The Government is Like Fire:  Necessary and Dangerous

--by Robert Arvay

(this commentary is freely available for reprint)

 

There is an old adage that says, fire is a useful servant, but a cruel master.  Fire is useful when it is restricted to the fireplace, but when it escapes into the parlor, fire is destructive and deadly.

      The government is like fire.  It is both necessary and dangerous.  When kept to its proper confine, i.e., to the Constitution, it is the servant of the people.  When government becomes its own special interest, it ceases to be a servant, and becomes the proverbial cruel master.

      This has always been the case.  So why is the present any different from the past?

      The answer is that today, technology has given to the government new powers that were never foreseen by the Founders.  In 1776, the government could not keep tabs on every citizen’s every conversation.  Today, it can, at least to a very large extent.

      Technology is power.  Power, when it is in the hands of only one or a few individuals, is almost certain to be abused.  Even if today the government is benevolent and responsible, tomorrow it can turn on a dime, and become oppressive.  The old saying, the lament of peasants for millennia, was, “Let us hope that the next king will be a good one.”  That wish was rarely fulfilled.

      The Founders did not rest their hopes on wishing for a good king.  They wisely did not trust that the government would be reliably honest and benevolent.  The framers of the Constitution deliberately designed a government that is never to be trusted, but rather, to be restrained by, and held accountable to, the people.  The government rightly owns no power, none, zero.  Power belongs only to the people, and the people lend power, not give it, to their servants in government.  We can withdraw that power upon our whim, without permission of the government.  At least, that’s how it is supposed to work.

      Today, the intent of the Framers has been thwarted.  No longer are there three independent branches of government, each keeping the others in check.  Instead, there are numerous fiefdoms, various departments of government, each vying to become the preeminent power over all the others.  Envelope please . . . and the winner is, the Executive Branch, the White House, the Presidential throne of power.

      The president and his minions have not been shy about “working around” the other two branches of government.  “If congress will not act, then I will,” or words similar to those, have been spoken by the president.  He has openly issued thinly veiled threats to the Supreme Court whenever it has ruled in ways of which he disapproves.

      Perhaps the most pernicious abuses of power have arisen from the National Security Agency (NSA) and similar agencies of government.  Here, the threat need not be clearly  spoken aloud.  If you do not grant me the unquestioned powers needed to defend you from terrorist attacks, then thousands of you will be murdered by terrorists.

      This unspoken threat is all the more intimidating because there is a basis to it in fact.  The nation does indeed need to use secrets and covertness to outmaneuver those who would kill us.  If we demand that the government have no secrets, then our enemies will exploit our vulnerabilities with deadly result.

      We are caught on the horns of a dilemma.  How do we keep secrets from the enemy, without granting secret agencies of the government unaccountable powers that are sure to be abused, if not now, then eventually?

      How do we defend our nation, while at the same time, ensuring that it remains worth defending?  How do we defeat tyrants without installing one in our White House?  How do we thwart terrorists, without spawning terrorists within our own government?  How do we intervene in Syria without becoming Syria?

      The answer is to restore Congress to its proper role as the watchdog.  Here are two steps that should be taken immediately.

      First, no unelected bureau of government should ever be permitted to enact regulations without the express consent of Congress.  Every bureaucratic regulation should be examined by Congress prior to its taking effect.  Every regulation should be voted on by both houses of Congress, the same as with any law.

      Second, Congress should appoint its own inspectors general to oversee each and every agency of the federal government.  These inspectors must have full and constant access to everything that the executive does, with only those exceptions already exempted by the courts.  The inspectors must answer only to Congress and the American people.  Such constant and intrusive inspections would have prevented such atrocities as the gunrunning operation that has killed hundreds of Mexicans and one U.S. Border Patrol agent.  They would have detected the abuses by the Internal Revenue Service before harm could have been done.

      Unfortunately, Congress has failed to do its duty to the people who elected it.  The members of Congress have become the dukes and duchesses of the modern American kingdom, not the rebellious nobles who forced the king to sign and comply with the Magna Carta.

      The king is not complying.  He is reigning.

      Now it is up to us, the people.  If we accede to slavery, then slaves we shall become, but if it is freedom for which we yearn, then we must prepare to pay the fearsome price it demands.  However high that price is, it is as nothing compared to the horror of having sold our children into cruel bondage.

      We must hurry, for the fire is already in the parlor.

Why ObamaCare is Failing

--by Robert Arvay
(this commentary is freely available for reprint)

 Enough with the ideology.  Let’s get down to the nuts and bolts.  If you hire incompetents to build a jet airliner, the plane will either never take off, or it will crash.  That is so obvious that even an incompetent manager can predict it.  The same holds true for software design.  Incompetent project managers cannot— repeat, cannot, put together a functional, working program.  Period.

