Pro Commerce

Glide and Ted McIlvenna

Four Methodist ministers came to Glide church in 1964. The one that probably had the most impact on society was Ted McIlvenna. There is not much I need to say about Ted because he has been the subject of books and is currently the subject of a masterful documentary film.

 

Ted's first work was in finding legal protection for gay male prostitutes in San Francisco and for all of the non-prostitute gay men who were regularly arrested for gay sex in semi-public places. He also hired as his assistant the leading lesbian organizer,  Phyllis Lyon.  Her partner, Del Martin, an accountant,  rented an office in the Glide Office Building.

 

All of this led Ted into the field of human sexuality, where he found absolute and abysmal ignorance. Even after the two major 1950’s  Kinsey reports and after 15 years of Playboy magazine, public awareness and understanding of human sexuality was exactly zero. The same was true for professionals to whom people turned with sexual questions, such as doctors and ministers.  Example: when asked if sexual intercourse was feasible during the last months of pregnancy, nearly all professionals said ‘No’.  Wrong.

 

Ted set up a training program for doctors and ministers in human sexuality. For the first decade these classes were run out of the basement of Glide church where Ted created a multimedia training world.  Classes involved movies and slides on three large white walls.  A sex-arama.  (Actually called a ‘fuck-a-rama’).

 

Ted rapidly found that there were few adequate films, tapes and videos to show the incredible variety of human sexuality.  He therefore had to set up an entire film studio and equipment to make appropriate sex training films.  He used another Methodist minister, Laird Sutton, to make the visual training material.

 

Since this biography of Ted will all be available in documentary film form,  I needn't go into much detail. Ted will be remembered for three extraordinary and historically important things:

 

• Ted trained nearly all the doctors and ministers in America in human sexuality for a 20 year period. This brought actual knowledge and information into a desperately blind Puritan world.

• Ted brought the issue of sex for the disabled to the appropriate and relevant people. For this humanity will always be grateful. Disabled people are sexual beings and for millennia, if they were allowed to live, they have been left out of the world of human sexuality.

• And lastly, Ted created a graduate school in human sexuality which has produced vast numbers of trained sexual professionals as well as supported graduate research into the dozens of complex and arcane elements of human sexuality.

 

Ted has changed the world and done it in a very quiet methodical and scientific manner.

My automated survey

My landline phone is connected to an answering machine that tells people to send me e-mail since the primary calls on the landline are sales calls. A few days ago, in the evening I picked up the landline because some phone calls after 6 PM are survey research.  I want to know what candidates are doing surveys.

This was a telephone survey done automatically. A recorded voice would ask a question and tell me what button to push for the response.

Roughly, half a century ago I experimented with this automatic phone survey technique. I would push a tape recorder button to ask the question and explain that the respondent was to use a one or two button on the phone for their response. This was in 1967, just after my region had gone to touch tone phone service.

I had about five questions in my automated survey and chose a random telephone sample of a few dozen people. To my complete astonishment, I got a 100% response rate at a time when telephone questionnaire response rates were down in the 15% level.

I'm sure the bizarre technical nature of the interview was alluring to many respondents. The technology, of course, was imaginary and far ahead of its time.  I was actually pushing the tape recorder button for each question and listening for the answer.

I reported on my results in a talk to the Pacific chapter of the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers.

I did not participate in the automated survey that came to my home phone. The people who created the survey had more than two choices for the first few questions that I listened to and I had to listen to all of their alternatives. Far beyond my patience.

Laws

This is a simple story with a powerful message.

A few years ago there was a head-on crash on the Golden gate Bridge. This was the third in a decade. The Golden Gate Bridge is run by local Bay Area politicians, so they proceeded to look for a solution to a perceived problem.

In the meantime, this six lane bridge, which usually has 3 lanes going each way goes to 2 and 4 at rush hours. Most of the day the speed limit is 45 miles an hour. It works.  Most drivers accepted the 45 mph limit because they can see that lanes three and four are going the opposite directions with only a few inches separating the cars. Clearly dangerous.

The other Bay Bridge that goes to Oakland from San Francisco put up a 45 mile an hour speed limit in imitation of the Golden Gate Bridge. The new speed limit on that bridge had no impact and didn't change the driving speed, which averages 60 miles an hour in moderately dense traffic. People saw no danger on the Oakland Bay Bridge because it is one-way traffic. They ignored the new posted speed limit.

I pointed this out right away when I saw what was happening; people do not obey laws that do not make sense to them. Conversely, people accept laws that make sense. If they know about them. (We don't know about nine out of ten laws the are intended to govern us.)

We had a wonderful test of my thesis recently. The directors of the Golden Gate Bridge decided to put in a multimillion dollar movable barrier to divide traffic on the Golden Gate. Once it was installed, people could see that cars would not cross from the opposing lanes of traffic through the barrier. So they increased their driving speed to a reasonable level. Here's the local story.

Lesson: people obey laws that make sense to them.

P.S. ( Also see Phil Ossiferz Stone's comment below. People will defy serious laws that don't make sense.)

 

Real productivity and the smartphone

My good friend Alex asked me to comment on the role of the Internet in producing greater efficiency. He points out that  products we used to order took two weeks to be delivered, even across national boundaries; they now arrive in two or three days.

We don't have any adequate measures of productivity. The productivity measure you see in the newspapers is a residual of dividing revenue of industries by the number of workers in those industries. As these numbers diverge we have greater productivity reported to us.

You can see the problem with this. It is crude. It is gross and it is often years after the introduction of the productive elements in that industry. This measure makes it impossible to identify specific sources of increased productivity.

My experience of working inside individual businesses is that there were two extraordinary increases in productivity that occurred in the early 1980s. One was in telecom due to the fax machine and the telephone answering machine which allowed commerce to proceed on a global 24-hour schedule. The second was the introduction of delivery services that were truly rapid, such as FedEx, UPS and DHL.

I watched as people worked longer hours, worked much faster and much harder simply to keep up with the flow of material and paper that was moving faster around them.

It is from this experience that I conclude that anything that shortens delivery time between information from individual to individual and material passed from individual to individual or business to business is inevitably going to increase productivity.

The first people I saw buy portable phones, called car phones at the time, were the most productive people at high ranks in corporations and self-employed people who frequently worked in their cars.

