Pro Commerce

One Giant Apology From Me

The brilliant Ruth Wisse wants me to apologize, so I do.  I apologize for my whole family past and present; I apologize to all Americans who love America.

Ruth points out in several articles that a large swath of Jewish immigrants, beginning around 1890, came to the United States with fervent communist ideas.  That is understandable since they came from tyrannical worlds and could see no other political solution to their miserable pogrom-dominated lives.  The problem is that this tidal wave of immigration to New York grew to the millions; concentrated in a new world ghetto, this cluster of Jews never learned why America was a better alternative to communism.  They never really assimilated to their new political paradise.

This cluster of communist Jews, living in America, millions of people, never learned how attached to a horrible outmoded ideology they were.  In the 1930’s they were a dominant group in the American Communist Party and its thousands of colluding front organizations.  After WWII they remained aligned with communism and the Left.  Even as the murders of Soviet Jews became public they never denounced communism.  Even as the murderous rampages of Stalin and the Gulag become public knowledge, American Jews never publicly recanted their alliance with ultimate evil.

To this day American Jews are predominantly Lefties, unapologetically still in the same evil tradition.  The prototypical left-wing Jew is Bernie Sanders.

My mother and father were extreme Lefties.  My father became a rabbi to evangelize for Left Liberalism.  Even though his family were Californians from the 1850s and certainly were Republicans ( one of the second generation, my grandfather’s generation, was named Abraham Lincoln Phillips). My grandfather named my father Wendell after the great Boston abolitionist. 

My father became a Lefty at the U. of California and joined my mother’s New York communist clan in his 20’s.  He was so Left that I joked with him that he believed Adlai Stevenson (Democrat candidate for President twice) was more important than Moses.  

My mother’s family were the heirs to a Prussian sect of Judaism, Ethical Culture, that was a Leftist coven.  Her brother Fred Hart was an actual Marxist.  Fred made money in the stock market and was the sustaining donor of the National Guardian, a Russian communist front in the 1950s, later to become a Chinese Communist front in the 1960s. History has no record and no way of knowing that Fred provided all the Guardian’s sustaining funds from 1952 to 1972.  

My mother and her brother were the first American tourists to visit China in the mid 1960s, thanks to Fred’s vital role at the Guardian.  In that period I asked my mother why she wasn’t disturbed by the nightmares of Stalin, the Gulags and Mao. Her reply was the same as Lefties today: “Real communism has never been tried.”  

How deep was this communism?  I asked my close friend Ruth Kadish, in the mid 1990s, part of the Jewish Lefty clan, whether she had changed her mind about the guilt of Julius Rosenberg the Soviet atomic spy once the KGB files were made public.  “No, you can’t trust the anti-Soviet crowd,” she replied.

I abandoned my Lefty family tradition at age 20, having learned about the American genius from reading the Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Animal Farm and living on an Israeli Marxist kibbutz.

It is now time for me to apologize for the terrible Lefty hogwash and blind ideology that my family, a part of the disgraceful pattern of American Jewry, have spread in this great American land.  I apologize to all Americans who love and appreciate America for my family's guilt.

Data and facts

My life has been very different than most people’s.  Starting as a student at the University of Chicago, I was introduced to the concept of reading original documents. It has shaped me, positively and for a more interesting way to live.

Then while starting two corporate marketing research departments, I learned how to easily handle data. Which I have done for the last 60 years.  I did it often as a court- certified expert witness in many fields. I use data to shape my views of the world.

In 1992, looking at  global population data on a spreadsheet, I was among the first human beings to discover that the population explosion was over.  I threw a big party to celebrate it. 

A few years later I put all the data for global surface temperature on another spreadsheet and found that there was no global surface temperature rise in the past 100 years.  No rise, no way to blame it on human generated CO2.  I’ve followed temperature data ever since.  Satellite data confirmed what I had learned and reported in many blogs.  Then while showing a young friend how to collect the data, he found the most reliable numbers in radiosonde measurements accurate daily back to 1950.  Fifty seven point 4 F (57.4 then and now) no change in the global surface temperature.  Look at this chart, lower right. Surface temperature has gone down in the past 18 years. (Source.)

