Pro Commerce

Two engineering systems not two moral systems

My friend David Boxenhorn has made a major contribution to the issue of two moral systems that I have struggled so hard with.  I am always uncomfortable with the whole idea of moral systems inside of amoral systems (commerce is amoral but commercial people operate with values different from traditional values).  I'm uncomfortable with the idea of morals in the first place, they can't be explicated.

David's brilliant solution is described by him:

"In system design there is a very powerful concept called Loose Coupling. Its purpose is to facilitate building large systems. The problem with large systems is the complexity of the interdependencies - if you don't manage them carefully you easily get into a situation where you can't do anything, because changing any little thing has ramifications throughout the system. Loose Coupling is the solution to this problem. It involves modularizing the system such that the interface of each module (i.e. how it can interact with other modules) is clearly defined and as simple as possible. That way, when you make a change, you only have to worry about ramifications within the module. Perhaps more important, you can easily substitute one module for another. All a module has to do to fit into the system is implement the correct interface.

"Commerce is the same idea applied to social systems. Commerce aims to simplify relationships between people (or firms) for exactly the same reason - to facilitate building large systems. As with Loose Coupling, one of the hallmarks of commerce is competition - i.e. the ability to substitute one supplier for another. 

"Politics, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite of commerce. It aims to make relationships complex. It aims to reduce or eliminate competition. (When politics succeeds completely in eliminating competition, we call it bureaucracy.) And, finally, it results in the inability to build large systems.

"Until now, I was uncomfortable with the opposition between traditional and commercial moral systems, but now I see that this description is exactly right. Traditional societies are small-scale, and the system of morality that tradition has bequeathed us perfectly suits it. You would not want to use commercial morality with your spouse, your family, or even larger groups, such as your coworkers in a firm. But as we scale up, the system breaks down. There are too many people with too many agendas. However, by combining traditional and commercial morality we can have a complete moral system and achieve the best of both worlds. Social groups should be small enough to make traditional morality work, and between groups we should use commercial morality."

David's concepts are perfect for describing my observations.  Commerce has become global because it is based on simple and clear requirements for interactions between people and firms. Loose coupling.  Where David uses the opposite of commerce as politics I use 'traditional tribal relations' as the opposite of commerce which is close to 'politics'.

I will  go back to my original idea number 15 and make it a joint idea with David. 

Laws against honest people

I have a simple definition of bad laws:

*Any law that forces most people to act illegally or dishonestly is a bad law.

Our society requires the cooperation of everyone in order to function. No amount of police can enforce cooperation. The core behavioral rule for members of our society is that they obey the laws and act honestly.

When there are laws that force honest people to act illegally or dishonestly the laws tear at the fabric of society and increase the level of social disintegration. Murderers in black neighborhoods run rampant when they know that honest people are afraid to cooperate with the police.

The following laws are good examples of bad laws.

In an earlier blog I pointed out that the number of stop signs in urban areas keeps increasing without restraint and without regard to the number of cars or drivers. The consequence is that fewer and fewer drivers make a full stop at a stop sign or even at a stop light.

The speed limit on major highways is 65 mph. Light traffic most of the time has cars exceeding that speed limit. Consequence: the speed limit becomes either the cluster of cars acting as a speed barrier or trucks going the speed limit becoming the speed barrier. Otherwise the speed limit law is treated as a suggestion.

Bicycles are legally required to act like cars. In the streets. They don't and both bicyclists and automobile drivers are perpetually frustrated and angry because bicycles act more like pedestrians. But they are not allowed to use the sidewalks like pedestrians in many other countries.

The most egregious of all laws as I pointed out in an earlier blog are the laws aimed at controlling dangerous-criminal and lunatic use of firearms. The number of laws on the books is continually increasing to govern people who observe laws and are honest. These laws have exactly zero impact on the actual criminal users of firearms. They have minimal or no impact on lunatics.

The consequence is that legal honest people are angry at the government and increasingly acting outside the law to enjoy their firearm rights.

The recent recall of two anti-gun legislators in Colorado is the first example of how the public is rising up against laws against legally oriented citizens. Most of these voters in the recall were Democrat blue collar citizens.

If you have more examples of laws against honest law-abiding people please send them to me.

Democracy needs improvement

Over the past month we have watched our national government do a number of preposterous things. It is embarrassing because it goes to the roots of our dysfunctional democracy and raises the question of whether democracy can be improved.

It turns out that legislators cannot reduce government budgets in any way that jeopardizes funding for the individual politicians.  Party appointees and hacks under them will follow the Party line.  Legislators cannot think about the common good.  It can never override their own personal legislative benefits ranging from cars, to salaries, to staff, all the way to lavish retirement bennies. Legislative bodies are unable to act in ways that are contrary to their own self interest.

To expect otherwise is self-deception.

I am here to remind you that there is a way to have legislative groups that are functional and act on behalf of the general population.

For that to happen we need to have legislative bodies of every sort and at every level selected by random processes. The technical term for this form of legislative body selection is sortition.   The book that I wrote on the subject is Citizen Legislature.

When I get furious with the inability of Democratic legislatures to act in the common good and in the public interest I have to remember that random selection of legislators is the solution to this problem.

Bribery

In my neighborhood in San Francisco there are regular neighborhood battles against new retail outlets and apartment buildings. There are many empty stores, too few living spaces and many battles.

Discussing this with some of my friends who were bemoaning the fact that a Trader Joe's store, which we all needed and which would've done much to help the other neighborhood businesses, was rejected by the neighborhood groups while CVS, a pharmacy chain, got the same space. There are already big Walgreen pharmacies within two blocks in each direction.

I was compelled to explain the situation to my friends.

There are three lobbyists in San Francisco who are excellent at their jobs. Some national chains,CVS, Walgreens, Citibank, Chase, Loews, cell tower operators, Comcast  and a few others have been smart enough to hire these three top lobbyists. The rest of the major chains including Starbucks, Trader Joe's, Home Depot, and Walmart have hired lobbyists who are not in the top rank.  They don’t get good locations or any location at all.

The difference between the top rank three lobbyists and the rest is that the top ranked lobbyists know who to bribe and what bribes will work. The others just cost money and can't deliver.

Local government, here and in most of the world, is totally in the hands of bribery. To think otherwise is foolish.

In San Francisco the ordinary homeowner needs to know that certain construction groups have established bribery mechanisms. You hire Chinese for electrical work, Mexicans for roofing and Irish for carpentry and you will get your permits promptly. Hire anyone else and you will face long delays and obstreperous neighbors.