There is no mystery to it.  The science of project management is ancient.  It was used to build the pyramids.  During the twentieth century, it advanced by leaps and bounds.  With the advent of the space rocket program, Murphy’s Law was discovered, which says that if anything can go wrong, it will.  Computer software can be just as complex.

While there is no mystery to project management, there is a lot of complicated, hard work involved.  Yes, it is rocket science. 

From the very beginning, the entire project must be mapped out on a flow chart.  The flow chart is a maze of boxes, each connected to the others by arrows, showing which steps must be taken, when, and by whom.  Within each box are other boxes, showing who is responsible for what.  Every step and sub-step must be accounted for in excruciating detail.  If not, then failure is inevitable.  For the project manager, that is a lot of complicated, hard work.  Did we say it is hard work?

Ironically, the project manager for a computer program does not have to know very much about computers.  That seems odd, but let’s face it, not one person involved in the space program knows everything about every piece of equipment on board the rocket.

What the project manager must do is to educate herself on the important principles, and then to ensure that each and every box on the flow chart is accounted for by one, yes one, responsible person per box.

The first time I ever got involved in managing a project— and it was much simpler than the ObamaCare rollout— my result was a colossal failure.  Fortunately, I got it right the second time, but only after learning some brutal lessons.  Most of them involved accountability.

My mistake early on was to trust the people whom I should have been holding accountable.  That was fatal to the project.  At every point of the project, someone who is not personally associated with the workers, must scrutinize whether the “box” on the flow chart has been properly completed.  The worker must be able to prove that he completed every feature of his part of the project.  Every worker must know, ahead of time, that management will not simply take their word for it.  Each worker must know exactly when each of his deadlines is to be met.  And each must know that no excuses will be accepted.   None.  If and when a problem arises, the worker must immediately report that.  And he must be listened to.  Intently.

The hardest working member of the project team must be the project manager.  She must constantly read the progress reports, quickly identify any bottlenecks, and promptly and aggressively resolve them.  If this means being awakened at 3 AM because a supply truck did not arrive on schedule, then so be it.

During the course of a large scale project, occasions will arise when people must be fired.  Whether that person is the janitor or a master engineer, failure due to incompetent actions must be quickly and decisively identified, and when necessary, punished.  The person being fired must be the right one, but the word “fairness” does not enter into it.  The phrase, “he did his best” is irrelevant.

Large scale project management is not for the faint of heart.  Too much is at stake.  The project will never succeed unless every nut and bolt is in its exact, precise place.  Jet airliners do not fly on excuses.

Barack Obama did none of this.  Kathleen Sebelius did none of this.  Had they done their jobs, they would have been able to document early on, what was going wrong, and what was being done to correct matters.  The computer project would have succeeded.

Not only did they not do their jobs, they seem not to care.  They blame others.  They disavow any personal responsibility.  They deny that any part of the massive failure had anything to do with them.  They deny knowing anything.

When the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids, they did not wait until a catastrophic collapse to bring in the “A” Team.  They did not blame the Assyrians.  And as for excuses, anyone who was negligent in their duties made their excuses to the guy with the headsman’s axe.

Project management is a dirty, brutal, and necessary affair.  Politics is just dirty.  And it was politics, not sound management theory, that caused the failure of the ObamaCare computer program.  But, then, it was politics that designed the entire ObamaCare law to begin with. 

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George Washington:  Founding Father and Slave Master

--by Robert Arvay
(this commentary is freely available for reprint)

After World War 2, Germany rose from the ashes of defeat to become a modern, civilized nation.  It also confronted its Nazi past.  While many war criminals were put to death or imprisoned for the atrocities they had committed, many other evildoers escaped punishment.  Some of these were hunted down by the law enforcement officials of Israel and other nations.  Years after the war, Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann was caught, publicly tried, found guilty and put to death for his unspeakable crimes of inhumanity.

Some people are not satisfied that Germany did everything possible to expiate its guilt.  Despite millions of its people dead, its homeland carved up between the victors, and lasting international shame, some people say it was not enough.  Nothing, however, could have been enough.  The horrors inflicted by Nazis upon the innocent can never be fully atoned for by earthly punishment.  Yet, whatever else one may say, Germany did come a long way, rising from the darkest depths of evil to the sunshine of humane civilized standards.

The reason for mentioning this is neither to condemn nor to excuse present-day Germans, but to reflect upon and analyze a frequent criticism of the United States, and in particular, its Constitution. 