From all of this. I conclude that increased speed in communications and materials results in increased productive output.

I know there are restrictions and limitations to this statement.  People have a limited number of hours to work as opposed to sleep and people have a finite amount of energy. But I have certainly seen productivity gains in communication and supplies translated into exhaustion of available work hours and energy. I have also seen some nonproductive uses made of these new tools.

I think improvements in communication and supply are of great productive significance.

American productive uniqueness

I don't know what leads me to think about this subject on occasion. America plays a unique role in the world.

First it is important to see the parts the world that are significantly different. Some categories overlap others.

* Most of the world is tribal and that includes vast portions of the globe: India, Indonesia, Malaysia the Arab world, Africa and the entire Latin world, including the Philippines.

* The second large population on the planet is based on hereditary elite controlling the society. This applies to most of Europe, some tribal areas, as well as much of the Latin world. A society based on an hereditary elite cannot be very productive because it stifles meritocracy and diversity.

* The third part of the world which can overlap both the first and second categories are societies based on extractive industries. Mining, oil, lumber, fishing, etc. This includes Canada, Australia, Norway and a few oil-rich countries.

* The fourth category is that part of the world that produces nearly everything we consume or view or use to build other products. These are countries with highly productive hard-working workforces. Germany is one, Holland, Israel, China, S. Korea, Taiwan and Japan, To some extent England is productive too. The most productive  country on the planet is the United States.

The people in the productive countries that I have just listed above, but particularly in the United States,  Israel and Japan are productive both in day-to-day output and also in innovation and new industries.

Therefore, when I think of the world in commercial terms, I am invariably going to think of the engines that make everything work, of which the United States is the greatest and Israel and Japan are important contributors. Germany is important too because the Germans work so hard but Germany is not in the league of the first three.

That's how I see the world.

Socialism and envy

My wonderful friend Hans regularly suggests ideas for blogs. All my readers are encouraged to send me suggestions for my blogs.

I don't promise to use the material suggested, except as one step on the ladder that I might use for climbing somewhere else. Hans was meditating on the relationship between cooperation and commerce. He meant cooperation as used in the meaning one finds in tribal environments.

Tribal cooperation is a tightly knit social intercourse, commercial cooperation is a loose coupling.  Explained here.

Cooperation that is the byproduct of commerce is a different word. We cooperate to make businesses work, we cooperate in the marketplace to buy and sell. But that is not the same as a cooperation that occurs in a tribe, family, social environment, social organization like the PTA or a co-op owned by the members or the workers.

Cooperation in the commercial world can be impersonal, and is most of the time.

My perspective on this is a little bit new. It brings up the issue of socialism.

Socialism is pure, unadulterated envy. It consists of two categories of envy. The first is envy of people who are more successful, wealthier, more prosperous or superior in any other way. Socialism promises to equalize the social hierarchy by leveling the economic hierarchy. That is pure envy.

The secondary envy of socialism is envy of the success of industrial commerce. Socialism has no inherent positive functions. It cannot produce wealth, health or well-being in any form.  ( Think USSR, China, Cuba etc.) It is pure envy of the industrial commercial world.

Socialism handles the envy by confiscating the tools of production. It gives the tools of production to the government to operate. It makes sure there will always be non-meritocratic bureaucracies in business and that there will be no creative output.

Socialism is pure human envy in the form of an ideology.

Glide and Don Kuhn

This blog is a continuation of my series on Glide Church in San Francisco. An unknown but significant institution in America.

One of the original four ministers who came to Glide was Donald L. Kuhn.  Don was free to act on any of his interests. His prime interest was in the politics and cultural vitality of San Francisco. He therefore created a number of interesting portfolios for himself.

The most significant in terms of historic perspectives was his determination to bring minority individuals into the heart of the San Francisco political process. Don interviewed many hundreds of minorities that he found through church and organizational connections. Among the ones who were most competent and politically astute, he directed them to serve on any one of the appropriate 500 board re;ated positions and agencies that are part of San Francisco. He acted as a mentor. By the time he helped elect his own Mayor, George Moscone, he was able to get hundreds of his minority proteges appointed to important positions.

I do not know how to evaluate the historic repercussions of Don's actions because San Francisco has become the largest city in America with a pro-communist anti-business city government. It also remains as inefficient as it ever was. Maybe more so.(Inefficient is a good environment for starting new businesses.)

In the San Francisco cultural area Don published dozens of books under the Glide Publications label. He always aimed for social action and published books on lesbianism, family sexual abuse and the political activist cartoon world. Each of these was built around a community group and Don deserves credit for the extraordinary explosion of groups focused on intra-family sexual abuse. (Again, if you think that is important.)

Lastly, it was Don who brought me to Glide. Don had been instrumental in renovating the San Francisco public school system which is where we met. He continued to work on this issue throughout the decade that he was at Glide. I can't say it succeeded because nothing has succeeded in education.

Don worked on many vital projects, including planting trees in San Francisco, making San Francisco agencies more responsive to their clientele and promoting the poets and artists of San Francisco.

Don's role at Glide was instrumental in making Glide the center of many communities and new organizations that became important throughout the United States.

I went to Glide after deciding to leave the Bank of California.  Among many offers I was interested in, Glide was one and the other was Booz Allen.  I was to be the national bank marketing director for Booz Allen.  

One hot night on the beach, while I was making up my mind, I had built a small fire with my girl friend. In the fire were hot dogs and potatoes. First to come walking up the beach was the personnel manager from Booz Allen; he and his wife had a portable table and champagne and offered to have us join them.  Next came Don Kuhn and his wife Emogene, they just had beer with them.  I invited them to join us and made up my mind that I fitted in better at Glide.

Bureaucracies and budget cuts

We recently got to see how the IRS reacted to a 3% budget cut built into the 2015 budget.

The wily scoundrels at the IRS, who've already demonstrated that they are one of the most evil organizations on the planet, have announced that in response to the budget cut they will reduce services to taxpayers. They will stop advising ordinary citizens on tax questions, reduce the number of telephone calls they will handle and they will generally reduce other taxpayer services.

If you think this is exceptional bureaucratic behavior, think back two years to the government shut down. Obama ordered flight controllers to delay flights out of LA and deliberately hassle air travel customers. He closed the White House to tours and closed all the monuments in Washington DC.