That's the way it works.

Don’t remember Cesar Chavez

You have heard me comment in these blogs that people who write poetry, create art,  publish prominent books or people who work in journalism are likely to get extensive obituaries. Many politicians are likely to have schools and streets named after them. In a large percentage of these cases the person has made little or no contribution to the betterment of society and because of their Lefty politics they have done some harm (occasionally great harm).

At the same time, the thousands of people who have built businesses that provide wages that in turn provide food and housing for hundreds of thousands of people are completely ignored in obituaries and memorials. People who really do help our society in commerce are ignored. The people who celebrate the Lefty values of tribalism and anti-commerce are elevated

The most blatant example of this sad pattern in today's society is the celebration of Caesar Chavez. Chavez is memorialized as a Mexican farm-worker organizer.

I did not personally know Mr. Chavez. Three of my friends worked with him closely. Two were lawyers in rural legal work and the third is a elected official. In each case they offered to help Mr. Chavez and the farmworkers. Their offers were rejected because at the root of his motivation Mr. Chavez was only seeking sainthood.  Sainthood based on his permanent failure to accomplish anything to help the farm workers. In his mind it was 'we tried so hard for so many years but the evil ones beat us down.'

Since I know the specific offers that were made to help the farmworkers and which were rejected by Chavez  I can assure you that Cesar Chavez was indeed only concerned about his personal sainthood. He did live a life of simplicity which is the only real qualification he had for sainthood. But he rejected every possible benefit that could be given to the actual people who toil in the fields.

This is in direct contrast to the hundreds of farmers and farm owners who were willing to improve the conditions of the farmworkers. These men are entirely anonymous today. They were the ones who created jobs, income and food for tens of thousands of farmworkers and their families.  They also produced the actual food that we Americans are fortunate to eat.

There is a street in San Francisco and probably other places named after Cesar Chavez. There are none named after the farmers and farm owners who did so much for all of us.

Politics of daily life

This observation began when I was talking to a new neighbor who had just had a child and owned their home here in San Francisco.  I asked whether she or her husband had sufficient political skills to deal with the San Francisco public school system.

I was just being curious.  My concern was that the child would have to go to private schools if the parents didn't have the political skills to get the child into the best public schools (of which there are several very good ones).

As I have thought about this, political skills are vital for many daily life functions. The healthcare system is bureaucratic and you need political skills to navigate the complexity of multiple doctors multiple medical recommendations and multiple sources of information.

If you deal with city government in any way you need political skills. You need them in order to get favorable tax treatment, you need them for doing any repairs to your home or apartment and certainly for any construction projects. Because of the wildly varying regulatory limits on automobiles you need them.  You need them to deal with  restrictions and licensing for professional services and business practices.

If you don't have political skills you are likely to be buried by bureaucratic torture.

By political skills I mean the ability to analyze where power and decision-making is in any organization. To understand the most effective form of influence on the power and decision-making centers. To be able to present yourself and your situation in a way that fits into the most normative goals of the organization.

Without political skills most people are doomed to a great deal of misery. With political skills, a condition that I think is fairly rare in the population, most of life is smooth and rewarding.

I learned my political skills in my early 20s when I was actually involved in elective politics. I don’t know where other people learn it.  Some clearly get it from a parent or parents.

The neighbor?  When the child was four they all moved to the suburbs.

Vince Gilligan

Being a fan of modern commerce I always make an effort to be part of the technological trends so that I can understand them.

One trend is to watch less television and to see more shows on the television screen from Netflix, Amazon and Hulu-plus. This is rapidly becoming the main form of home entertainment among my friends and associates.

One show that is now on Netflix and was on cable has stood out among the others. It is constantly discussed among the people I know. It is Breaking Bad.  

In the new technological environment some people watch an entire series of TV shows in a day.  Most of my friends only watch two or three episodes in an evening over many nights.

This is treating modern storytelling in much the same way that stories were told in the beginning of the 19th century by people such as Charles Dickens and Herman Melville. These were serialized stories that had to have complete single story excitement and character development in each serial short story and that all had to fit into the longer narrative.

That is what we seem to like these days. That is what I like about the work of Vince Gilligan the man who created and writes Breaking Bad. Every episode is complex with character development and a full short story. All of which fits into the longer narrative that is unpredictable and exciting.

I want to make two additional comments about this. First, the complex short television story seems to have first been developed in the Seinfeld middle and later episodes. In the Seinfeld episodes there were three interacting storylines dealing with moral issues. The three storylines were resolved at the end of the half hour program. Actually 22 min. programs because 8 min. are  left for commercials. 

The second real advance in narrative is evident in Breaking Bad where extremely interesting developments occur in each complete single 40 min. episode while fitting into the longer term narrative in a way that is unpredictable, but connected and fascinating (an airplane crash because of a young girl's drug death).

Both the Seinfeld development and the Gilligan development have made it very hard for me to watch any other lower quality television.

Wooden rubber-band handgun

A friend recently visited Burma and among the presents he returned with were some hand rolled cigars and a wooden pistol designed to fire rubber bands. He gave me both.

You may not have noticed that the federal regulators have decided on a consistent basis to make life miserable for poor people. Second-hand stores cannot sell toys without meeting very stringent and intolerable guidelines. So they don’t have them anymore. Clearly this affects the poor disproportionately.

So I can’t give the rubber-band gun to a second-hand store.

My friend assumed that I had some friends with children who would be happy with the wooden rubber band hand gun. Wrong.

I live in a society of Lefty ideological fanatics. They hate guns, they are obsessive in their hatred of guns. They’re wildly irrational on the issue of guns.

I speculate on why they can hate guns. They are determined to pass laws to make it impossible for any legally observant person to own and operate a gun. Their anti-gun obsession seems to require severe laws governing guns which of course don't apply to the large illegal population of people who use guns on each other.

When someone is completely blind to a phenomenon or behavior you can assume that that phenomenon or behavior is something that is too disturbing for the person to deal with. People are blind to anything they find  impossible to comprehend.  Lefties falsely believe that keeping toy guns away from young boys will make them pacifists when they grow up.  There is a blindness to gender differences and testosterone.

Here is my explanation for that blindness.

You will notice that over the past 30 years the press, the Lefty public and the Lefty politicians have gone completely berserk any time a white person shoots a black person. 97% of these cases turn out to be decided in favor of the white person in court. With no acknowledgement of the earlier error. There is no focus on young black men killing whites or regularly killing other blacks (including black bystanders).