There is an even better source with daily data. No change from 1950 when global surface temperature was 57.4F.  Here.

Data on Covid

Now we have a reliable source (National Bureau of Economic Research) that has looked at the covid data to see what government policies worked and what led to excess deaths in most states in the U.S. (data.)

• First, closing schools was counterproductive in many ways.  Measurable loss of education and no excess deaths in that age group with or without classes.
• Mandating masks on people who were not potential spreaders, people not dealing with the public, were not productive. The closing of businesses cost millions of jobs and destroyed over a million businesses. Unproductive from a contagion perspective.
• Putting hospital patients in retirement homes created additional excess deaths among the elderly.

That data will hopefully inform governments in the future.  Governments need to act more like Utah and Florida and less like New York and California.

I end up with a unique and different view of the world because I like data and know how to make use of it.  Hopefully more people, over time, will join me.  It is comforting to be in a world of reliable first hand data.

Am I Due Any Credit?

As a business advisor it is rare to get credit for good advice.  It is even rarer to get credit for advice that has a major impact.  Most people forget they got advice and assume they would have done the right thing of their own accord.  Which may be true.  From the advisor's perspective that isn’t how the world looks.  We don’t have alternative versions of life so the issue can never be settled.

I bring this up because I just drove from the East Bay back to San Francisco across the very beautiful rebuilt Bay Bridge.  Could I possibly deserve some credit for that bridge?  I think so.

The architect for the bridge was Donald MacDonald, a client of mine in the 1980s, and also a friend. Donald wanted to know how to get more recognition for his many years of creative work.  

I made sure I was right that he had designed many parts of the spaghetti freeway that enters the San Francisco Airport; one of the most attractive freeways I have ever seen.  He said, “Yes.” I asked if he had done any other government architecture.  He said he had done the pedestrian overpass in Berkeley. Also very attractive.

I said he had a unique talent that virtually no other architects had; the ability to work with governments. Consequently my advice was for him to become a bridge designer. He replied that that field was already taken in the U.S. by Calatrava.  I said “no’” there was plenty of room for him.  Of course he took my advice.

Donald was noted for being a little tight with money.  He often counted the nails on his projects. My bill was $1,500, which he was slow to pay. I went to his office and offered to take a framed drawing of his, on his wall.  Which he agreed to.  It has been in my living room ever since then.

Years later when he had designed the East end of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, and it was under construction, I suggested that he hire a person to put all the change orders during construction online with a short explanation of the meaning.  It would have been an incredible success. He didn’t do it.

Again, do I deserve any credit for that beautiful bridge?

The Medium is the Message

That is the title of the first chapter of a prominent book in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan.  The meaning, outside the book, has been widely discussed.  To me it means that the social uses and forms of communication of many media is different from anything in its content.  Light bulbs,  automobiles, TV, books, etc are the media and the message they convey has to do with their impact on the culture in which they are operated.  Usually promoting some elements that were already present.

I have two media to discuss.  One is the Internet, the other is blockchain.

The Internet is a global network of connected electronic nods that transmit sound, text and images in a nearly infinite array of forms. Presently the images are nearly all 2-dimensional. The material is nearly all stored for rapid recall.

The ‘message’ of the Internet is that society will use this medium to reflect its existing social fabric.  Five qualities of the social fabric are promoted by the Internet.

1. There is always a structure to grass roots communication such that some people whose opinions are representative of large groups, become visible as informal leaders. So we get Internet opinion leaders. More obvious and more common than outside the Internet.
2. Our society and many other societies have a large array of ‘factions’ (Madison’s word) which become more visible as they are able to organize with a good peer-to-peer communication system. The Internet is therefore fractious.
3. Many people behave badly when they are anonymous.  Which is true of criminals in general and is true for a larger part of society than just the criminal class. Lots of nastiness from anonymous people on the Internet,
4. Wire-limited communication misses the conviviality and gentleness of actual live person-to-person communication. The Internet provokes interpersonal hostility and fighting.
5. People with political opinions that favor top-down changes to society (the Left and some other religious people) are intolerant of differing opinions and try to enforce censorship on disagreement. 