When the Constitution was ratified in 1791, it became the highest law of the land.  It embodied the highest ideals of any nation in history.  Its concepts of human rights, enshrined in law, and implemented by social contract, represent the pinnacle of human virtue.

It also continued slavery as a legal institution.  Slavery in America was evil, an evil that cannot be overstated.  It separated men from their wives, and mothers from their children.  It condemned innocent human beings to living out their entire lives beneath the whips of cruel overseers.  To fully list all the evils of slavery is too agonizing, and too shameful for any decent American to bear.  But they are many, and they are without justification.

Some say that the American Civil War of the 1860s was punishment for the sin of slavery.  It was, but no earthly punishment could suffice.  Nearly a century and a half after the end of slavery, its after-shocks persist, in the form of racial tensions, the disintegration of the family, and the enactment of supposed civil rights laws that do much good and more evil, more evil because political opportunists use those laws to perpetuate grievances instead of enacting solutions.

All of which brings us back to the Founding Fathers, including truly great men, men such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

These men were nothing like the Nazis, nothing at all.  Having said that, it must also be said that no excuse can be made for their part in the atrocities of slavery.  And no excuse is sufficient to explain why the Constitution permitted slavery.

To that extent, we must, as a nation, be humble about our history.  And we must seek to reconcile the ideals of the Constitution with the sordid history of slavery.

Unlike the founding of National Socialism under Adolph Hitler, the American dream of 1776 was never an evil plot to destroy human decency.  Failure to recognize the difference is crucial to understanding where America has been, and where it can go.  It is the difference between inherent evil, and incidental evil, between evil intentions, and misguided intentions.

In 1776, slavery had already been a social institution for millennia.  For thousands of years, humans had lived under the cruelty of bondage, the indignity of forced servitude.  The British Empire did not outlaw it until 1802.  The French had practiced it when they founded the island territory of Haiti.  It persists in Africa and the Middle East to this day in various forms.  Communist nations disguise it, but the essence is the same.

Half of America knew that slavery is an evil, and by every peaceful ploy and means, struggled to end it.  The Civil War, although not primarily fought to end slavery, was brought about by the schism, by the fact that, as Abraham Lincoln said, quoting the Bible, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Yes, the Constitution permitted slavery, but every principle underlying it cried out, then as now, against bondage.  Human rights, human dignity, and human freedom are its heart and soul.  The compromise, permitting slavery in only some states, seemed at the time necessary and practical.  In hindsight, it turns out to have been neither.  The free states would have been better off without the slave states.  Independence would have been less certain, achieved more slowly, and come at a much higher cost, but the outcome would have spared us from the lasting legacy of human bondage which plagues us to this day.

Let us not, however, buy into the argument, posed by some, that because the Founders committed their grievous error, that because they committed this original national sin against God and humanity, that therefore, the principles underlying the Constitution itself make it a fundamentally flawed document.

The Bible shamelessly records the Twelve Apostles of Jesus as being so deeply flawed as individuals, that it seems inconceivable that most of them would rise above their sinfulness and revolutionize the world, even at the cost of their own freedom, at the loss of their own lives.  The Bible, unlike the Constitution, is perfect.

In contrast, the Constitution is imperfect.  It was, however, prayerfully and devotedly constructed by fallible men, sinners, apostles of freedom— and while it is imperfect, it is far from being fatally flawed.  Its core principles are at the height of human achievement.

Contrary to what our present president says, it was not a mistake that the Constitution does not mandate a government that provides all manner of goods and services to its people.  Such a mandate leads inevitably to slavery.  We’ve come too far away from slavery to put it back in our Constitution now.

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Defending the Indefensible, and Doing it Well

--by Robert Arvay
(this commentary is freely available for reprint)

Liberals insist that they know better than you do, what is good for you, and if you refuse to cooperate, they have a right to force you to submit to their wisdom.  They honestly believe that they can run your life better than you.  You just don’t know what is good for you.

If you doubt that, just listen to the way that advocates of Obama-care defend its failures.  People are complaining that as a result of the ACA (Affordable Care Act, or Obama-care), they have been kicked off their health insurance.  This has happened because the government has set new requirements on what the insurance must cover.  These new requirements are expensive.  In some cases, the insurance company could no longer afford to comply with the new government rules.  In other cases, employers have had to lay off full time workers, or reduce their hours, to avoid being bankrupted by the ACA, and therefore, leaving formerly insured employees with no insurance.

One would think that the advocates of ACA would finally, finally admit the obvious.  The promises have been broken.  As it turns out, you cannot keep your insurance plan.  You cannot keep your doctor.  Your insurance costs will go up, not down.  Two plus two equals four, not billions in savings.

