Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf.
American Indian Proverb
Stopping the Spinning Wheel: Traffic Regulation
I have to say this is already one of my favorite Youtube videos ever (HT Carpe Diem). The video shows on the left traffic after a power outage in Auckland, New Zealand late afternoon; on the right, at the same time of day, we see the traffic with the traffic lights restored.
It's amusing to read the Youtube comments of statists in a state of denial, arguing apples and oranges, but I have driven many times with dead traffic lights, no policeman to guide traffic, and people are meticulously patient, courteous and careful and I've found that I usually get through an intersection faster.
In fact I've often felt it was SAFER. Why? Traffic lights affect how people drive. A number of people may trust other people to obey traffic lights and proceed before checking crossing lanes. A lot of people think they can outrace a yellow light and don't want to be stuck sitting at an intersection. In some cases, especially for cars following huge trucks, the driver may find his view of the traffic light obstructed. Other frustrated drivers get off to jackrabbit starts; drivers who have lost the left only light caught in an intersection may make aggressive turns in front of oncoming traffic. There are probably 101 other reasons of "real life" driving issues with traffic lights; statists will no doubt argue, "Well, they've violated traffic laws, too." But, among other things, there are timing efficiency issues with many lights; for example, I've been at red lights at 4AM with no traffic in sight, I've been in some intersections where it can take literally 4 light changes to clear the left only lane (e.g., in McLean, VA). I've also hit every single light at normal speed with no crossing traffic at the intersections.
Here's the critical point from a libertarian perspective: a statist solution introduces moral hazard: for example, if I know that the government is going to pay me a pension when I turn 65, maybe I'm not as motivated to save for retirement. If the government guarantees my health care, why should I worry about diet and exercise: after all, if I develop a bad health condition due to my personal decisions, the government is going to cover it, and I have Democrats to ensure that my premiums will be "affordable" and never go up, no matter how obese or unhealthy I get... If the government regulates traffic, I shouldn't have to worry about crossing or oncoming traffic because, hey, I've got the green light; they have to obey the rules.
When you have economic liberty, you are fully engaged and vested in your actions--in retirement security, health security, traffic security, etc. You don't have unrealistic expectations whether a federal government with over $40T in unfunded senior citizen liabilities will meet its unsustainable commitments.
Last June 19, I wrote a post recommending a McCloskey essay which, among other things, took on a high liberal (progressive) Elizabeth Anderson (and others). Anderson's competing essay reads like a Barack Obama's Greatest Hit album. She rattles off a number of "essential" government services, e.g., federal inspections from meat packers to "save us" from traces of rat feces or an occasional human finger ground up in our sausages (see Political Humor section below) and unregulated traffic. (I've made occasional sarcastic "feces" references since then.)
My Feb. 16 post introduced the Word of the Day: iatrogenic. The late Senator Moynihan used the term (e.g., where a doctor in the process of examining or treating a patient makes his condition worse) in reference to the government. All Big Government is iatrogenic.
Good Description of College Teaching/Lecturing
I have sometimes described my college teaching experience as being on my stage; I personally preferred the much-maligned lecture format. I came to class with a word-processed set of highly-organized notes, but I never read from my notes, other than when I was writing things on the board, and as an occasional check to ensure I covered all my points. I wouldn't say I saw myself as an entertainer, especially when I was teaching abstract concepts or the syntax of computer languages: football players have to get in shape with various workouts, drills, and scrimmages before they're ready to play regular season games; runners prepare for a marathon through countless hours of mind-numbing jogging.
I think the best lecturer I've ever seen, particularly in a large class setting (hundreds of students) was Michael Parks, probably my closest faculty friend and a mentor (no, don't blame him for my political ideology: no one at UH is to blame; I don't recall discussing politics with any professor, inside or outside the classroom). (Not to take away from Richard Scamell, my dissertation chair, whom also happens to be one of the best teaching professors ever; my selection of chair had more to do with the nature of my research.) Parks is brilliant; you should see his eyes light up when he starts talking about Turing machines. In any event, before teaching COBOL (a business/English-like computing language) for the first time (in our program at the time, the undergraduate MIS core requirement in the business school), I decided to audit a few of his lectures, and I was absolutely spellbound. It wasn't so much the content as the process. Once every semester he would have a lecture which I'll loosely call "COBOL theater" where students would play parts in running a job on the computer.