This tells me that the focus on outrageously restrictive gun laws is really a focus away from the fact that we have a large young black illiterate-innumerate permanent underclass that is out killing each other and bystanders. It is they that are the problem, not their guns and not the guns of the rest of the population. But this reality is so dissonant to Lefties that they focus on guns rather than the permanent black criminal class.

Isn’t this the reason the Left is so obsessed about guns?

Darwinian model of history

I do not know enough about contemporary historians and their writings to know if there is a Darwinian model of history in common use.

Since I wrote about the two common models of history the other day, one being the Great Man theory and the other being the Hegelian-Marxist economic trends theory, I want to point out my own view of history.  I know there is a French view of history from the point of view of the common man and I know there is the Gregory Clark view of history that only has two parts before and after modern commerce. There are many other minor historical theories some that focus on sexually and gender as well as race and botany.

None of these are of any interest to me nor convincing.  

I see history as a Darwinian process. Darwin gets credit for the idea, justifiably, that there are long periods of random variation in a population interrupted by a significant environmental change and the survival of the fittingest then acts on the population.

This is clearly the case for commerce. This is clearly the case for the world of biology.

The reason I think that it is also the case for history is that many times similar phenomena reoccur.  This repetition has the quality of random variation. For example there are hundreds of religions and thousands of schismogenic sects of those religions. Very few survive for long periods because they don't fit into the culture or the society in which they must function.

Similarly there are random variations in tribal and geographic governance systems and many variations in national systems of government but only a few highly fitting systems survive competition from neighbors and invaders.

It appears to me that history does not have a cyclical quality they way Indians think of it.  History has a random variation quality. Calendars appear and disappear. Calendars get modified and change their base from 4 days to 7 days to 10 to 60. Calendars survive because they fit the culture and society. Most recently, in the world of commerce, the most successful has been a 7 day based calendar.

I am inclined toward a Darwinian model of history. It explains a great deal more than any other model I know of.

Russian systems theory

I learned about Russian systems theory from my friend Boaz I. during my recent visit to Israel. He learned about it in classes in the top levels of the Israeli military.

The term ‘Russian systems theory’ is an ex post description. The actual Russian theory to which this label is applied is call Activity Theory.

Russian activity theory is based on a systemic analysis of ordinary peoples’ behavior. We recognize parts of this theory in terms of clothing and automobile signaling theory in which people use clues about other people to determine their interaction. We also have theories about facial expression, personal history and social status that parallel some elements of the Russian activity theory.

American systems theory has been largely focused on machine operations. That is where the whole notion of feedback comes from. American systems theory is also the source of thinking about communications theory that is heavily used in information sciences. It is also a primary source of game theory,  which I heavily use because of its brilliant discovery of zero sum and positive sum games.

American systems theory and Russian systems theory converged in the late 1990s into a systemic structural activity theory. SSAT, as it is called.  SSAT arose when theorists began trying to understand human interactions with computers.

The reason Russian systems theory came up in a conversation in Israel is because the Russian approach focuses on transmission of information up and down hierarchies. Such up and down information transmission can be designed to include creativity. Which my Israeli friend is interested in.

Those of us who did not go to college in the last decade are unlikely to know much about this subject.

Black passover

It wasn't until I got to Tel Aviv that I understood an issue that Israelis have been discussing for several years.

I see in the Jerusalem Post, which I read regularly, that there is a steady stream of legal cases about deporting Somalian refugees.  I didn’t really grasp the issue.

I got off the airport rail line at the wrong station. We ended up near the old Tel Aviv central bus station which is a poor neighborhood. To my shock, the neighborhood is nearly all black now.  Many of the women wear Muslim head scarves. It is a Somalian neighborhood.

Because of the Civil War in Somalia many refugees have set out to walk from Somalia to the only country they know is free and democratic with any hope of settling: Israel. Israel is 2000 miles away from Somalia across nearly all desert.

That is what I call the new Black Passover. These Somalian refugee are doing precisely what the Hebrews did as a group led by Moses. The holiday of Passover celebrates that story of the Hebrew exodus from Egypt across the Sinai desert.

The Somalian refugees do not have their own Moses. They come in small groups.

The Israelis have finally put up a fence across the Sinai desert to keep these refugees from entering. But there are already 200,000 in Israel. Mostly in Tel Aviv.

You see them everywhere because they are a hard-working, determined and conscientious people who get jobs at the bottom of the employment ladder.

How will Israel handled the assimilation of black muslims? I suspect that in a few generations they will be totally absorbed. Unlike the American slave population that has become a gigantic illiterate-innumerate criminal underclass, the Somalians were economic refugees who arrived in Israel with great determination and survival skills. Very few will remain unskilled in the next generation.

I think this absorption will be fairly rapid because there is already a generation or two of dark skinned people living in Israel, the Ethiopians. Ethiopians have already extensively assimilated into the population and the women were promptly married to Europeanized-Israelis because they were so beautiful.

(The photo is an Ethiopian girl.  I couldn't find any photos of Somalis in Israel.)

Unions in the U.S. vs Europe

Why are unions so strong in Europe and so weak in the United States?

In Paris you have to expect the transportation system to be closed down in any week. In England strikes are the norm for the whole society. In Germany strikes are usually related to closing a business. In Spain, Italy and Greece strikes are just a local excuse for a few days off.

In the United States unions have been steadily decreasing in membership. Unions are mainly limited to government jobs where hiring is in the  hands of the Democrat-Union Party.  Most picket lines are crossed by the general public and other unions.  Public support for transportation strikes is practically nil, as those of us in the SF Bay Area know all too well.

The reason is straightforward. Hereditary hierarchy.

In Europe, to this day, you are still born into your social class. And you are still likely to remain in your social class for your lifetime.

The consequence of this, because intelligence and capability are randomly distributed in the population, is that some highly competent people are born into the bottom class. These competent people invariably rise to become union leaders because they can't rise higher.

Union leaders in Europe are the intelligent competent people who are able to make effective use of unionization, internal union loyalty and popular support (or at least tolerance) for unions.

The United States, where we don't have hereditary hierarchy anymore, the highly intelligent people and competent people who were born to a lowly station have no trouble rapidly rising to appropriate levels in our society. Therefore unions are stuck with incompetent leaders. If a competent leader arises he is probably promoted to a responsible non-union position.

That is precisely what happened in California with Michael Peavey. He was a highly competent man who joined the utility union and rapidly became president. Because his talent was promptly recognize by the utility company he was fighting, he was immediately drafted into the management of Southern California Edison. Again because his talent was so evident, it was not long before he was made chairman of the California Public Utilities Commission. From the bottom to the top of the utility industry, in a few decades.

