Cavalier Cavalry
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Political Thoughts
It's not that I am not political, I totally am, but more that I cannot stand to identify with either political party. The Democratic Party does have a tendency towards retrenching union privilages without insisting on worker rights. Time in service counting more than worker performance, rather than working with companies on a system to encourage promotion- by-merit tracks as well, and shutting down old governmental programs that have run their course but are kept open due to union insistence, not because of job loss (all employees are offered new positions at-grade) but because the employees in these programs will lose their little fiefdoms of power.
The Republican party, however, is just words, and has been for thirty plus years. For all their cries of "small government", the biggest expansions of governmental power and interference have come under Republican watch. Republican policies have increased the GDP, but at the cost of the debt and the gap between the top 1% (most of who earn money with money, not producing anything, even jobs) and everyone else.
Individually, the current candidates are a choice between bad and worse. Obama has not been able to break away from his own party to deal with real problems, becoming entrapped in the DNC political process, which continued it's fine tradition of folding like a cheap suit to pressure. Romney is GOP as usual. Despite his "Mormon" background, his real god is the Dollar, and the more he and his backers have, the prettier the temple. Santorum is the man Heinlien warned us about in Revolt in 2100. An avid anti-intellectual and hatemongerer, his America is a bad mix of Iranian theocracy and Leave it to Beaver. Ron Paul has the positive of being a real champion of individual rights, but his economic views seem straight from the tin-foil-hat brigade.
The current political climate, however, gives us these tools. Both parties have devolved into my-way-or-the-highway type politics, and gone is the deal making, compromise, and general day-to-day governmental work that was the hallmark of Senators such as Lyndon Johnson (who has his own host of problems...) We need to find real solutions that help as many people as we can, while discarding the stuff that doesn't work. Old programs need to end, and tax breaks need to be firmly tied into American job growth. Corporations do not operate in a "free market", they gain more in governmental bailouts and subsidies than the cost of any ammount of regulations they are nominally under (many regulations are woefully underenforced). Consolidation of regulations and their observers, however, would help many a small business to open faster and operate more efficently. It does not take eight inspectors per business in California, all inspectors are just college grads, and there could be an office of inspection from which all departments could pull reports, meaning ONE inspection could do the job all at once.
Government does the job that cannot be done efficently by industry. It doesn't have to be more inefficent than nessessary, however.
11 April 2012
R. Sterling Frank II
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