But no.  The Obamaniacs will not admit to any of that.  Instead, here is their excuse:  you see, the insurance plan that you had, the one you liked, the one you were promised you could keep— yeah that one, the one that is now gone— well, you see, that was a bad plan.  Bad.  It didn’t cover pregnancy costs for eighty-year-old ladies.  Indeed, it did not even cover pregnancy costs for men.  You fool.  How could you have ever thought that was a good plan?

We, the elite, the powerful, we will decide for you what is good for you.  We will ignore your silly opinions.  We will ignore your right to choose for yourself.  We will take from you to give to others, because the greater good demands it.  After all, if we do not cover health costs for illegal aliens, then where will those illegal aliens go?  Don’t answer that.  For whom will those illegal aliens illegally vote?  Don’t answer that.  And after all, aren’t we, the powerful elite, subject to the very same laws that we force upon you?  Don’t.

Of course, the liberal elites do not phrase it this way.  They are much more polished in their delivery.  Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who designed the ACA, filibustered Megyn Kelly as she asked the obvious questions which the liberals never answer.  The You Tube Video is at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYPaNEM9oI

Emanuel has a very polished delivery, but his arrogance and elitism dominate all that.  Don’t fall for it.  There is a difference between being smart, and being cunning.  Emanuel is not smart.

Of course, if you decide to let him run your life, that is your decision to make, not mine.  I’m just not smart enough to make that decision for you.

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What Liberals Do Not Understand About Insurance

What Liberals Do Not Understand About Insurance

--by Robert Arvay

(this commentary is freely available for reprint)

If liberals had the slightest clue how insurance works, they would never have allowed insurance companies to have any part of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obama Care.

The insurance companies have suckered the Democrats, and doomed Obama Care in the process.

To understand this, one has to understand what liberals do not:  how insurance works.

On the simplest level, it works like this:

Suppose you have built a house.  Several other people have built houses nearby, houses much like yours.  As with all such houses, there is a danger of fire.  This danger comes about because of such things as cooking accidents in the kitchen, a mouse eating through a wire, or lightning.  If this happens, the house could be damaged or destroyed, inflicting costs that could make the homeowner homeless.

To reduce the risk of becoming homeless, the homeowners get together and decide to form an insurance cooperative.  Each homeowner will contribute into a fund.  Money from the fund will pay for any fire loss to a home.  To seed the fund, the homeowners take out a bank loan, to be paid off in installments over a period of years.

That’s it.  That’s how insurance works.  Of course, this is the simplest case.  Let’s complicate it just a bit.

One day, there is a small fire in Joe’s house.  The damage is minimal.  But the neighbors ask Joe what happened.  He tells them that he fell asleep on the couch with a lit cigarette.  Fortunately, his wife saw smoke, and quickly put the fire out before it could spread.  Still, it was a close call.  It could have been much worse.

Everyone is glad that Joe is okay, but someone points out that only a small portion of the homeowners smoke.  Smoking cigarettes in a house increases the chance of fire.  That adds risk.  But why should all the non-smoking homeowners pay extra, for a risk that not all of them have?  If Joe wishes to remain in the insurance cooperative, shouldn’t he bear the extra cost of the extra risk which he is adding?

If this is not immediately clear, let’s compare it to health insurance.

If Joe smokes, and he has health insurance, he is at greater risk of developing health problems than non-smokers.  Should non-smokers pay for the added risk which Joe incurs?

This question, and others, are answered by the policy holders.  If an insurance company decides to charge the same health premium for smokers as for non-smokers, then they must raise enough money to cover the extra health costs that smokers have.

If they do this, then the non-smokers are free to find less expensive health insurance from a company that does not charge them for the added risk.  Thus, the smokers wind up getting charged more for their health insurance.

Is that fair?  Should it be legal for insurance companies to discriminate against smokers?

For an answer to that, let’s return to house insurance.  Joe has agreed to pay extra, to cover the added risk that his smoking places on the cooperative.

Then one day, Mack builds a house nearby, and the neighbors invite him to join the insurance cooperative.  Mack decides not to join.  However, a few days later, he rushes into the office of the insurance cooperative, and urgently requests to buy fire insurance.  Mack is in a hurry to do this, because his house is on fire.

Should Mack be allowed to buy fire insurance for his house?  After all, his house now has a pre-existing condition, and it would not be fair to discriminate against him.

These parables exhibit the simplest principles governing how insurance works.  They are simple, but far beyond the ability of liberal policymakers to understand and apply.

Liberals believe that everyone has a right to health insurance, even if they have a pre-existing condition that makes their risks much higher than the risks of other people.  They believe that even if people cannot afford health care, it should be provided to them free.

Mack has a right to a free house.  Why shouldn’t his neighbors have to pay for it?

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