That's the difference between Europe and the United States. They still have hereditary hierarchy and we don't.

Sapir-Whorf revisited

I thought I had written a blog about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It must’ve been back in the days before the current Typepad blog.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as I use it, relates to cultural anthropology. It was developed by Sapir and Whorf studying Southwest American Indians particularly the Hopi. The hypothesis suggests that because of the language and culture in which each person is immersed that person sees the world in a way that is similar to everyone else in his language and cultural but very differently from people in every other language and cultural group. Learning a new language while living in another country does not necessarily change one's perspective.

The idea that one's language shapes one's perspective on the world was advanced earlier by Ludwig Wittgenstein as a basic philosophical premise.

I personally subscribe to this thesis.

I have spent 40 years studying Japanese society for a month or two at a time every year.

It is clear to me that Japanese society appears on the surface to be very similar to my American society. But since I looked at details I find that the organizing principles of Japanese society are radically different in perspective.  Each Japanese sees the world differently from me and other Americans.

Two examples. The Japanese consider cleanliness to be one of the ultimate social values. They take off their dirty street shoes when they enter a home and wash their dogs feet too; they sweep and wash the entrance area to their home and business daily; they do not let their children stand on the velvet seats on public trains; they bathe in hot water every day for close to an hour, the soaping is done outside the bathing water;  they would never think of wearing the same clothes two days in a row; they do not use a handkerchief which we use and reuse,  they prefer disposable Kleenex; when they wash their car they wash the underside of it…….. the list goes on and on.

The Japanese believe in meritocracy over family. They have a very deep connection to their family. A bonsai tree can be passed along in the family for 400 years. When a grandmother makes a demand of a grandchild, even in the choice of a spouse. it would be very rare that such a demand is ignored. I have seen a gay man marry a woman because the grandmother demanded it.

Nevertheless meritocracy trumps biological family. If there is no member of the family who can carry on the tradition or family business, the family will look for a highly skilled outside man (or have a daughter marry such a man) who could carry on the tradition. The family will adopt that man into the family. The adoptee will take on the name of the family (and financially support his old family). This was the case with a close friend of mine who was a Japanese Senator.  He was adopted into the Shiina family and subsequently took the position of his father who did not have a son capable of handling the role of a Senator.

I strongly support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis based on my 40 years of research in Japan.

Jerry, Claire and Doug and the great man theory of history

The Jerry, Claire and Doug that I referred to in the title are: Jerry Mander, Claire Greensfelder and Doug Tompkins

The great man theory of history is the traditional theory of history which suggests a central role for prominent individuals. The Second World War would be focused on people such as Hitler,  Churchill and Stalin. The alternative theory is best stated by Hegel-Marx that there are long-term economic trends that determine the real directions of history.

I am putting these three names together with the great man theory to explain why radicals, who are friends of mine, have no idea what the TPP is. And it has been underway for several years.

The TPP is a Pacific wide free-trade agreement that should be opposed by every environmentalist, union freek and anti-global Lefty. So why isn't there any opposition with demonstrations everywhere in the United States?

Because the last anti-global demonstrations were the result of the three people listed in my first paragraph. Doug Tompkins made his money as cofounder of the clothing chain Esprit. He used part of the money from its sale to create a foundation run by Jerry Mander. Jerry hired the very best network community organizer in America, Claire Greensfelder. Claire organized those demonstrations you saw on the streets of Seattle against the WTO. She even got a major union conference convened at the same time to join the street demonstrations.

All three of these people are still around. Jerry and Claire would still be active in organizing an anti-TPP campaign. But Doug has changed the focus of his attention and where his money goes. Doug has bought up the wilderness and coastline of Chile. About one third of Chile. He has now set out to buy most of Tierra Del Fuego in Argentina. That's where his money is going.

So buying up conservation-environmental lands has taken priority over Left-wing anti-global organizing.

If the two key anti-global organizers are not funded by Doug, there is no anti-globalization movement in the United States. Also, the people who normally would be involved in such a movement  don't even know what is happening in the world.

This certainly supports the great man theory of history. Individuals do move history.

I read Mark Levin

Encouraged by Susan G, I read Mark Levin’s Liberty Amendments book on the flight to Israel where Susan lives.

I occasionally listen to Levin on the radio. He seems angry and confrontational (I am too, often) which does not strike me as an effective tool for a radio host to win political arguments with the general public. Nevertheless he has a large audience and Michael Savage has a larger and growing audience with the same emotional outrage.

Levin’s book does a wonderful job of pointing out that Article 5 of the Constitution provides for  a unique route to a new constitutional amendment. States can generate new constitutional amendments if two-thirds propose the amendment and three-quarters approve it. This mechanism completely circumvents the Congress. For that very reason it was proposed in the last few days of the founding Constitutional Convention. The Congress can act in its own self-interest.

I have seen arguments that this alternate amendment process would have to be litigated before the Supreme Court for a new amendment. That is an invalid, nonsensical argument.  The current 27th  Amendment to the Constitution was passed in precisely this manner. The 27th Amendment was passed to deliberately circumvent the Congress. No one has questioned it in a decade. The Congress has followed the prescription of the 27th amendment from the day it passed the 38 state vote. (The 27th Amendment limits Congress’s self setting of salaries.)

I concur entirely with Levin on the need to circumvent Congress. Congress has been unable to enact spending restraint regardless of the party in charge or the public mood.

The list of Levin's proposed amendments must be proposed by the states. The amendments will have to be generated by 33 states and approved by 38. Only a few of the amendments Levin proposes are really in the interests of the state legislatures.

One, such amendment is the requirement that Congress be subject to its own laws This will be very popular and will be the first to pass under the Article 5 amendment process.

Other legislation to restrain government spending will be more difficult to pass in 33 states. Though I am confident that some such amendment will finally emerge over the next few years.

The current battle over long-term budget imbalance and constant increases in the debt will have the unexpected consequence of increasing the demand for such a budget resticting amendment.

Thank you Mr. Levin for stating the issues so clearly and pointing out to so many millions of people that there is a form of redemption, short of civil war.

Original idea: two moral systems

Throughout history there have been moral systems in place within every culture. While each of these culturally-based moral systems have had different elements, they have all been designed to support tribal structures. Tribal structures have, over time, coalesced into larger units that form modern nation-states. I call this tribally based moral system the traditional moral system. Ultimately this system is based on a zero sum world where the amount of food and land are limited. Anyone or any tribe gains anything only at the expense of others.