That is standard behavior for government bureaucracies.  When you get a budget cut, punish the citizens.

When I worked with the California legislature in the 1960s, the worst highway in California was between San Francisco and Sacramento, Interstate 80. This highway got the heaviest traffic from political and government usage.

Caltrans, the agency responsible for maintaining and widening this vital highway always put the budget for expanding the San Francisco-Sacramento highway section at the bottom of their budget list. Telling the legislature to pay for everything else Caltrans dreamed of doing, or they would never get a better highway for the most important highway for the legislature.

I'm sure you get the message. Government bureaucracies first response to a budget cut is to punish citizens.

If I were to recommend a legislative remedy for this behavior by bureaucracies, I would suggest that any reduction in service to taxpayers or citizens would result in an automatic doubling the size of the budget cut in the coming year.

We need tools to deal with the evils of bureaucracy. This is just one suggestion.

Muravchik and me

I am in the middle of reading Joshua Muravchik’s book  Making David into Goliath. You can read the critical chapter, 10, where it was reproduced in the Times of Israel.

Muravchik  has done a masterful piece of history and has come up with a conclusion that has convinced me.

The great Leftist move to fight modernity and commerce originally took the shape of communism in the mid 1800’s with the hard-core belief that workers who hated modernity and the commercial world would rise up as the 'proletariat' to form revolutionary cantons to return the world to the old agrarian ways. Or to at least seize the new industrial technologies.

The proletariat was always a disappointment. Slowly the Left began to look for another revolutionary global population. With the help of the Third World movement promoted by the UN and the American versus Soviet Union conflict, the idea of a global ethnic group formed from the anti-colonialists, created a potential successor to the proletariat that would be the revolutionary future.

It is this global coalition of ethnic populations that the Left now looks to as the revolutionary basis for overturning modernity and industrial commerce.

Muravchik makes the point that ever since Israel defeated its Arab neighbors, most decisively in 1967, the Left has looked at Arabs as part of their new revolutionary coalition and Israel as part of the modern commercial monster.

Since the title of this blog concerns ‘me’, one could ask ‘How do you get in this?’

I am a consultant to the first and most significant fantasy of the Left. I am a consultant to a new group called the Diversity Coalition (no website yet) which has tens of thousands of members made up of black and Latino churches, the major American Filipino organization and an array of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Korean political action groups.

This coalition has found a number of American political issues on which they can agree. Principally they agree on the need for more access to employment and more access for minority small businesses into banking and the commercial market.

This finds me working for a functioning organization that is part of the wet dreams of the Global Left.  The Diversity Coalition is devoid of the Left’s revolutionary ideology. It is purely American.

Don't tell the Left that such an organization could not exist outside the United State if it included Chinese, Indians and other Southeast Asians as well as Arabs.  The many ethnicities might all hate the United States but such an organization would not be anti-commerce; the members would have such different worldviews they would never be able to agree on anything of substance.

Public advocacy 2

I have watched my close friend and partner for 45 years, Bob Gnaizda, as a legal public advocate.

Aside from the four cases I cited in the last blog. All the effective legal public advocacy work that I have seen has been done on the basis of the following principles:

• The only time to go to court is to have a press conference on the steps of the court to announce a case that is being brought. This is a tactic used to frighten vulnerable opponents. To actually use a court is nearly always a mistake. It is costly in time and resources to prepare a case, and it takes many, many years for the case to be heard and adjudicated. Never worth the time.

• The ideal legal public advocate should come with prosecutorial experience not defense experience. Cases and projects must be put together with the kind of tactics and strategy that people learn in prosecutorial environments.

• Always use the discovery component of a court case to obtain information and use pressure based on the discovery information to obtain your goals.

• The ideal situation is always to use instances where some government regulatory body can be applied as a threat. Many businesses are wholly regulated such as banking, utilities, transportation, communications and a few others. A good tactic is to develop skills and allies at the regulatory level. The regulations may not directly  impact on the opponent but public hearings by regulatory bodies and public pressure on regulatory bodies can frighten your opponent into conciliation.

• For a tactic to become successful, pressure must be continuous and unrelenting. The opposition may be forced to sign some public agreement but that agreement should be subject to constant review and public examination. Almost always, an opponent will back out and reneged on promises.

The best person to be a public advocate is a lawyer whose interest are intense in the subject area and whose life is committed to the subject. My interests are in pro-commerce cases.

An example, for me, of such a public legal advocate would be a young woman with ferocious intensity and belief in the values of pro-commerce.

She would find plaintiffs with nothing more than her friendship networks and a telephone call to five people  who had been laid off from their jobs because of an increase in the minimum wage. These people would be videoed with their statements and their explanations, for use in media contacts. My imaginary advocate would find the best jurisdiction in the United States, where the case has a chance of being heard and where the local jurisdiction has a chance of dropping its minimum wage policy. That might be a city that had already gone through bankruptcy and was gun shy about risking an adverse court decision.

My public advocate would then seek a class action representing vast numbers of people and broad geography.

With letters to all appropriate legal jurisdictions where minimum wage laws have been passed, attention would be brought to this class-action worth billions of dollars.  The tactic would be to get a vulnerable jurisdictions to rescind their minimum wage raises. That action could spread.

It would also be useful to have one or two public spokespersons hold press conferences on the issue.

Where is this young person that I am seeking? Finding adequate funding for her office and a modest salary is trivial….when the right person is available.

Public advocacy

In my mature years, what I now refer to as my old age, I am beginning to see one last major project that is worthwhile.  It has always been on my back burner but never promoted.

I would like to see some form of legal public advocacy for a pro-commerce position.

I have had more than 45 years experience with legal public advocacy, beginning with a firm in San Francisco founded and led by my friend Robert Gnaizda: Public Advocates in San Francisco.

I have been a consultant and an expert witness for Bob's variety of clients and advocacy firms for at least 40 of those years.

In almost all cases legal public advocacy has been trivial despite its occasional successes. In one of its greatest successes in California it won a case recognizing the disparity in support for public schools Serrano v Priest. The case was won but the lack of follow-up meant nothing ever changed.

I can think of four extraordinary cases where legal public advocacy has been positive.

• The first was my own case against Bank of California. It was fortuitous the we drew a favorable Federal judge who understood the case and made it clear to the banks that they would all have to settle the class-action. Savings and Loans and other financial organizations nationwide joined the settlement. There was never an actual trial.