Blockchain refers to one sub-Internet quality, a medium in itself;  the ability to send copies of digitized material to multiple geographic locations at one time and have the material available for referenced review quickly.

For simplification I picture this as a fax machine that sends copies to several locations where the faxes are time-stamped and numbered in order for easy retrieval. 

This medium is suited to all legal and bureaucratic functions. The ease of retrieval will allow much greater access to the realm of laws and regulations, possibly reducing the role of lawyers and encouraging paralegals.  It may also reduce the onerous nature of laws and bureaucratic regulation. A great new policy objective established by President Trump.  It could play a political commentator role like I.F. Stone played in the 1950s and 60s.  There could be many I.F. Stones of many persuasions.

I.F Stone was “a liberal, politically outspoken reporter from the American left wing, Stone often had to work in ideologically hostile environments (military, diplomatic, business) where information was controlled, making verifiability the essence of his journalism, corroborated by facts in the public domain, which the reader could verify. About his style of work as an investigative journalist, Stone said:

I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own — particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these [political] pressures.

“The journalistic professionalism and integrity of I. F. Stone derived from his intellectual willingness to scour and devour public documents, to bury himself in The Congressional Record, to study the transcripts of obscure congressional committee hearings, debates and reports. He prospected for news nuggets — published as boxed paragraphs in his weekly newsletter — such as contradictions in the line of official policy, examples of bureaucratic mendacity and political obscurantism. Stone especially sought evidence of the U.S. government's legalistic incursions against the civil liberties and the civil and political rights of American citizens.”  (Source en.wikipedia)

The earliest widespread use of blockchain has been for bitcoin, a currency.  Currency can be any medium that is popularly accepted (cowry shells and cigarettes.)  The widespread use of blockchain as a currency has occurred because conventional currency is controlled by governments and governments are not universally popular.  Bitcoin’s future use is dependent on its continued level of popularity.  Which in turn is dependent on the size and locale of its users.

Stupid and Lucky

I know the history of San Francisco because I started the first unlicensed bus tours of the City in 1972 (Third World Tours). I had to develop the spiel for the tours and train the bus drivers.  So I know that San Francisco has a long history of extremist, stupid, legislation that has often resulted in positive outcomes; lucky.  

Because the City has long had 500 appointed commissioners, nothing really gets done. The number of police officers was limited by charter to 1,500; meaning the police never even tried to be effective.  There are dozens of more legislative stupidities which is why the beatniks then the hippies settled here and why my Briarpatch had over 600 members of new small hippie businesses in San Francisco.So what is the latest legislative stupidity?  Right here: this sign is on the door of an empty restaurant and the empty grocery next door.

Our brilliant Board of Supervisors, all woke, are taxing empty retail businesses for being empty.

I can’t tell you how stupid this is.  Any business person will tell you this will not lead to any more retail rentals, it will lead to more retail rental space converted to residential and office space; the lucky outcome is different..

With more than a million square feet of retail rental space empty now because the of Covid lockdown and the perpetual homelessness destroyed retail business, much of that space will be sublet for a $1 a month to artists, dancers, yoga teachers, short term-schools and temporary office space for people who are tired of working from home.  The For Lease signs will still be up, maybe not on the store fronts but online.

That is great for the thousands of people who will get short-term nearly free space and for all the pedestrians who will now see life in the retail spaces.

Stupid new taxes will lead to the lucky outcome of more street life.

Stewart Brand Biography

Stewart has been a friend for 50 years.  We last saw each other in the early 90s when we had a 20th anniversary of the Point Foundation founding. At my home.  Our reunion was not joyful. 

The whole former board of five men had gone in different ways and had little in common in our respective lives.