In the past two centuries a new moral system based on commerce has emerged.

For much of the commercial world these two moral systems operate in parallel. The commercial moral system values meritocracy above all values. Meritocracy requires tolerance among working and commercial people so that they can tolerate working with and selling to others who are radically different from when. (A Bahai Lebanese engineer has to work with a Persian Shia sales manager.) It additionally requires high levels of openness and honesty among people working together. And it requires an appreciation for technology and the subsequent commercial-technologically induced world of change. The world of moral commerce is new and different and is based on a positive sum world. Commerce has brought wealth and prosperity to everyone in its path.

The difference between these two systems is understood with the question: 'would you prefer to hire a friend or to make friends with the people you work with?'

Both the traditional moral world and the commercial moral world exist within traditional nation-state and commercial systems that are amoral. The traditional world has tribes and nations that fight with each other, cruelly. The commercial world has people and businesses who will buy from and sell to anyone regardless of who they are.

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to see 14 other original Michael Phillips ideas go here.

 

Finger printing

The crime rate in the United States was rising for 20 years until it reached its peak in 1991. From that point crime in the U.S. has steadily declined.

The most prominent and successful theory explaining this pattern came from Steven Levitt.  He showed that we finally saw the effects of legalized abortion that had begun 20 years earlier in the 1970s that reduced the number of unwanted children, the future criminals.

Crime is related to three factors. (1) The number of people aged 12 to 25.  That is because crime is a juvenile behavior, (2) The certainty the criminal will be caught and (3) The certainty of being punished. These are traditional points in criminology.

What most people are not aware of, because movies and TV shows always focused on the successful collection of fingerprints in identifying criminals, is that fingerprints were insignificant before 1981. There was no national fingerprint database because we didn't have adequate computers.

Before 1981 the typical big city fingerprint file was 5000 hard-to-read original pages of local criminal prints. After 1981 the FBI and others created a multimillion fingerprint national database for local use.

I contend that this significantly increased the likelihood that a criminal would be (point 2) caught and (point 3) punished.  The new national fingerprint database resulted in reducing the amount of crime as more criminals were caught and put in prison.

I personally observed several unsolved murder cases committed in the late 70s that were finally resolved and brought to justice after the original fingerprinting finally became useful in 1981.

Just something to add to your knowledge base.

Original idea: origins of modernity

Sometimes history is easier to understand after the crucial interacting elements of the time have played out.

It is my opinion that looking back three centuries on the origins of modern industrial commerce, from my current perspective, with my experience consulting several thousand contemporary businesses, has given me insight.

I see the period before 1750 as 50,000 years that consisted of the classic Malthusian battle between increasing food output and increasing population. The British, by 1750, were influenced by the Enlightenment and Dutch attitudes toward science and worked aggressively to increase crop and animal food output.

Two things changed the course of history. The first was the Glorious Revolution, 1686, in which Holland successfully invaded England and created a modern financial infrastructure (a bond market and sound taxation systems) combined with a Protestant explosion of individualistic middle-class values.

The Dutch-British forces of the time had already created a global empire. The the people in that Empire… the outcasts, the innovators and the losers in that primogeniture family structures were shipped voluntarily to the outposts of the globe.

What we ended up with was a British-Dutch scattered society that continued to expand its agricultural output dramatically. These food producers were middle-class citizens scattered around the world trading with their home countries. The absence of hereditary control at the periphery of the Empire allowed these middle-class citizens to create extraordinary value added in agricultural output and most importantly these citizens on the periphery created global trade.  

Global trade among ordinary citizens thence created the modern industrial commercial world.

Summary: rising agricultural output combined with a scattering population of middle-class Protestants who settled nonhierarchical innovative societies, created global trade networks. The sources of prosperity out-ran the Malthusian cycle and became the positive sum modern commercial world.

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Footnote:

The Spanish and Portuguese empires did not generate modern commerce because they were Roman Catholic with strong hereditary hierarchies and were focused on extractive industries not trade.

 The other 13 Phillips original ideas are here.

Caroline Kennedy

Pres.Obama recently appointed Caroline Kennedy to be our ambassador to Japan. The Senate confirmed her unanimously.

This is an unusual and exceptional appointment.  There are three forms of ambassadorial appointment.

- The first is promotion in the State Department of talented people. These people are usually sent to difficult and unpleasant outposts. Such would be the case with Pakistan, Mongolia or Guatemala.

-Second are our appointments of wealthy donors. These appointments go to stations that have luxurious living conditions where actual international relations issues are handled at the executive level above the ambassador. Such instances are England, France, Sweden, Italy etc.

-The third instance of an appointment is to a country of vital security interest to the United States.  These are states such as China, India, Japan, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and Israel. These appointments go to exceptional, politically skilled internationally experienced masters.

The latter is the case for most of the previous appointments to Japan. Caroline Kennedy on the surface would appear to be an exception to this practice. She has no special experience with Japan. She has held no elected or appointed office. She has little or no contact with actual political operatives or officials in the U.S..

Yet Caroline Kennedy was appointed to this vital and important ambassadorship and approved enthusiastically. The reason is straightforward. Caroline Kennedy has deep and influential relations with the entire power structure of the United States. She is part of the political elite. She is widely respected for calm demeanor and good networking skills.

She actually does fit the traditional role for the job of the Japanese ambassadorship. It is just that she comes from the informal side of American politics. Should a problem arise that requires American domestic manipulation by the American ambassador to Japan, she would be as good as anyone.

By the time she takes office, the TPP should be negotiated. She would have been helpful in dealing with many American major protectionist operatives who were dragging their feet on the TPP deal.

(The photo?  Caroline asked if the picture of Monica Lewinsky was still taped to the underside of the desk.)

Wonderful world of bondholders

You may be watching a great Netflix show or even going to a wonderful movie, maybe reading a great book. I get to watch one of the truly great historical dramas playing out in our time.

The 2008 financial downturn created a monstrous problem for almost every government agency. The pension funds shrank 10 to 30%. Most have not recovered.

The consequence is that nearly every government agency has to put up more money to support the current pension fund and in order to support their current pensioners. Many cannot do this because their tax revenue, based on property tax, declined at the same time with the housing bubble collapse.

This happened in the small town in California, Vallejo, which fired nearly everyone but kept the remaining union people at their high levels of pay. They got out of bankruptcy but the problem will recur again soon. The town, which is heavily black, has created an out-of-control crime problem.

Then there is the California city of Modesto. The city has gone into bankruptcy.  Modesto is suing everybody left and right to avoid paying the bondholders. They will get nowhere and everything will get worse while they waste their time suing. Fun drama as unions destroy a formerly healthy farm town.