I think, as a natural polymath and scholar, I have a way of modeling the learning process. When professors start labeling themselves as teaching or research professor, it's unfortunate. The natural curiosity of a gifted scholar, his intellectual rigor, his approach to a problem. I used to LOVE "The Paper Chase"--not because I had a desire to become a lawyer. (Could you imagine advancing all the way to becoming Supreme Court Chief Justice and make a critical decision, not understanding the difference between a penalty and a tax?) But Professor Kingsfield says it all: "you come in here with a skull full of mush, and if you succeed, you leave thinking like a lawyer". I wouldn't say I achieved that level--students didn't leave my classes ready to take a job as a professional COBOL programmer. But in many cases, their prior college courses were little more than glorified high school courses. I taught a legitimate college course, and I treated my students as adults. But I knew the material inside-out, and I was constantly looking at the students for feedback, I would bring in examples from out of class, I would use my sense of humor. Now I definitely wasn't popular with the students (although surprisingly I had my fair share of white knights), and it would show up in the subjective rating measures. In part, especially after I left Houston, I taught at metropolitan public universities with lower admission standards; a lot of those students were simply collecting card punches towards their college diplomas and hopefully a good-paying job. Many of them were working several hours a week, and here was this professor expecting them to spend more time on his course than other professors. I can only daydream of what might have been, say, being in a private residential college with higher achieving students and other faculty interested in joint research, but my last academic job offer was more than a decade ago. I came close to returning to the profession on a couple of occasions in 1999-2003.
I was on the Chronicle (of Higher Education)'s website, reading about how a nationally recognized anthropology Kansas State professor Michael Wesch, who loves to infuse his active teaching methods with various cloud-based technologies (e.g., Google Docs, Youtube, Twitter, etc.), is reassessing his general prescription after getting some feedback from other professors (effectively, challenging the generality of his recommendations) Wesch hates the "outmoded, authoritarian" lecture/chalkboard approach; I personally think this is a stereotype. I cannot recall a single time I ever belittled or embarrassed a class member. If a student would come late to lecture, for example, I didn't want to reward the behavior with special attention. If it happened more than once, I would summon him at the end of lecture. There were times, like when I was teaching database at UTEP, when I discovered a prerequisite topic of data structures hadn't been covered in the prerequisite course called data structures; I revised my lectures on the fly to accommodate that. Hats off to Wesch's Kansas State colleague Christopher Sorensen (my edits):
Christopher Sorensen also teaches at Kansas State University, and he too has been named a national teacher of the year. But Mr. Sorensen, a physics professor, is decidedly old-school in his methods. Exactly how he connects with a roomful of students is unclear to him, but he senses that it happens. "I walk into the classroom, and I get into a fifth gear, you might say. My voice goes up and down. It's almost like being an actor. But don't get me wrong, I've never been an actor or anything." Even though he has been teaching for some 34 years, he still spends the morning before each class preparing—rehearsing the material in his mind. Mr. Sorensen has heard increasing questions about whether the lecture—his preferred method—is an effective way to teach. One study he saw found that students in after-class interviews remember only 20 percent of the material. Yet he still champions the approach. "The way I look at it is, I've plowed the ground," he says. "Now they're susceptible the next time they see the material. And you'll give them an assignment, and that forces them to look at the material in a new way." As he sees it, his job is less about being an expert imparting facts and figures, and more about being a salesman convincing students that his material is worth their attention. "The messenger, ironically enough, is more important than the message," he says. "If the messenger is excited and passionate about what they have to say, it leaves a good impression. It stimulates students to see what all this excitement is about."Well, unlike Wesch or Sorensen, I've never been named teacher of the year. (I have been called other things by students...) But I've never heard another professor says the same type things I say in describing my college teaching experience; it's like we're kindred spirits (except his students like him--I'm probably more of an acquired taste).
Stopping the Spinning Wheel: Obama's Auto "Rescue"
Obama wants you to think while he dithered on the auto bankruptcies, extending loans to businesses he arbitrarily decided (on the unspecified behalf of his interest group supporters, Big Auto Labor) were "too big to fail", a concept totally unacceptable to free-market (classical) liberals like myself; we don't like it when it's applied to banks, and we don't like it when it's applied to insurance, cars, or whatever.
I have seen former Obama car czar Steve Rattner's attack on Romney's famous op-ed in late 2008 arguing the moral hazard of what Bush and later Obama were doing, deferring the day of reckoning, and letting the the free market and existing bankruptcy regulations work. Writing a related commentary on Rattner is on my to-do list (I wanted to see the Romney campaign respond first), but Romney's column is one of the best things that he has ever written; anyone who buys into the flip-flopping reputation seriously underestimates a man whom by his own bootstraps made his fortune.
Romney's big problem is simplifying his message; I understand where he's coming from: he doesn't want to be seen as divisive or inflexible or promise easy solutions to complex situations. There's also a difference in political style; there was an interesting Time article piece discussing his mother Lenore's unsuccessful run for the US Senate against a Democratic incumbent during the first Nixon mid-term. Mitt's father George, a former sales guy and auto executive, was very aggressive (even climbing a fence once to argue to the union members gathered inside against the leadership's plan to support a straight-Democrat ticket); Lenore was uncomfortable with confrontation, and in many ways, Mitt, as a politician, is his mother's son. I think in a way, his attempts to strike a conciliatory message can come across as unprincipled.