I was on the Board of Portola Institute in Menlo Park for many years starting about 1967;  Portola was the parent organization for most of Stewart’s projects for more than a decade. Stewart and I ran into each other regularly.

We worked closely because of the quarterly board meeting of the Point Foundation from 1971 to 1974.  Stewart made me President of Point in 1973.  I ran the Point office in my Glide building during that time.  I supervised the only staffer who had been a previous bank employee of mine.

We also saw each other regularly when we played outdoor handball in Golden Gate Park in the following year.

I am very grateful to Stewart.  He encouraged me to write a dozen or more articles for his magazines and encouraged me to do illustrations.  Several of those articles were quite consequential.  One was about my original idea for a lottery legislature which led to a book and an entire political movement.  Another was about the anti-whaling movement and my problems with it.  That led to the end of the anti-whaling movement in the U.S. as described in the blog here.

I was always a great admirer of Stewart and loved the time we spent together.  He is an original person in every way and a genius by any standards. He had a big influence on my life, my thinking and my circle of friends.  We had many common friends and many of them are mentioned in the book.

Because of my strong feelings for Stewart I am a little saddened by the recent biography.  I’ve dealt with the author John Markoff, on several occasions and helped him write several earlier books.  He took copious notes, used many of my ideas but never gave me a shred of credit. The worst thing about John is that he is 100% a NYTimes journalist in his values.  (Not something nice I would say about anyone.)  Consequently his biography of Stewart represents the worst of the NYTimes view of the world (though John lives near me in San Francisco.).  John has a Lefty distorted view of the world, of history,  and is New York-centric.

That means he never describes the people he mentions as fully developed people. For example, Dick Raymond, Huey Johnson, Mike Murphy, Paul Krassner and Dick Baker Roshi are important and fascinating figures in Stewart's life but they are all treated as 2- dimensional cardboard cutouts, like everyone else in the book.  The powerful fascinating qualities of these people are totally ignored.  A very shallow way to write a biography.

Markoff uses the book to simply make lists of prominent people Stewart knew or worked with.  Because he lacks a realistic sense of history, he can never put Stewart’s actions in their important context.  Much of what Stewart has done is historically important.  But not to a dyed-in-the wool Lefty who is New York-centric.

The saddest part of John's biography is that he exaggerates Stewart’s falling out with people he worked with.  Early on he worked with Zack Stewart and they had a falling out.  But nearly everyone who ever worked with Zack had a falling out with him.  It needs to be balanced with reality.  

Stewart also gave John access to his personal diary which records the many self-doubts and emotional turmoil in his life.  Most of this is entirely internal in Stewart’s mind and is contrary to the very strong, bold and confident man that the world around him knows of him.  It does a great disservice to him much like getting a biographical account from a person's angry ex-wife days after a tumultuous divorce. Stewart is very open and in this case naive in letting Markoff use the diaries.  Unfortunately Stewart put the diaries in the library of his own accord.

Of the many things left out of the book, the two most frustrating that I know about are (1) the many important and interesting grants made by the Point Foundation and (2) many of the original and fascinating articles in the Whole Earth Catalogs and the follow-on magazines.

One of the private conversations I had with Stewart was about life choices we had already made by 1970.  I had chosen to be largely invisible to the media because I knew that a good community organizer never takes credit for what he does, he gives credit to all the people around him.  Stewart felt the opposite.  Being in the bright light of the media would give him access to many of the people he wanted to deal with and a way to promote his ideas.  This biography shows the consequences of that position.  The good and the bad of it.

One regret I have is that in the mid-1980s Stewart and I became interested in the same subject; how institutions work.  I was influenced by Mary Douglas, Stewart by Gregory Bateson.  Stewart began studying large corporations and global entities.  I began interviewing thinkers on the subject for a public radio program that was broadcast widely for seven years in 300 half-hour shows. Now on the Internet. We never compared notes.