The grandaddy of all municipal bond default stories is Detroit. Detroit has been on a downward slope for over 40 years starting when the black population burned its own neighborhoods in the late 1960s. Whites were already leaving Detroit because of busing. That combined with high union wages to drive the automobile companies into several successive bankruptcies.

The sum total of all these messes, and I have ignored a few other bankruptcy grandiose cases, is that bondholders are being very careful to avoid government issued bonds, mostly municipal bonds, where the certainty of repayment is less than 100%.

The consequence of this is that the interest rates on these carefully evaluated bonds is rising to the point where fewer and fewer municipalities, including the state of Puerto Rico, are finding it possible to sell bonds. When bond ratings go down and interest rates go up too much no conservative portfolio will buy the bonds. Most such portfolios are held for pensions, often by unions who are strangling the source of funds for their own pensions.

If you look around you, 360°, nearly every form of public construction, public building, streets, schools, water and other infrastructure was financed with a  bond.

Now look at this 360° scene again and realize that no public buildings, no infrastructure will be possible if the political entity that built them cannot issue bonds.  No future.

It isn't just that Detroit is a current disaster. It is that Detroit is a permanent disaster and there is no way out. That is the powerful drama we get to watch play out.

It is also fun to watch everybody squabble over the remaining assets of Detroit. The bondholders will always win. In Detroit they are asking for the art that is owned by the city art museum. Fun.

Some unions may win in bankruptcy in the short run, as they did in Vallejo, but they do not win in the long term because the agency, city, region or state is dead.  

Commerce is still amoral

I have been discussing, in a number of recent blogs, that we live in a world with separate and distinct moral systems. There is the traditional moral system of a zero sum society and the commercial moral system of meritocracy.

One of my astute friends reminded me that commerce is amoral.

So how can we have a commercial moral system inside of an amoral larger commercial institution?

Let me first remind you that my astute friend is correct. Commerce as an institution is amoral. People in business will sell or buy virtually anything without regard to the moral environment. That is why we can always buy illegal drugs, illegal arms and trade goes on with pariah nations that have been under international boycott.

It turns out that the traditional moral system exists within the larger institution of the nation state that is amoral. We have the great genius of Machiavelli who taught us that lesson. He pointed out that leaders of nations must use a wide range of deceptive practices to keep the population productive and cooperative. He taught us that nations have self-interests that are amoral and frequently lead to war and conquest that are definitely not moral.

Therefore I can state confidently that it is not hard to conceive the amoral institution of commerce has within it a moral system that values meritocracy, openness, diversity and technological change.

The two can and do reside together.

Socialism

The most significant person who has written about socialism and influenced more than 100 years of socialist thought was Edward Bellamy his book was Looking Backward 2000-1887.

Bellamy did what all subsequent socialists have done. He looked at the total wealth of our society and asked why it could not be distributed equally to all people in this country.

Just to understand what this would mean, one simply needs to divide our current $16 trillion GDP by our number of households, 116 million.  That would give every family roughly $140,000.

Why can't we do this? We can, but it has two consequences.

Number one, we would have only $140,000 in the first year. From that year on, the income number would rapidly decline and quickly be below our current family income of $50,000. ( The current family income is down from $55,000 when anti-commerce ideolog Obama took office.)  

Based on data from lottery winners 80% of the working people in the United States with the new $140,000 income would no longer work. Add that to be 60% of the population that is not currently in the workforce. That would leave under 10% of the population working. Add to that all the people with current incomes over $140,000 who would find a way to leave the country. The great socialist countries of the 20th century, Soviet Union, China, Cuba and North Korea all had iron curtains to keep their citizens from leaving. There would be virtually no one left to work in the equality-of-income socialist America. The income would rapidly dwindle as it did in every socialist-communist country.

The second reason is that we would all be living in 1887, the year that Bellamy’s equality would have been put in place.

We would be living without our extended lifespans, without the brilliant health innovations that have made life much more livable, there would be no telecommunications after the telegraph and transportation would still be focused on horses and the smell of horse manure would dominate our lives.

Innovation would cease in the world of equal in income.

The reason is not so obvious. Innovation does not occur merely because of a few innovators. It was not the invention by Bell or the inventions by Edison that changed the world 15 years after Bellamy wrote his book.

Men like Theodore Vail and 1000 other business builders had to create the corporations that made the telephone and electrical systems possible. Entire networks of distribution and distributors were necessary for the innovations to become part of everyday life.

Telephones did not saturate European society for 40 years after Bell but they were ubiquitous within 15 years in the United States. The same is true for all of the Edison inventions. American society offers complex distribution networks and they are necessary for innovation to occur.

Distributors would not go to work and take risks in an equal income society.

Think of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They learned their skills from outlaws who were building telephone hacking devices (Homebrew Computer Club and John Draper).  They sold their initial core computers to the same innovators and then sold them through other distributors in stores catering to technical geeks who all had jobs in technology. They got funding from a giant game company that provided nothing to the society but it's games ( a type of business absent in socialist countries). The game distribution network became the simple-core-computer distribution network. Complex networks did not exist in 1887 and would have been incapable of distributing any form of innovation other than food.

The socialist dream of income equality means rapid descent into poverty and a life stuck in the year in which socialism becomes real. A world without innovation unless there are external sources of innovation.

Socialist Europe and the previous communist countries did not invented one single important thing. Socialism has used the dynamic innovation of the few truly commercial societies such as Japan, US and Israel.  Socialist countries also depend on global corporations from these three pioneering societies to bring innovation to their zombie populations.

That is why socialism doesn't work.

The current China, EU situation

I don't think that most people have a clear idea about the world of commerce today.

Let's begin with Europe and energy. Europe is at a dead end. Germany, the main producing nation in Europe, is committed to an absurd idea of green energy. I can't waste my time describing why this is absurd.  Most of my readers already understand this.  It has made Germany dependent on American coal. Very expensive. At the same time they are sitting on top of natural gas. It is a political commitment that will make sure the Lefty political absurd ideas combined with no population growth result in long term low growth and pathos.

Next, Russia is irrelevant because autocracies are just consumers in a commercial age, not producers, they are all alike…. Arabia, Africa and much of Latin America.

China has a serious problem because it's natural gas is in geographically isolated and difficult locations and cannot be extracted without the help of American wildcatter's. China can’t go there these days. China is unlike Mexico.  Mexico is getting the message and will soon employ American oil companies to take over its oil and gas production. Then watch North America become the energy resource capital of the world.