• In Israel the law firm of Shurat HaDin was able to stop the constant barrage of Jew hating convoys trying to enter the Gaza blockade zone. They did this by sending letters first to marine insurance companies and then to every harbormaster in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic pointing out that ships crossing a legal blockade were uninsured and the harbormaster who permitted them to leave a harbor in the first place was liable.

• A law firm in Washington DC brought several cases against the IRS, the lead lawyer is Tom Fitton at the firm of Judicial Watch. The firm was able in discovery to get a good judge who made the IRS cough up the e-mails that the IRS had been hiding and lying about to Congress for several years.

• In Los Angeles a legal action by Students Matter on behalf of poorly performing low income students got a court order against the union policies of not firing teachers and promoting teachers automatically on seniority. This raised the issue at least to the level of public understanding about the evils of union control of public schools.

My next blog is about the actual way in which public legal action can be effective and has been effective without pursuing actual court cases.

Irony in my life

For those of you who have not read every single blog I have written you may have missed the fact that I began my civil-rights-for-blacks activity in 1957 at the University of Chicago.  I worked with a few black friends to integrate barbershops on 63rd St.

I was active in black civil rights issues from that day until this day.

In 1970, after I found a lawyer who would take the case, I brought a civil rights, affirmative action case on behalf of minorities and women against the Bank of California. That case became the most successful civil rights class-action in American history. It shaped employment for blacks throughout American finance.

At about the same time, I helped integrate San Francisco public schools as well as play a minor role in the police and fire department integration. Integrating the public schools with busing was a mistake for which I have prolifically apologized.

At very few points over the past 55 years was the black community ever cohesive.

That has since changed. Thanks to Ferguson and similar incidents in the past (and in the future), the black community has become unified for the first time.

Unfortunately blacks are now unified in their vilification of whites. Not just police who haven’t been white for many decades, but vilification of all whites. This unification of the black community around a preposterously wrong idea (that whites disproportionately kill unarmed blacks) is tragic.

This horrible black behavior and attitude is returning us to the Jim Crow days. I will not be surprised to see a modern version of the Ku Klux Klan. Americans, other than blacks are now hostile to blacks on a scale that has always seemed unimaginable to me.

The irony is that I devoted my life to helping blacks and today the black community has become unified to demolished their own future. I recognize that I helped hundreds of thousands of blacks, possibly millions of blacks, to get work and establish themselves in the middle class. The movement has ended.

It is sad for me to see that this honorable movement has come to an abrupt end and may remain stagnant for decades or generations. It is even more tragic to see that a  half black president presided over and encouraged this horrible outcome.

Sea level

I saw this article recently about sea level rise.

I have been carefully looking at the global warming thesis since roughly 1980 when Stewart Brand asked me to look into the issue. The most reliable data I could find then were ocean temperatures dating back to 1820. The noise to signal ratio in the data (variation) was so great that it was not possible to see any trends.

As I watched the global warming thesis developed in the 1980s. I began looking carefully at the data. By the mid-1990s. I could see that the data was increasingly unreliable. By the end of the 1990s I was able to see the beginnings of the satellite data and could see that the earth-based sampling that dated back to the1850s was terribly biased toward populated regions, and completely unreliable. By the 2000’s all of my concerns became publicly known and justified.

No data other than satellite data on global warming has any value whatsoever. It is crap.  The satellite data shows a tiny warming over the past 35 years, mostly occurring in one year mid-1996 to mid-1997 for reasons that are completely unknown.

Beginning in the early 2000's I began to read about rising sea levels. Again, I looked at this data, which appeared to be reliable dating back 200 years. For 200 years there did seem to be a rise in sea level of about 8 inches per century. Not really enough to give a damn about.

From reading this article, mentioned at the beginning, it turns out that the measurements of sea level for the past two centuries were not reliable. Overall the most recent hysterical numbers on sea level rise are even less reliable. We don't have reliable global measurements of sea level.

Since the earlier data about sea level shows a rise beginning two hundred years ago, there is no possibility of connecting it to human behavior or CO2, which only begins to play a global role, if any, in 1900 as population and industrialization grew.

So here I am: knowing that the global warming data and hysteria is nonsense and beginning to see that the sea level data is comparable nonsense. If either are true, they are at an insignificant level.

Business start-ups

This graph says two things to me.:

One advances the hypothesis that I have had for a long time. The second is an explanation for the current long economic doldrums.

In 1974 I started an organization with several other people called the Briarpatch Network. This was a network of hundreds of small hippie startups in a nearly infinite range of businesses. It began as people who came to meet me in a wharf office I had set up shortly after publishing the Seven Laws of Money. Hippies came to me because they knew that I understood finance and that I was sympathetic to their interests. Along with the first coordinator and many subsequent coordinators of the Briarpatch, we built an organization that rapidly reached 600 members and remained at about that size for the next ten years. I would say that our membership was well over 1000 small businesses. Over that period of time there were 5000 to 6000 employees.

It has been my hypothesis that this explosion of small businesses was the source of the very rapid growth of America from the late 1980s until the early 2000's. The hippies learned from me and from each other that the best way to start a business is to cooperate with everyone else in that business and nearby businesses. Cooperation was a very hippie value that gave us nearly 90% success rate for business startups over a five year period.  That compared to a 10% success rate among non-hippies businesses.

I know that the Briarpatch methodology of cooperation among start-ups worked because I duplicated the pattern in Sweden starting in 1980.

I think this chart in some ways is a reflection of the hippie interest in starting businesses and the Briarpatch success model that was widely imitated.

The second issue is that the hippies maintained a very optimistic view of what they could do in the world and what their impact on the future would be. This led them to start businesses and led them to start innovative, imaginative businesses.

It is my contention that this optimism is necessary for business startups to be abundant and that this business optimism has been on the wane for the past 15 or so years. Partly due to politics, meaning the Democratic Party, and certainly due to local hostility to commerce evident in the mistreatment of Uber and AirB&B as well as the horrible enactment of a rising minimum wage.

If my hypothesis is correct we will not see rapid economic growth again in the U.S. until we see an optimistic pro-business, pro-commerce climate.  The kind one finds in Israel.

