A minimalist approach to essential, transparent, accountable, flat, adaptable, responsive, solution-based government, rooted in virtuous individual autonomy, traditional values and free markets, with a bias towards reduction of government functionality, cost and scopeI really had done so without being aware of or researching the minarchist perspective. In part I want to maintain an independent perspective; in fact, I sometimes don't even visit websites on my blogroll for days or weeks at a time. In part, it's because I don't want to be unduly influenced by others. (I remember once reading that a famous rock singer-songwriter actually listened to classical music, not other rock acts, in his spare time.)
So how did the minimalism seep into my consciousness? First, I wrote my Master's thesis in math on a construct in abstract algebra called essential submodules (there are various topics of interest, including examination of descending or ascending chain conditions); this, of course, has no political context, but it explains my natural inclination to look at minimal or essential constructs.
Second, one of my professors at the University of Houston was Maryam Alavi (I think she is now with Emory). At the time she was doing research on prototyping methodology with respect to decision support systems. (In fact, she asked me to review the page proofs for an influential paper she published in Communications of the ACM.) I have written many times in the blog how I started my IT career as an APL programmer/analyst. APL is a concise, powerful interpretive mathematically-notated computing language which facilitated rapid application development and was an important technology for early work on decision support systems for management. Prototyping is a design approach which includes user input/feedback on a system, with a focus on key functionality; the basic idea is a proactive approach to detect design problems early in the process, when it's cheaper and easier to remedy design issues.
Third, some of my own work focused on these concepts. I was particularly interested in documentation and the human-computer interface. Just to provide some context, I once worked as a NASA subcontractor while I lived in Houston; I was doing FORTRAN programming (which I had picked up in undergraduate school). One day I was tasked with dumping some program or data from one system and loading it on another. That seemed to be a common task, but when I checked relevant documentation, I found long complicated command syntax and esoteric examples. So you had to master the syntax before you could do even very simple things. Similarly, a lot of technical documentation is written in a way where the author expects you to read it serially, as in a novel. But when you're a programmer trying to fix someone else's code and you have co-workers or clients waiting on or expecting a short-term fix, you don't have time to read a novel. I did background research in the reading-to-do literature in technical communication. I also recalled when I worked on my math degrees, there were popular books of the type "proofs by example or counterexample". I advocated application of prototyping to the technical communication process and recognition of the 80/20 principle. Similarly, I focused on usability issues in software/system design; I don't necessarily mean dumbing down the interface or trying to impress others with a 'cool' interface, but I wanted to strip away a Procrustean design to software and documentation; a user should not have to memorize technically-oriented cryptic acronyms or otherwise jump through hoops to get the information he wants or the functionality he needs.
John Carroll, an IBM researcher, published The Nurnberg Funnel, which really hit the sweet spot in terms of coalescing all these threads; his minimalist design approach focused on minimizing the time for a user to do something productive with the software, encouraging user experimentation, trial and error without Draconian effects, practical guidance, key user tasks and activities. One of the last research threads I worked on before having to leave academia during a recession (I had a one-year nonrenewable contract) involved my writing a minimal manual for SQL, an industry standard language introduced by IBM for extracting data from a relational (table-based) database; examples of commercial relational database products include Oracle Database, IBM's DB2, and Microsoft/Sybase SQL Server. Oracle was installed on UH's mainframe system when I took my graduate database courses. A former office mate, Minnie Yen, who is/has been chair of Alaska-Anchorage's MIS program, did her dissertation on an SQL topic. At the time, she had a student whom was taking database as an independent study, and Minnie and the student agreed to use my manual and provide feedback. (No, I haven't published it yet. It's probably boxed in a storage unit.)
Government Procrustean solutions abound. The atrocious ObamaCare website, going beyond the widely reported glitches, forces you to go through a tedious application process before you even get a price quote. When I looked for an individual policy some time back, I could get price quotes at a private-sector portal with a small number of questions. The government doesn't do that. Why? Because with its budget busting guaranteed issue and community rating policies, not to mention several unnecessary gold-plated benefit mandates, the "affordable" care plans are not so affordable. The government doesn't want people to know the price consequences of its incompetent, anti-market policies; after all, you may qualify for a government subsidy. But to know if you qualify for a subsidy, you need to jump through government hoops.
I'm not even going to go through the insanity, whether we are talking about health providers or the government, of constantly reentering the same information. Password utilities and/or browsers have provided similar functionality for form-filling predictable information. Again, the idea is to accommodate the user, to respect economy of effort, less busywork, not to accommodate some arbitrary technical design requirement.
My first DBA gig after leaving academia was a subcontractor to the regional EPA center in downtown Chicago. There was a custom application LIMS (laboratory information management system). Just hearing about the core design as an MIS academic made my head hurt. As I recall, core functionality was decided by three-quarter votes of the regional lab administrators, not the target user chemists. This was a perverse fusion bureaucratic-democratic process.
Regular readers of this blog are probably familiar with this experience I've discussed in other contexts. The network administrator group was responsible for tape backups of the database. I had multiple conversations with them about the backups and specifically whether they had tested restorations. I got a predictable defensive response (they didn't report to me, etc.) A contractor for the core custom application flew in to do the latest upgrade. Something unexpected happened during the upgrade, and he asked me to do a restore from the latest backup. That's when the network group discovered none of their backups were usable. I was told that the backup software reported that it had backed up the files, and they didn't feel the need to double-check.
