Musings

This is for my liberal friends.

Last night, I was thinking about the tree house I've been working on with the girls, trying to figure out how I want to build the ladder for it.  I was thinking a bit about work, mulling over a problem that I've got to tackle today.  I was also playing a game online, killing internet dragons, and being a proud Dada contemplating my oldest's upcoming volleyball game today.

And I was thinking about our government.

I don't think I'm that much different from the average American.  I've got a family I worry about, friends I love and cherish, co-workers I respect, and when I get home at the end of the day, I have a dozen little things running through my head.  There's grass to cut, dogs to wash, cars that need to be inspected, laundry to be put away, kids to bathe and put to bed.  My wife and I both think about, and do, all these things...

And we think about our government.

My main thought these days is that our current government is a horribly inefficient beast.  Its investment strategy stinks.  Its labor efficiency is abysmal.  In the best case, the political need to do outweighs the practical need to do the right thing.  In the worst case, the everything else - efficiency, practicality, and even legality - take a back seat to accomplishing the goal of growing, strengthening, and increasing the importance of the government.

It's the engineer in me, really.  I have to continually remind myself of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy in order to keep my head from spinning.  There's a tipping point where the majority of effort from an organization goes from providing benefit for others to providing benefits for itself.  Once you cross this point, it's a long, fast downhill slide to destruction.  In the free market, companies who pass this point quickly become ex-companies.

In the larger world, governments that pass this point quickly become ex-governments.

I may be optimistic, but I don't think we've hit this tipping point yet here in the US.  We still have an opportunity to pull back from the brink, and to start valuing the efficiency of government over the politics of government.   An opportunity to re-learn how to fund our government, and spend those funds, in a way that strengthens - rather than weakens - the United States as a whole.

As I said, I'm not that much different from the average American.  I'm not rattling a saber trying to incite revolution.  I'm not advocating the dismantling of the government and the establishment of an anarcho-capitalist utopia.  Practically speaking, I'm not even against a large majority of government programs.

What I do have a problem with is how they're implemented.

Poorly.

Inefficiently.

Ineffectively.

I think that there are better, cheaper, and more effective ways for the government to serve it's citizens... and I think that there are a lot of Americans who feel the same way.  They don't want the government to go away.

They just want it to do things differently and more sensibly.

They want to see an end to waste, fraud, and abuse.

They want to see government regulations that increase freedom of choice instead of taking it away. 

They want to see the government revamp and then enforce existing regulations instead of generating new bureaucracies.

They want to see programs that help people succeed in life instead of trapping them in a cycle of dependency.

They want to see their government stop making their lives more difficult.

More than anything else, they want to see the government pared down and simplified, because there's a visceral understanding that simple things are harder to break.  

I really can't put it any more plainly.  We're not that different from you, in our everyday lives.  We have a tremendous amount in common.  We agree on far, far more points than you might realize.

We just think that there is a better way to do things.