Parents and children

Most people have made some observation about the relationship between children and their parents. It is a periodic theme in literature and the arts.

I have also observed, as many others have, that children are born with fairly distinct temperaments. These temperaments are often similar to their parents and equally often in conflict with their parents.

How a child turns out as an adult has often appeared to me as the byproduct of early interaction between the child's temperament and the parent or parents. For example, a very gentle child who might someday be a kindergarten teacher, a poet or an artist is raised by  business oriented, determined, relentless parents and the child becomes a rather terrified adult who seeks the safest occupation as a government bureaucrat or an accountant.

The interaction of infant temperament and parents' remains to me and everyone else I know completely unknown. We do not know whether sympathy and support is positive or whether conflict and stress lead to innovative human development.

I am merely one to point out that this will be an important area for human development in the future.

This subject is more important now than at any time in history. In the modern commercial world each individual can make an extraordinary unique contribution. Thanks to commerce there will be some audience or a market for every unique human creation that is authentic.

Glide and the players 1

This is a continuation of yesterday's blog about Glide church in San Francisco. The first of many.

The first minister to arrive with a an appointment from the Methodist District Bishop was Lewis Durham. Lew played the role of chief executive and organizer throughout his career at Glide which lasted until roughly 1976. He was the glue that made the organization work. His unique talents were as a mediator and quiet leader.

Among a dozen projects of significance that Lew organized were Huckleberry House.  A home for the explosion of young runaways flocking to San Francisco in 1967.  Another Glide minister is given credit for starting Huckleberry, but Lew was the driving cohesive force.  Today Huckleberry survives as a large social service organization with 60 employees.

The most important lessons I learned from Lew were that:

* A mediator's function is to identify with the values and ideas of the opponent (the mediator usually starts out sympathizing with one side). Only by seeing exactly how your opponent sees, feels and thinks can you find a resolution to any conflict. This was a standard teaching for ministers in the Methodist tradition but Lew fully understood it before he taught me.

*  Another lesson Lew taught me was about myself. He used to bring me a problem of any sort and say that he would be back in a while to get an answer. Over a few years he had learned that my brain was especially good at solving problems when given two weeks to contemplate it. After two weeks Lew would come back for his answer.

* Lew also taught me about the concept of ‘the flag’. Methodist training had emphasized that all movements need a flag around which supporters can rally. That flag can be an idea, a metaphor, a physical object, but the flag always played the same role as in military history where the flag is carried at the front of a salient. Lew always spoke of Glide as an institution that raised flags for movements and peoples.

Glide Church

My wonderful friend, Alex, has suggested that I write some blogs about Glide. Glide is actually  Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco.

Alex suggests that I write about it because I was there as business manager and treasurer from 1970 until 1981. During the most exciting years. Most of the influential participants are dead and the two remaining have written a rather self-centered aggrandizing picture.

Glide was an extremely important institution at a time in American history when the hippie world that centered on San Francisco was shaping the global future. I am not exaggerating. One can easily look at my many blogs on hippies to see that they had an extraordinary influence on everything from food, to health, to fashion,  to business and  to technology.  Interestingly Glide church was an institution at the very center of this globe shaking phenomenon.

History is often written as the consequence of trends and sometimes written as a consequence of extraordinary individuals. From my experience it is clearly both. For individuals, we can substitute institutions as well. The institution of the Protestant reformation had an overwhelming influence on history as did the Masonic order in promoting commerce. Both are institutions.

In this case Glide and the four founding ministers  had an extraordinary impact on the world as I will try and explain in occasional blogs on the subject.

The name Glide derives from Lizzie Glide a religious woman who inherited vast sums from her husband's investment in Ventura County oil. In the late 1920s and into the ‘30s Lizzie built a church at the most heathen location in America that she could think of which was in the ‘Tenderloin’ of San Francisco. She put a rotating neon cross on the top of the the church building. In addition to her endowment she bought a nearby Methodist hotel and she also built the church as part of an office building with the intention of generating future income for the church.

When I arrived in 1970 the buildings and the liquid assets were substantial enough to maintain a staff of 30. I was able to grow the liquid assets at 20% a year while I was treasurer working with an asset firm.

The significant change in Glide occurred in 1963 when Lew Durham, a Methodist minister from a prominent Methodist divinity school in Tennessee was appointed to handle the Lizzie Glide trust. Lew brought out two of his fellow classmates. By 1965 the hippie revolution was beginning and each of these ministers began developing their own special contributions. At the same time they felt the need to actually have a church component and they brought out another Methodist minister who became the best-known of the group: Cecil Williams who remains there to this day.

Oil and deflation

I have no idea how many of my readers are sophisticated in finance and economics. I assume it is a high proportion.

We are currently experiencing one of the most dramatic change in oil prices in my lifetime. Crude barrels of Brent, (which is not a location, it is a class of light viscosity low sulphur oil) have dropped from over $90 to under $45 in roughly 4 months. This is a very dramatic change.

$45 is below the level at which the Calgary tar sands can be extracted, making the XL pipeline somewhat irrelevant at the moment. $45 a barrel is my calculation of the price of oil if it were directly substituted for the current three dollar price of natural gas. Possibly a long run equilbrium price.

This point of intersection is probably irrelevant for now. I don't see many people changing their cars or trucks to natural gas. However, many electric generating plants are doing precisely that.

The dramatic fall in the price of oil is clearly understandable because of the global oil glut largely driven by oil fracking and to some extent by the willingness of Saudi Arabia to keep pumping oil at full output.

Most other countries who contribute to global oil Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela, Iran and Libya have little choice or no choice. They can't cut back production. Oil is their only source of revenue. The Arab Emirates can only survive a short while at the current price.

Cuba begged for American assistance because of the oil price, knowing that socialist Obama would help them, just as he helped fund bankrupt Democratic Detroit in their desperate straits.

The most important element of this economic phenomenon is that it will have repercussions on everything on the planet. Transportation, retail, manufacturing, primary goods and all other natural resources. Taxes, governments, military, international relations.  Everything.

At the same time: We have actually been in a global deflation, just like Japan, since 1991, except that in the United States some domestic monopolies such as healthcare, housing and education have obscured the real deflation.