China without natural gas and Germany in the same situation, are doomed to little or no growth in the next two decades.

With a quick scan of the sources of growth in the past two decades there are only three countries that have made significant original contributions to commerce. The United States has created the gigantic world of Internet, Internet commerce, the associated telecommunications and media explosions. Japan has created the hybrid engine and the subsequent radical change in modern transportation. Japan is also a source of visual and graphic originality for young people. Israel created the modern drone, several other innovations in air warfare and much of the subsidiary elements of the Internet and telecom world.

The rest of the world has contributed very little other than style, pistachio nuts and innovations in food (mostly developed by Americans).

The rest of the world are merely cars on the train of commerce... the train is being pulled by the three engines of modern dynamism.

Can the Left destroy modernity?

As I have given further thought to the sources of the modern commercial industrial revolution I have invariably asked myself the question whether the Left can destroy the modern commercial explosion.

We are now 200 years into commercial modernity. The obvious Lefty forces intending to destroy the modern world of commerce are evident in the successful destruction of Europe. Nothing productive has come out of Europe since the beginning of the 20th century. Europe is a case where the hereditary hierarchy runs autocratic governments that control and manipulate all members of the society with powerful trade unions, myriad government jobs and highly restricted social relationships.

In the United States under the Democrats and Obama we have had a vast expansion of government and its rampant regulations, tyrannical government employees who have become horrible parasites with high wages and higher pensions.  We have unions controlling much of the government for self-serving interests. On top of that we have the new and most horrific parasites of all time, the environmental mandarins.

Can this life choking ivy kill or stymie the American commercial  world?

The Lefty machine of destruction is horrible and frightening.  But I would argue that it cannot, at this stage in American development, destroy us.

I find two elements in America that are our driving commercial force. One is the extraordinary freedom that young people have to explore their dreams and do it without any suppression from the social hierarchy. That is why places like San Francisco, with minimal and ineffective government are the magnets for young creative entrepreneurs. I do not believe that this freedom of young people can be squashed. The idea of freedom is too powerful to be destroyed at this point.

I would also argue that suppression of commerce with financial disincentives which can occur in the (a) progressive income tax programs, in the (b) healthcare tax on young people, and the (c) excessive loan obligations on that same young population, are not totally successful. I think enough young intelligent and independent people are capable of eluding these horrible repressive tools.

I have no numeric data points. It would be my guess that 10 to 20,000 young people a year in America are able to survive outside the Lefty parasitic commerce hating environment.  That number is sufficient to drive the American commercial engine for the world.

I think that number includes a large enough group of young people who can survive well into the foreseeable future.

Mao may be the source

I have been giving a great deal of thought to the origins of modern commerce the so-called industrial revolution.

I believe I have managed to do original thinking about this because it is a subject mostly treated by historians.  It is seldom looked at by people with a business background that I have.

I further believe that the current world of commerce gives us a different perspective on what may have been the origins of industrial commerce.

When I mentioned my interests to David Boxenhorn in Jerusalem his response was wise. The commercial explosion happened once and the sparks from that fire spread to many parts of the world. It is not so important what caused that fire because the explosion has change the world already.

My concern turns out to be the question of whether the sparks that created the fire have been suppressed by the modern Lefty world sufficiently for America to lose its driving role. The role that  keeps commerce alive in the world today.

That is the reason for my blog title.

In the world in which the sparks of the American commercial genius have been carried to every corner, there are a few exceptional cases. Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Each of these were traditional societies where radical change permitted the explosion of modern commerce to occur. Each was a non-European unique situation that made modern commerce viable.

Taiwan had been invaded by Chiang Kai Shek in 1946 and the traditional Taiwanese society was pushed aside.

Japan was invaded by Adm. Perry in 1853 and Japan decided to make radical changes in its structure to accommodate the new outside world of industrial commerce.

We find the same thing in Korea where the American army arrived for a war in 1950 and created the commercial infrastructure that later exploded into a commercial society.

So what happened in China? The subject of this blog.

First we must examine the unique circumstances about the first industrial commercial revolution. Holland was the home of modern commerce in the 1600's. Holland invaded England in 1687 and dramatically changed England into a Protestant outpost for commerce. Both Holland and England then became a joint global empire.

For the previous 50,000 years humans had been trapped in the Malthusian cycle of increased food production resulting in population increases to destroy the productive benefits. What the explosion of the British-Dutch Empire provided was the export of the surplus population as the productivity of the food supply increased. Simultaneous with the export of the surplus population to the Empire the exported citizens then had the benefit of forming societies without the traditional hereditary hierarchy. It was these newly freed citizens of the Empire that led to international trade and commercial growth.

These exported citizens to new worlds were the essential root of the commercial industrial revolution.

A similar social decapitation of hereditary hierarchy and newfound freedom for the invading citizens explains the commercial explosions in Taiwan, Japan and Korea.

Now back to China.

It was chairman Mao who slaughtered 60 million people in the 1960s in China. He especially focused on the hereditary hierarchy. It was this Mao cleansing of the Chinese society that allowed for the explosion in commerce in the 1980s.

Killing that many people is not the recommended way to jumpstart a commercial society but it does help us to go back and understand the other circumstances where commerce began and where it exploded.

(I have not forgotten that Japan conquered Taiwan, Korea and China but Japan did not destroy the hereditary hierarchy and release the entreprenurial spirit. It may have created some infra-structure such as banks and telecom.)

Hiring a friend or...

I've come to the realization that the modern world is divided into two distinct and separate moral worlds. The traditional moral world and the commercial moral world.

In the commercial world meritocracy is the primary value.  So is diversity, which in turn requires a high level of tolerance and good behavior.  The engineer that you have to work with because he is the best, might be an Iranian Shia Muslim and your family are Lebanese Bahai. Commercial morals require you to get along.

None of that happens in the traditional world.  You go your separate ways, to separate schools and your paths never cross.

What is the best way to explain the separate morals of commerce and tradition?

My friend David Boxenhorn in Jerusalem suggested the metaphor of friendship.  He asks: 'Is it better to hire a friend or to make friends with people you work with?'  

To me that does suggest the moral difference.  I would virtually never hire a friend. My friends are friends for many reason including loyalty, family, a caring disposition, patience and mutual values.  Meritocracy and industriousness are low on the list of values for someone to be my friend.

In the world of commercial values, we fire someone who is unproductive.  We don't do that in the traditional world, or the world of unions and government employment.  Traditional values respect seniority and loyalty.  We keep people as friends long after they have ceased being productive in many ways, if they ever were.