Two footnotes:

• I don’t get credit in the book for the man-made planet that was important in Stewart’s relations to the environmentalists.  I found Gerard O’Neil, the physicist who conceived the man-made planet.  I gave O’Neil his first grant (Point Foundation money) and taught him how to get attention for his project.
• In the early 1980s Stewart heard rumors from NASA about the issue of global warming and asked me to look into it.  The only public temperature records going far enough back were in the Harvard Library of water temperature measured by ships from 1825.  I told Stewart that the noise in the data was greater than the signal and no evidence of warming could be found.  The variance was too great to run an average. If I had run an average, I could have found slight evidence for warming but it was due to the opening of the Panama and Suez Canals which allowed fewer ships to go to the Antarctic waters in the 20th century.

Jews and Money (2 of 2)

I am the first prominent Jew to give public money advice.  My book is The Seven Laws of Money.  What is the connection?  (The original edition is the only unabridged version)

After eight years of community organizing including creating a graduate student organization at the U. of California Berkeley, a friend, Salli Rasberry, asked for advice on raising money for her first hippie homeschooling organization.  That is the origin of the book The Seven Laws of Money.

The book came from a spontaneous conversation in my living room in 1970.  The original transcript was a 12-page typed version that my secretary reprinted in a few dozen copies.  

One day, months later, I saw her putting ten copies in a big envelope which she took from a large box of a few hundred copies.  I knew at that moment to expect a phone call from a major publisher.  The first call was Penguin, the second was Knopf and the third was Random House.  

After writing the book, with Rasberry, I formed a publishing company and contracted Random House to do the distribution.  The first edition sold 75,000 copies.  From there on, many editions were published, most were abridged, including a few classic editions from Shambhala Press.  Every hippie I met, from 1974 on beamed with joy to tell me that they had a copy.

The influence of the book is hard to measure.  If you have ever heard the phrase ‘Do what you love and the money will come,’  ‘ Live your passion,’ ‘Your work should be your passion,’ or any variation of this.   It comes from the 1st Law of Money: Do it!  Money will come when you are doing the right thing.

Not only has the insight by me become a mantra-meme for the entire human world, but you won’t find anything close to it before 1974.  Also note the global ad version from Nike: “Do it.”

Moreover, the idea of seven laws seems to also have become a mantra-meme.  The number of book titles that are a variation of this are in the thousands. Only one earlier book title exists (from 1906 about rabbits.) The original idea of seven laws came from Charles Roll, the poet in the book calling himself Jug and Candle who claimed he knew of the model from Chinese literature.

My original views on money were widely accepted by the world of hippies.  The hippies were a large multi-million person revolutionary group whose ideas were spread to every corner of the planet. 

The Jewish connection is discussed in the previous blog.  Being a Jew and finding a large community (hippies) with similar values was the synthesis that generated my unique money advice.

Jews and Commerce (1 of 2)

I am the first prominent Jew to give public business advice.  What is the connection? 

Let's start with my background in banking.  I knew from my seven years in banking that banks have little to do with business.  Banks lend only to sure things.  They prefer to lend on a gold mine in a secure stable country.  The mine can’t be moved and has a gigantic market.  Everything else is less appealing and is measured by the certainty of repayment within a year.  That is banking; most people never get the chance to learn that.

U.S. government loans to businesses are irrelevant (SBA). No real entrepreneur has the patience to do the paperwork.

Loans to small businesses and new businesses come from family, friends and from my experience in Japan loans also come from suppliers and landlords.  

People who start businesses are known and appreciated by the people personally close to them.  Several clients, after a few years in business, have said to me ‘Does it ever get any easier? Ten new problems everyday?’  My answer “No. If you don't like it, quit and become an employee.”

My first client was a bar-restaurant.  I looked at the successful ones I knew in San Francisco and observed that they all opened with big crowds of friends for the first few months. Word of mouth was the only issue.  Booze was generous at the openings. That was the advice I gave.  The three owners were already supplying meals to airlines and knew how to run a profitable kitchen. That client took my advice and went on to open a chain of 80 locations.