Economists and central banks everywhere have been having an hysterical fit over deflation. They consider it to be bad. They are stuck with my namesake ‘the Phillips curve’ which shows that inflation correlates positively with employment. Therefore, they want to have some inflation to promote employment. They aren't getting any inflation at all. We are at zero interest rates and in negative interest rate territory in many parts the world.

To me deflation is a way to put money in the pockets of the middle class who benefit the most from falling consumer prices because they consume at levels that are disproportionate to their income.  So central banks and governments everywhere are working against the middle class and have been for decades.

There is a perverse effects on deflation of low oil prices, when oil and deflation work together. This is an appropriate time for a significant financial correction.

The problem I see is that the Federal Reserve and the new Elizabeth Warren economic banking environment have created a serious crisis promoting mechanism.

The Federal Reserve now handles short-term money emergencies, the so-called repo market. The Federal Reserve is inadequate to handle this formerly private safety mechanism.

We all get to see the forces of a financial crisis at work and at the same time to see the old crisis prevention mechanism that isn't working at all.

Future of retail

This is a site where you can see one of the most interesting directions in retail brick stores.  You can also read the page on my secondary Marketing blog here.

I’ve seen the earlier model of this idea in the Tokyo Daikanyama bookstore.  It is based on beautiful architecture by a brilliant young architectural group that I have been following for many years: Klein Dytham.

The Japanese idea developed to compete with the digital retail world is called ‘curation’.  Sales people become curators of retail subject areas.  A section of the store might be for railroad enthusiasts.  That section will have model trains, train books, train posters, appropriate videos, train related clothing and a salesperson who knows the subject and curates that section.

This makes sense to me and is important to watch.  However, commerce is not about good ideas or even brilliant ideas.  It is 100% empirical.  We will have watch and see how customers react and whether they buy.

Ants are productive

On my Facebook page. I decided to have a little fun.

I commented on the frequency of posts about cats and dogs and said that I personally have strong positive feelings toward ants. I included this image of an ant.

The reality is that I do enjoy watching ants go about their daily life in my house on my sink and in my bathtub. I go out of my way not to kill them. I have great respect for their extraordinary perseverance and other anthropomorphic qualities.

As a fan of pro-commerce, I am also biased toward ants because of their high productivity that is not put there by humans.

They go about pollinating the world as a byproduct of their own search for food. You can look at the extent of their pollination efforts in Google scholar. At this moment ants' pollination importance doesn’t seem to be fully appreciated. But that is the way of science, which has fads. The fad in which ants become more important in pollination is certainly on the horizon.

Ants also help create topsoil by digging homes deep in the surface and providing routes for water and seeds to penetrate the surface. Creating topsoil is vital for all animal and plant survival.

And then ants are food for many species.

I am very impressed with ants and I'm expressing my gratitude to their entire species here in this blog.

Passover story

I have to confess to my readers, five months late. I was somewhat depressed during the Gaza war and for a few weeks after. No rational arguments mitigated my depression. I am always a cheerful, upbeat person. During that time I only expressed my depression to my very closest family and friends.

What depressed me? It was an historic change of such extraordinary magnitude that I could not ignore it.

Killing 6 million Jews in the territories conquered by the German armies. (I did not say Hitler the Third Reich or Nazi), it was the German army that brought forth the most abominable act in human history: the Holocaust.

As we humans, in the few civilized parts of the world where commerce has been triumphant, became aware of the Holocaust the level of Jew hate that had preceded World War II rapidly abated. Less than 15 years after knowledge of the Holocaust was widespread most Jew hate was at a very low level in the population of the modern commercial world. (Using the term ‘modern commercial world’ excludes the ugly communist nations.) Under communism, virtually no information about the Holocaust was available.

Slowly over the past 15 years. The conditions that created the Holocaust, the high level of Jew hatred, has returned.

This is bothersome, less so to me as an American, and less so to me, knowing that Israel is a militarily strong and unified nation based on pro-commerce values.

What was terribly depressing for me was the large percentage of American Jews who did not support their fellow Jews in Israel at the very point when a new Holocaust is emergent.

Here are the facts: the Gazans, (I make no exceptions because any competent and decent person over age 12, long ago left Gaza) began firing over 1000 serious missiles at the major population centers of Israel. Their intent was to kill every ‘damn Jews’. No ambiguity here. Their intent was to kill every single Jew that they could.

It was only an act of God that allowed the Israelis in the Jewish year 5766 to build and operate the Iron Dome. The Iron Dome is a technological feat of genius that was able to destroy nearly all of the Gazan murderess missiles in the air.  The Iron Dome was only installed long after the missiles first arrived in Gaza.

The president of the United States, a man who hates Israel and announced it in his first day in office by canceling all written agreements between the previous government in the United States and Israel, also expressed his disdain for the Israeli people in its time of ultimate distress by doing two things: allowing or encouraging the FAA to suspend flights of American planes to Israel because one rocket had fallen a few miles from the airport. A potentially damaging act against Israeli civil aviation. He further emphasized his disdain toward Israel by ordering blockage of American defensive missiles that were already ‘forward based’ in Israel.

Even after this modern Gaza based proto-Holocaust, more than half the Jews in the United States told survey researchers that they support president Obama.

I say here, with the entire weight of Jewish history on my shoulders: these people who call themselves Jews are not Jews. These American Lefty Democrats are not Jews.

What do I base this on?  I base this on the oldest ritual in Jewish tradition: Passover.

During Passover we read the story told in the Torah about the Exodus from Egypt. Passover tradition tells us to tell four sons about the Exodus story. The second son is called the ‘wicked son’ and it is he who uses language to exclude himself from the community by talking about ‘them’ rather than ‘us’.

This oldest Jewish ritual tradition that has survived, specifically says to this wicked son: ‘You are not a Jew’. “Had you been in Egypt, when the Lord brought forth the Jews from Egypt, you would not have been brought with them’.  You are not a Jew.

I therefore say, based on 3000 years of tradition and more than 100 million lives of Jews who lived before me: “that you who support Barack Obama and fail to support Israel are not Jews”.

A meaningful life

Last week I wrote a blog about simple living.

One of the main points I made in the blog is that our commercial world allows those of us with a clear and authentic identity and a clear understanding of what we want to do with our lives, the ability to use the simple lifestyle to do whatever we wish.

That of course raises the question of how does somebody find the relevant passions in their lives and in their authenticity. The two are usually closely connected.