Unfortunately, George's unsuccessful run for the 1968 nomination as the initial front runner against Nixon died after a series of gaffes, the most infamous was when he said that his earlier support for the Vietnam War was due to having been "brainwashed" by the government. (My personal response: I would have probably said something like the following: "When I visited Vietnam, I was not in charge of government foreign policy. I wanted to be seen as supportive of the troops. But since then, I've made the decision to run for President. Circumstances have changed, and I've learned more about Vietnam. I've decided that the current war is unsustainable; we have spent enough American blood and treasure. The time has come for the Vietnamese people to step up and take charge of their destiny.") This is another aspect of Mitt's politics: he saw his Dad's 1968 campaign derailed by key messaging mistakes, and so he has a more risk-averse political style (but he still has a gaffe problem not unlike George H.W. Bush of being seen detached from the ordinary American's way of life, e.g., the infamous supermarket scanner event. (The Democrats want to pull the same game this election: the discussions of multiple homes, car elevators, etc. Of course, they're putting up a millionaire author whom bought a $1.6M mansion before he became President, sends his daughters to a school that charges $30K tuition per year, has played at least 100 rounds of golf during his term, eats arugula versus iceberg lettuce, and shops at Whole Foods, not Kroger. Conservatives should avoid treating the symptoms (i.e., the class warfare populism) versus the disease: the major issue Romney needs to address is showing that he identifies with the plight of everyday Americans.)
As I've pointed out in past posts, the handwriting was on the wall: GM actually was already in a negative net worth situation more than a year before the start of the recession. The fact that Ford survived without filing bankruptcy and the fact that other foreign automakers with plants in the US (Honda, Toyota, etc.) are also operating successfully. Would GM and/or Chrysler have survived? Undoubtedly in some downsized form, perhaps under new names, under new management and without burdensome labor pacts, perhaps some joint ventures. (To counter one of Rattner's points, if I was a capitalist looking to make a stake in GM or Chrysler, the last people I would have been doing business with is the US government; the federal government's deals come with meddlesome strings attached.) What about various suppliers, etc.? The fact of the matter was GM and Chrysler's suppliers knew about the automaker's problems (and were already feeling the pinch of declining auto sales) and realized the risks; no doubt prudent suppliers were developing other lines of business (e.g., with foreign automakers or alternate industries, products and markets)
Here's the point: we have an American President who has been involved in business matters, including terminating executives, without business or industry knowledge and experience. And with American taxpayers still in the red, President Obama is shamelessly promoting the fact that he is picking winners and losers in the private sector, using taxpayer money to fund a fight against industry participants whom have played by the rules and now instead of being in a position of wooing customers to switch brands, they find their own tax dollars boomeranging, being used to compete against them... It's Obama's version of "fair and balanced".
We have nearly 240M registered vehicles in the US, about 55% of which are passenger cars. New vehicle sales over the past several years have ranged from a low of 10M to 17M.
I'm listing below the top 7 American-made vehicles according to cars.com (HT Carpe Diem) (model, location of plants): "Cars.com's American-Made Index rates vehicles built and bought in the U.S. Factors include sales, where the car's parts come from and whether the car is assembled in the U.S. We disqualify models with a domestic parts content rating below 75 percent, models built exclusively outside the U.S. or models soon to be discontinued without a U.S.-built successor."
The cars.com post also notes that the number of models sold by Ford over the past 5 years with 75% or high domestic content has decreased from 20 to 3, while the top 3 models with 80% or more American-made parts, assembly, and engines/transmissions are sold by Toyota, Honda and Ford. As you can see, neither GM nor Chrysler placed a single make in the top 5.
- Toyota Camry; Georgetown, Ky.;Lafayette, Ind.
- Ford F-150; Dearborn, Mich.; Claycomo, Mo.
- Honda Accord; Marysville, Ohio
- Toyota Sienna; Princeton, Ind.
- Honda Pilot; Lincoln, Ala.
- Chevrolet Traverse; Lansing, Mich.
- Toyota Tundra; San Antonio
Political Humor
There's an amusing Chip Bok cartoon (available here) of teacher Chief Justice Roberts handing former Speaker Nancy Pelosi handing back her voluminous ObamaCare bill with a grade of D-. Roberts noted that he had to rewrite parts of the bill (i.e., convert the insurance mandate penalty into a tax), and Pelosi responds, "What was in it?" (i.e., "We have to pass the (health care) bill so that you can find out what is in it.") My immediate reaction is an Escher-like self-reflexive piece like Drawing Hands or the Citizen Kane mirror-inside-a-mirror image: if the federal government keeps watch on meat packers, who keeps watch on the government? And if Upton Sinclair's research for The Jungle at Chicago meat packing companies in the early 1900's revealed disgusting things in the sausage (e.g., unsanitary meat (dropped in dirt and sawdust or covered with rat dung), the occasional dead or poisoned rat, etc.), just who is governing the federal government? Just imagine the nasty things you'll find inside this corrupt partisan sausage making... You'll find soiled, shredded copies of the US Constitution; government pork behind all that lipstick; just like the meat packers used chemicals to mask the appearance, smell or taste of the sausage's filler ingredients, Obama uses flowery snake oil sales hype masking the stench of what we Texans call "cow pies". Obama would do very well in competitive cow pie tossing contests; he has shown an ability to toss BS around the world in a single sound bite.
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, "You Wreck Me"