In San Francisco, I already had a reputation as a banker and founder of MasterCard when I opened an office to help small businesses in 1971.  The first day 12 clients arrived at the same time and I realized that they could help each other.  They were hippies and loved the freedom that small business offered.  They were open-kind of people and were each part of a generous community.

That set the groundwork for my future success in giving advice.  Of my first 600 clients, 80% were still in business five years after opening.  That compared to the traditional business norm of 2 out of 3 failures in the first 3 years.  Orders of magnitude of difference.

The core of my advice was always built around community. Look at the headline of this blog. Meritocracy, diversity and openness; these are necessary to create a community, these are what make businesses work.  Nepotism, favoritism and tribalism just don’t work for business in America.

That understanding comes from my Jewish tradition.  Torah, the core Jewish sacred text, is a document that is open to community interpretation and debate.  The debate has gone on for 2,000 years and is called the Talmud.  Orthodox Jews (all Jews before 1850) read all the debates of that 2,000 years and learned the logic of debate: clear innovative thinking, lived experience,  community and openness. 

My book (with Rasberry) Marketing Without Advertising is based on the direct observation of over a thousand client businesses where I saw the financial books.  It is empirical.  Like technology. The book sold more copies than all but two other non-academic books on marketing in English; nearly half a million copies over 6 editions in 20 years.   Look at the glowing comments on the Amazon book page from every reliable business media source.

Because the core of my advice came from my experience with hippies, I was able to see that the key factor in success was their love of business.  Their motive for getting up and going to work every day was their love of business and their sense of responsibility to their community, to their employees, to their friends and to their customers. A little different from Adam Smith’s views 250 years ago.

I saw clearly that 90% of building a successful business was cooperation, not competition. Cooperation with suppliers, workers, customers and everyone on whom the business depends.  Cooperation is built on openness and the concomitant trust.

I also wrote an earlier book (with Rasberry) called Honest Business.  I learned over a few years that ‘honest’ had too narrow a meaning.  Many people are ‘honest’ but that alone doesn't generate trust.  ‘Openness’ was the correct broader term when discussing commerce and trust.

Both my parents came from business families.  But my father was a rabbi who was not good at business.  My mother was the one who transmitted to me the values of candor, clear empirical thinking and trust.  Her family were the founders of Ethical Culture, an 1880s German sect of Judaism.

Summary: it has been my Jewish background that values (1) clear empirically based thinking and (2) the centrality of community.  Together they create the trust that underlies successful commerce.  This view has made my business advice useful. Commerce is based on cooperation which is based on trust.

I Sold Three Tech Stocks

I have never talked about my portfolio because I don’t discuss investments in any circumstances.  The problem with me giving investment advice is that I am not around when it is time to change the advice.  I could recommend that you buy a stock and a week later I sell it and forget that I told you to buy it.

My portfolio has several segments based on my half- century of managing portfolios, professionally.  One is medical/pharma, another is anti-green that includes nuclear, oil, coal and gas, a third part is tech.  There are two other parts. The anti-green has risen spectacularly lately.

I’ve talked recently about the tech stocks’ income to the U.S. because Seattle and The S.F. Bay Area are connected to giant pipelines from the entire world that pour tech money into the U.S.  That is coming to an end over the next few years.  Sooner than I thought.

I’ve sold all my holdings of Microsoft, Adobe and Salesforce.  These are companies that have announced their refusal to sell products to Russia because of the Ukraine invasion.

The shortsightedness of these announcements is that punishing Russia is an announcement to businesses in China, India and several other countries that American tech companies can be fickle suppliers.  American tech now means ‘unreliable.’

It is easy to replace these three companies’ products with home grown products quickly, especially since China, India and Russia have good indigenous computer professionals. One year and two years from now the products from these companies will have been replaced in many businesses all over the world.

The other problem I see with this fickle shortsighted corporate behavior and the associated government nonsense is that closing down SWIFT for international banking to Russia means that Russia, India and China will rapidly develop their own reserve currency and bank transfer mechanism.  