A wonderful friend of mine who loves Bali sent me a link to a set of classes and conferences conducted in Bali that are designed to help people find their passions and create employment around those interest.

I would like to admit my colossal failure in this regard. I have had dozens of clients and many classes for people who wanted to find their passions, their authenticity. I don't think I have ever succeeded, in even one case. I have helped women identify their desire to find a rich man so they don't have to work. Some may consider this a passion and an authenticity. I don't.

I don't think it is a difficult question to answer: ‘Why can't I help people find their passion?’

I think the answer is that most people simply do not have a core value system. A core interest in life, a strong set of desires. By the time they reach their late teens, if they had it, it is gone.

I think that offering a child a route to authenticity and a life of passion would require a great deal of effort on the part of parents. First, the child would need continual  encouragement from some source either parents, relatives, or peers. Second, the child would need to have a range of experiences that awaken interest in the world and stimulates vitality.

I have no idea how that could be done. I have merely pushed my problem back from adulthood to childhood.

Size of the real Left

I am most comfortable when I have some data. For this blog I have used some media circulation data which is notoriously unreliable.

So how big is the real Left in America?

I would have to put the number somewhere around 30 to 40 million people. I base this on the perpetual 30% of survey respondents who say they support Barack Obama, regardless of what he says or does. Those surveys are based on people who voted. The actual vote for Obama in 2012 was over 60 million. I have reduced the final number of Lefties because many studies I have done indicate a habitual voting pattern on the part of a large percentage of voters. The remaining voters actually express strong support for their candidate as evidenced in opinion surveys.

Of this 30 million Lefties, where do most of them get their information?

By definition, I consider a sincere Leftist to be someone who reads the New York Times and the New Yorker. That is a tiny population. Even if it includes people who read the New Yorker in the dentist office. That is roughly 1,000,000 people based on the circulation of both the Times and the magazine. We can add to that the people who look at the New York Times digitally and look at stories in the New Yorker periodically.  Despite the unreliability of media data, we get an additional million and a half digital readers. A total of hard core informed Lefties of under 3 million people. They are the core of 30-40 million Lefty sympathizers.

Why do I personally know so many of these people?. By definition: I live in a Lefty city and my friends are disproportionately educated readers.

What is the maximum number of people who can be considered core Lefties? There is another 20 million people who listen to NPR regularly. That includes the under 3 million who read the NY Times and the New Yorker.

The really interesting question is how does this small number of people in the immediate NYTimes and New Yorker Lefty circle have so much influence?

Of course they have a disproportionate influence in academia based on survey data and in journalism, based on survey data. But we have only academia and media at the level of 100,000 people who directly influence the next 3 million people who indirectly influence another 30+ million people.

What are the mechanisms?   I don’t know.  I know that circles of friends, sociologically speaking, demand coherence of values.  That doesn’t explain much.

Before you become upset by these numbers. There are only two comparable numbers we have for the opposition to Leftism. The number of people who look at national print news that is not the New York Times is over 6 million when you include the USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The comparable radio audience is Rush Limbaugh and two other conservative talk radio celebrities whose audience exceeds 25 million.  They reach about 70 million people who strongly oppose Obama currently in surveys.  In the 2014 over 40 million of them voted in a new Republican government.  

The conservative non-Lefty world is significantly larger than the Lefty world and certainly the new Congress demonstrates its potency at the grassroots level. But the ability to influence public discussion at the media level is far behind.

I don't know ofreliable data concerning information distributed via the Internet. That must play a significant role as a source of news and information for both the Left and the non-Left.

Electric blankets

This blog covers two subjects: the first deals with cash cows and the second deals with brick stores versus digital stores.

The subject that got me inflamed was the cold weather in San Francisco, which led me to seek an electric mattress pad for my bed. I am wimpy enough to want to get into a warm bed.

I went to look for an electric mattress pad that could be turned on automatically an hour before I get in bed and an hour so after it would automatically be turned off.

The problem I found at the brick-and-mortar store, was that none of the electric mattress pad boxes had adequate information on the outside of the box to tell me how I could deal with the automatic on-off button.

There is a simple reason that the box information was so inadequate. The big companies that still have their labels on electric blankets from General Electric to Cannon to Sunbeam, all treat the electric blanket as a cash cow.  The manufacturing is in China.  

The money just rolls in even when the parent company ignores it entirely.This is a common fate for cash cows in the corporate world. The consequence is that a cash cow that might last 15 or 20 years by being ignored could last 40 years with some marketing attention.

Marketing attention means doing marketing research and adjusting the product to adapt to changing consumer needs and distribution channels. Brick stores need boxes with much more technical information on the outside.

Back to me. I took home the best blanket box I found and opened it to find that it didn't have any automatic clock nor did the on-off button lend itself to use on an automatic timer in the electric line. I returned it and ordered from Amazon.

The Amazon technical details were more than adequate to let me know that the on-off switch really would stay on and be controlled by a automatic clock in the electric line. 

What surprised me was that none of the electric blankets or electric mattress pads had automatic timers on them.

It looks to me like nobody's doing marketing research. I asked half a dozen friends, and they all want their electric blankets to be on automatic timers.

Post script: pad not sold with model in photo.

Simple living

More than 35 years ago I wrote a book on simple living.  

You can find an e-version here.  It hasn't been updated so it has nothing up-to-date on social security or Obamacare. 

I saw a list of simple living blogs this morning and want to pass it on to those who might care.  It comes from a Christian simple living site.

To me simple living in America is a brilliant synthesis of many simple living traditions ranging from Quaker to Bohemian to military.  From my secular point of view there are two primary reasons for simple living.

By living simply and being able to live on very little income one has the world-historic-opportunity to live freely doing what one loves.  An opportunity granted only to those of us who live in the 200 year old decades of modern commerce. Few people ever had such  opportunities.  To me, it is the greatest blessing of commerce.

The second reason is that owning few objects means less time one has to spend on maintenance and a comparable less cluttered mind dedicated to keeping track of worldly clutter.

Simple living is not for most people.  One needs to know what one wants to do with one’s life, rather than get a job.  I’ve never found a way to help people figure out what to do with their life.