In the commercial world we know that new businesses bring vitality and excitement to a neighborhood as well as new people. Some businesses fail some succeed it depends whether customers are satisfied.

In the traditional world we generally don't want new businesses unless they are local start-ups.  We want to protect the businesses we already have.  We like the status quo and use the political process to keep new businesses out.  We especially keep out businesses that are successful and widely popular.

The commercial world is based on rewards for good behavior.  In the traditional world there are rewards and punishments.

Commercial morals operate in a positive sum world where additional commerce and activity means more for everyone.  Traditional morals are based on a zero sum world were the growth of one social function must be a loss for another.

Is this discussion helping to make clear the issue of the separate worlds of traditional and commercial morals?

Suffering

Buddhism focuses on suffering.  It teaches that attachment (to everything in daily life, past and future) is the source of suffering.  Attachment can be ameliorated by focusing on the present, a practice of enlightenment.

 

This idea of suffering, the same that is found in most religion (Christ on the cross) is focused on 50,000 years of human history.  For 50,000 years, most humans have experienced suffering: everyday hunger, medical and dental pain, horrible birth defects, untimely death and the vicious attacks of the natural world.

 

Today, since the modern world of commerce has created abundance and daily freedom of unimaginable proportions, the worst suffering we experience is a long airplane trip in coach class.

 

We don't suffer in the modern world except for untimely death and the horrors our minds create about other people (homeless, poor, minorities, the third world and the disasters of the daily paper-press and TV news reporting.)

 

We live most of our lives without suffering.  I certainly have lived a rich, abundant, happy and pain free life... as have most of the people around me.

 

So how do religions get all their adherents?  Somehow the anguish of a sore Achilles heel is conflated with the Black Plague of the pre-modern world. Our minds create a suffering from the long past of human life.  Many of us are unable to accept the fountains of abundance and joy that commerce has brought us.

 

A pro commerce life is a good alternative to religion and theology.

Gay is a reaction to Islamism

During the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union there were many changes in the United States as our society responded to communist ideology.

 

Americans became aware of our theism and how its role in our society contrasted to the Soviet atheism.

 

Most importantly Americans became aware of the role of the free market and free trade in our prosperity.

To a limited extent Americans also supported a more equal society in both the civil rights domain and in the dissolution of our hereditary upper class.

 

I constantly bring up this question because we are currently in a conflict with Islam. At this point we have been in conflict for nearly 20 years since the end of our conflict with communist ideology. What are the changes in our society that reflect this conflict?

 

I would like to suggest that gay marriage and the acceptance of gays into our society is a very specific reaction to Islamism.

 

The largest body of Islamists are in the Arab world. The Arab world has a very strong male to male bonding tradition. As I pointed out before, sex between males in the Arab world is very common but entirely suppressed. The idea of intimacy between men in a marriage-like relation in the Arab world is abhorrent and subject to capital punishment.

 

I think our promotion of gay men and gay marriage is a direct response to the enemy, Islamism, that we face.

 

It is also a an open challenge to the structure of the Islamic world. Islamic members who are gay may see the American model as a form of hope and escape.

 

The same may be true for the widespread and increasing popularity of single motherhood in America. The Islamic world is based very strictly on arranged marriage for the purposes of strengthening tribal ties. To some Islamic women, the American model of the single mother is a direct challenge to the tribal structure of the Islamic world.

Economists vs historians on origins of commerce

My readers know that I continue to struggle wiith the question of how modern commerce came to be.

The economist Thomas Malthus is the most accurate writer explaining why the previous 50,000 years of human society brought no commercial progress. Malthus explained how increases in food production were consumed by population growth and how starvation was the outcome of these two cycles being out of sync.

After Malthus no economist has made a significant contribution to understanding where this commercial explosion of the past two centuries came from.

The most prominent contributor to this field has been a sociologist, Max Weber, with his analysis of the Protestant ethic.

Recently the historian, David Landes, passed away. He had made a major contribution to understanding the role of clocks in the creation of modern industrial commerce.

I  also give a great deal of credit specifically to Jonathan Israel who worked on the history of the Enlightenment and the Dutch Republic in the 17th century.

My simple question is: 'Why aren't economists focused on this issue'? Is it because they have not really recognized the transition from starvation to abundance?

Is it because they treat this as a question of developmental economics?

If it is the latter they have been incredibly incompetent in understanding what is happening. There is no developmental economic economist whose work is respected. They have done nothing to help developing countries. The miracles of development, Taiwan and South Korea, are ignored in developmental economics or treated as exceptions.

Economics does not seem to be the appropriate study for understanding the history of commerce.

Obituaries and commerce

If you build a business that employs several thousand people and provide homes, food, education and health care for additional thousands of children and partners of your employees, bringing your total to 5000 souls whom you have provided for, you are less likely to have an obituary published about yourself than if you had written two academic books attacking commerce and promoting the murder of thousands for Left-wing causes.

I read obituaries. Most obituaries are minor. Major obituaries appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and my local newspapers. These are reserved for people who work for newspapers, celebrities of popular culture and Left-wing heroes. The only business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, publishes obituaries rarely. Maybe two or three a month.  That leaves thousands of heroes of business unrecognized by the media.

I certainly wish this obituary priority was reversed. Part of the reason for this lopsided Lefty orientation toward death is that most journalists are incapable of understanding enough about business to be able to find the words to describe the business person's contributions.

Unions final breath

Recently the picketing against fast food retailers was being done by community worker organizations. Virtually no employees.

These are organizations designed to encourage and educate about unionization and most importantly to picket business.

The reason community worker organizations have become important to mainline union organizations is that they are not authorized to act as unions, not authorized to solicit ballots for union votes and not subject to legislation governing unions and worker relations.

What does this tell us?

It tells me that this is the death throes of American unionization.

In the San Francisco Bay area citizens are outraged at unions about to strike at the only major transportation underground vehicle that connects the east and west Bay. If BART is allowed to strike it will create havoc for well over 200,000 commuters who ride BART and about +200,000 others who drive or take buses.

San Francisco residents complain that union members are already highly paid and receive outrageous retirement healthcare benefits. Ordinary people don't.

It is hard to see where an environment such as this is going to result in increased union membership. It is even harder to see public support for unions when they primarily cause rising taxes and they destroy businesses on a regular basis. Unions are unwilling to make a trade-off between reducing pay and keeping their jobs.

Unions only survive in government agencies kept alive by contributions to the Democratic Party.  That is a dead end road as Americans get organized as they did in liberal Wisconsin.