That means the loss of a great power position that the U.S. has held for more than half a century.  It is even possible that this will lead to the explosion of some crypto currencies to replace the dollar.  Our loss.

We are such a stupid country, particularly the Democrat Party, the same party that held on to slavery and Jim Crow for 150 years. The same party that cut off domestic exports of oil and gas the first month in office and then later begged the Saudis to increase their oil production after we had become an oil importer.  The same party that doubled the price of Russian oil exports to empower Putin.

Reminds me of the kid who killed his parents and then complained to the trial court about being an orphan.

Stop Calling Political People ‘Dimwits'

That is what friends and family keep telling me. 

However, the new California political party Common Sense supports my position. The founders of Common Sense are known by me to be the anti-dimwit politicians of the last 50 years.

There are two reasons I call the political world ‘dimwit.’  First is my personal experience over a lifetime. The second is my own sense of hypocrisy.

Those who know me and those who are familiar with my blog know that I believe humans and other simians stop learning when they reach adulthood.  For humans that is roughly age 23. Only one out of 300 persons I have met in my lifetime were able to develop new ideas and new worldviews after age 23.  The rest of the people I know and knew were only able to use the worldviews they had at that age to respond to the world.  That is my core definition of ‘dimwit.’ Viewing the world based on early life experience without the additional input of adulthood generally makes one 'dimwitted.’

The single most important experience that has colored my worldview in adulthood came when I was in my mid 20s, just at the beginning of adulthood.  I was a campaign manager for a San Francisco Republican assemblyman.  My technical position, for payroll purposes, was as a legislative assistant.  That meant I spent time in Sacramento dealing with legislators and their staff.  In the entire Assembly and Senate of 120 elected officials in 1964 there were only about 4 or 5 that I considered as intellectually above average. The rest were ‘dimwits.’ The 97% became elected officials because they were egocentric, arrogant, weird people.  

Over the next decades I worked in politics on a regular basis and I knew hundreds more elected politicians.  The ratio of 2-3% who were not dimwitted and self-serving never changed.  

Now a small group of the people I knew and observed close-up, who are not ‘dimwits,’  have joined together to form a new party, the California Common Sense Party.  They have been moved to form a new party based on their own experiences that resemble mine.

This is all by way of saying that a few of these hundreds of politicians are nice people and some are decent human beings.  I even dated a few elected women. The two qualities of being nice and being politicians are not totally incompatible.  

People like former governor Jerry Brown are the exceptions.  Jerry is smart, the son of a standard politician, and he has learned to camouflage himself and pass for an ordinary politician.

Seeing this tragic fact of American democracy led me to propose that elected legislators be replaced by a random selection of ordinary people, the Greek style of selection called ‘sortition.’  I wrote a book called A Citizen Legislature at the end of the 1970’s.  (My co-author was Chick Callenbach.)

One great mind on the political scene, William F. Buckley Jr, once said that the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book could do a better job of governing than any group of Harvard officials. Concurring with this, decades later, was Norman Podhoretz.

My second reason for this view of pervasive politician dimwittedness is my sense of hypocrisy.  How can we see the Congress of 2018 spend two years impeaching President Trump on the claim that his election in 2016 was based on fraud brought on by Russian election interference, then denying any possibility of Biden election corruption by a new Congress in 2021 and 2022?  That is hypocrisy.  I see the same hypocrisy daily on the political scene.  Gross hypocrisy equals dimwittedness.

Should my readers wonder how ‘dimwitted’ people can raise money and perennially get reelected? The answer is that political people operate in a separate tribal system.  Most of America is based on a merit system of independent ordinary people. The political system is not; it is tribal.  

The Kennedy family seems to thrive over generations, as does the Bush family.  Political machines are tribal in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and most other cities.  Nancy Pelosi’s power comes from the money connections created by her father, Thomas D’Alessandro, a powerful politician and former mayor of Baltimore.

I do not apologize for calling politicians ‘dimwits.’ To fix the problem we need to randomly select our governing class from among ordinary citizens.