re working in. Nobody has found a perfect solution to this, though the best of the cathedral builders in the software world have learned to make their peace and to change their structure to accommodate the bazaar builders that they rely on and compete with.

The ideological struggle with the left just got company as my top priority. Party building a GOP bazaar just snapped into focus as a major challenge.

It’s easy to have a disciplined euro, but nobody would want to join.

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Reading Gerard Baker’s speculations on Germany leaving the euro I got somewhat bored halfway through. The solution was as obvious as the fact that Mr. Baker, and perhaps most of Europe’s luminaries, are blind to it.

Europe is a hodge-podge of buried irredentist sentiment and maximalist territorial dreams. Do you want Greek discipline in paying its debts? No problem, force it to put up the islands that Turkey has wanted for a very long time and suggest that insufficient fiscal discipline will lead to an auction sale of the territory collateral complete with loss of sovereignty. Not only will this instill fiscal discipline in countries that have to put up parts of their own territory, it will induce their neighbors to save up “wishful thinking” funds to bid the real estate up high enough.

Is the UK spendthrift? Have them put up Gibraltar as collateral and watch the Spanish suddenly start saving like mad in hopes of an auction. No doubt Moroccan finances would tilt towards fiscal surpluses as well.

The utter national humiliation of dismembering your own country to finance social spending should set things right. And if not, well, other hands would take over their country’s ultimate assets, national sovereignty.

Everybody draw Mohammed redux

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Well, I drew Mohammed, albeit in a purely derivative way (which makes me an ultra conventional modern artist, I guess). I did it this way to make a very minor point, that one does not have to be disrespectful to stand up for your rights. I will never fall into idolatry over Mohammed. If he is in Heaven, he got there by an extraordinary act of mercy by the grace of God in my opinion because he did many wicked things on earth and led many people astray. Even under a Caliphate run by normal muslims I would retain the right to that opinion as a dhimmi.

But I drew Mohammed today because many muslims are not normal and their more numerous normal bretheren are not keeping these extremists in check. I don’t expect that my blog post will get me any more than inclusion in the generic condemnation by these evil muslim jurists who abuse their powers and shame their own faith through their exaggerated fatwas but it’s the thought that counts. I stand with freedom and against censorship. I’ve done my bit. Now it’s your turn.