I considered that a management failure, but it's not the reason for writing the story. It's when I had to go to the chemists and explain what happened; they might need to re-input the data that were lost. I didn't even know if that was possible. I was embarrassed, but what surprised me was the chemists seem unfazed by the failure and a couple of them vented about how the lab directors had forced them through a series of LIMS, that it seemed that just as soon as they got used to one system, another newer, better mousetrap came along, and they would have to learn that one. None of them were designed from the perspective of the chemist, and they had learned to maintain two sets of books/records (they didn't trust the official LIMS). That incident, in a nutshell, is a good metaphor for duplication and redundancy in government.
When I started the blog in 2008, I was definitely a fiscal conservative but more of a pragmatist. I largely black-boxed government operations and saw cutting-and-running from Iraq and Afghanistan as morally irresponsible. I was increasingly disenchanted with Bush. I had largely hoped that Bush would bring his bipartisan approach in Texas to Capitol Hill; that was perhaps unrealistic. But whether we are talking about his reluctance to use the veto, the unexpected increases in spending and deficits, the botched occupation of Iraq, his failure to adjust military policy in Iraq until after a disastrous 2006 mid-term, an unpaid-for Medicare expansion, his nomination of a Texas crony to the Supreme Court, his ill-fated attempts at social security and immigration reform. There was his own Keynesian stimulus and the mishandling of the economic tsunami, particular TARP. There was a lot of fear-mongering at the time of TARP; I think I was confused if there was a government issue, why fiscal (vs. monetary) policy was necessary. In the blog, I mostly focused on the politics involving TARP than the policy itself.
It's unclear at what point I shifted to a government minimalist approach; I think Rick Santelli's clarion call was a factor and there was the sheer horror of the first trillion dollar deficit. I think Obama's blatantly political handling of the Afghanistan surge decision contributed to it. And the Fed's extraordinary 5-year record of near zero interest rates seemed to be the same madness that led to multiple asset bubbles over a decade
I didn't come to my current perspective through Austrian School proponents like Ron Paul and Tom Woods. I had heard of them, of course; I had purchased a couple of Woods' books, one of them about the Catholic Church and Western Civilization. I think in part it came from having 2 advanced business degrees and knowledge of how businesses are turned around, often by divesting nonessential operations. It was clear the federal government is bloated and is on an unsustainable course. It was also clear that I couldn't philosophically give the Defense Department and our bloated foreign policy a pass. The final straw may have been a corrupt reelection in Afghanistan. At some point I become aware of libertarian/classically liberal (free market) economic blogs like Carpe Diem and Cafe Hayek, probably on an investment blog or a Google search.
Over the last 2 or 3 weeks I've introduced a new feature called Facebook Corner where I give more of a Q&A format on various issues; I've "liked" a handful of more libertarian groups. In last Monday's post, I published the following excerpt:
Being "conservative" is not a political position or a political alliance. It doesn't mean Republican or "Constitutionalist". It means you love your neighbor as you would want him to love you. It would certainly help 'the cause' if those that lived by that simple general code could also apply it to their political philosophy. [How would you describe yourself?]
I'm a fusion libertarian-conservative. Whereas descriptions may differ, we tend to focus on negative liberties (freedom of interference from others), non-intervention on economic and international policy and limited constitutional governance based on Western cultural values (like religious pluralism, the rule of law, etc.) We respect traditional institutions, like marriage, family, the church and community (often buffering against the State) and social/cultural norms (the virtues, Judaic-Christian values, etc.) To a certain extent, we also see local or state governance as a buffer/check on the central/federal government.I've also sometimes described myself as having an "anarcho"-capitalist streak. Just to explain: I've referred to justice and public safety/defense as core competencies. Ancaps focus on voluntarism as a guiding principle. Since even limited governance involved monopoly and use of force; to them, a little government is like being a little bit pregnant; it's a slippery slope. The term "minarchism" refers to minimal, core government. By having an ancap streak, I see ways of privatizing, decentralizing or bidding out relevant services. But whatever ancaps see as a resolution mechanism among competitive defense and justice systems is similar to what I call minarchism. A number of ancaps were/are from the Austrian School perspective including Rothbard and Tom Woods. You will see some ancaps refer to themselves as anarchists; however, traditionally anarchists have not recognized the right to property.
I indicated in another recent post what I think of the slippery slope argument made by anarchists/ancaps. I made an analogy to a diet; obviously, in order to thrive physically, we need to eat a necessary, nutritiously adequate amount of food; just because we need to eat to survive doesn't mean that we are endorsing an unlimited diet. Similarly, we need sufficient infrastructure to ensure a safe, transparent marketplace, to guard against fraud and to arbitrate terms of contracts; it doesn't mean or imply intervening in exchanges. When I speak of recognizing the need for a common defense or justice system, I'm not referring to unrestricted powers, e.g., to rationalize international meddling as a proactive security strategy. Some will point out Wikipedia refers to minarchism as a form of Statism. I see Statism as centralized control over the economy and/or social affairs, not as an arbiter or common defender. I should also note that I don't always come down on the side of the states under the concept of federalism--for example , we have seen states implement anti-competitive practices, e.g., occupational licensing and restrictions on interstate banking or health insurance. The Constitution was intended to ensure a free market across states.