Here is the list:

• "Christian Simplicity -- Conversations about God, trust, and money -- Money Lies // God Ideas // Finding God // Mindfulness // Simple Living // NEW, under construction, being developed by Kevin Tupper: Five guides first, blogging second, and then money-help third.
• Dave and Sheryl Balthrop: Simple Life Reboot -- Making Room for That Which Matters Most: Transformational, healthy minimalism. The Balthrop's 2-3 minute episodes are simple reading of their brief 'essays.'
• Simple Life Together, a podcast dedicated to leading a simple life in the modern world by Dan and Vanessa Hayes.
• SimpleREV Conference -- Revive and Rev It Up! + All Things SimpleREV Podcast. Besides, SimpleREV, Joel Zaslofsky is the Chief Simplifier, Curator, and Founder at Value of Simple. He also hosts the popular Smart and Simple Matters show. When he's not enjoying nature, making his wife smile, or playing with his two young sons, Joel's busy minimizing, being Paleo, doing public speaking gigs, connecting, reigniting his personal renaissance, and Experience Curating.
• Joshua Becker is the Founder and Editor of Becoming Minimalist, a website with over 500,000 regular monthly readers dedicated to inspiring others to find more life by owning less. Motto: Caring for Your Whole Self. His rational approach to minimalism, focusing on passion and purpose, has made him one of today's most-influential simple living advocates. He has sold tens of thousands of his books, has been invited to speak all across America, and has made media appearances in TIME Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post Live, and the CBS Evening News. His most recent book, Clutterfree with Kids, consistently ranks among the best-selling parenting books in America. Currently, he lives in sunny Peoria, Arizona, with his wife and two young kids.
• Sarah Wehkamp is passionate about helping families find balance and simplicity in their home life. She and her husband, Chris, are founders of Parents Who, a website that equips parents with tools to create and maintain a simpler, more meaningful family life. She's the mother to the youngest firemen in the world, identical twin boys Mr. B & Mr. C, a fair trade chocolate enthusiast, a former elementary school teacher, and an avid traveler."

Solar hypocrisy

Do you have an interest in installing solar panels at your home or business. It is reasonable to assume that the price of those panels will play a role in your decision of whether to generate electricity using solar panels.

I presume that the environmental movement has a general interest in promoting increased use of solar panels.

That presumption turns out to be false. The environmental movement is not interested in increasing the use of solar panels as a priority. The top priority is gaining political support from labor unions and Democratic Party donors, and getting government funding for environmental projects such as Solyndra.

What is the evidence?

Three years ago the US government put a 33% tax on all imported Chinese solar panels. The goal was to get labor support for American made solar panels and the enviromental movement in general. This year the tax was raised to 200%. That increase indicates to me that the Chinese solar panels are so good people were willing to pay the 33% penalty.

Let there be no doubt that the current Democratic administration is controlled by environmentalists and labor unions when they concur on any issue. 

In this case the environmentalists really don't give a damn about the environment. They just want to win a modest battle. I would suggest that they are hypocrites.

Species rights

This is not a very big issue for the immediate future.

Lefties and other sentimental people for whom reality and rational thought are unimportant have been pushing for legal status for non-human animals.

While I see no prospects for this becoming a serious problem the perpetual push for Lefty theories and the slow perverse infiltration of important institutions by Lefties may create conflict. At least on this issue.

I want to foreclose this realm of debate.

Anglo-Saxon common law already deals with this issue in two robust traditions.

One, species must have the ability to represent themselves in order to have standing in our courts.

That means that gorillas can certainly have standing. If they can find a gorilla to represent them. The same is true for dolphins and dogs.

This tradition has always allowed human lawyers to represent humans who are mentally or physically deficient.

The second Anglo-Saxon common law provides that other courts can be used if those courts have reciprocal relations. This is not uncommon in international trade where a second country is used for court settlement so long as the second country recognizes the first country's courts and laws.

That means that gorillas, dolphins and dogs, can be represented in human courts when humans can be represented in the gorilla, dolphin and dog courts.

I hope that making these common law traditions visible and explicit will head off the Lefty New Age nonsense.

Koan: what are you going to do?

I have had a fairly long connection with American Zen Buddhism. Roughly 45 years, including Zen practice, being on many boards of directors and knowing a large number of people in that population. I've also visited some of the major temples in Japan.

I published two books by Zen abbotts. One of them is a book of modern, up-to-date koans.

A koan is a short riddle that comes from the Rinzai tradition of Zen Buddhism. The teacher in that particular line of teaching uses the koan as a way to help the practicing Zen student to clear his mind. It is a puzzle that does not have an single answer. The puzzle might be: ‘How many stars are there?’ ‘ Where do clouds go?’ ‘ When I make this sound how do you know the universe?’  The student is to meditate on these puzzles.

When the answer indicates that the student is no longer, trying to solve the puzzle and is focused on the immediate world, then the koan has done its job. The student might reply to any one of those puzzles with: “Can I pour you some tea?”  Or the student might take a stick and pound it on the ground. The student who understands the koan will show a response in the immediacy of time and space.

While talking to a recent Buddhist friend about our pasts, since we have not seen each other for nearly 4.5 decades I realized that I didn't need to know what she was going to do in the future. The koan  suggested by this meeting would be:’What are you going to do?’  The answer was simply seeing her after 45 years because she embodied everything she has been and will be.

Prisons and poetry

Recently, an old friend gave me a book of her poetry at brunch. We had a chance to cover the 45 years since we have seen each other. I commented that poetry is an important social vehicle that few people appreciate.

I told her this story.

A close friend of mine, Catherine Campbell, had long been active in the prison reform movement, particularly in dealing with the health needs of prisoners.

Catherine is a lawyer who had access to prisons but because of her activism such access was always available at a bureaucratic snails pace.

Catherine learned from her friends in the prison system about a new prison in northern California that was being used for the worst of the worst offenders.  Usually gang leaders.  Nearly everyone in the prison was in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. Catherine began investigating the prison and found prison conditions did not meet her minimal standards.

Catherine decided to make the prison publicly visible. At the time, no one had heard of it outside the prison world. Catherine visited the prison at monthly intervals. Each time she took people with her, including doctors, lawyers, occasionally journalists but always a poet.

Catherine didn't get any significant articles out of these trips to the prison with visits to inmates but to everybody's surprise, especially to me, the world of poetry became the first to know about this prison.  It was from the world of poetry that knowledge of this prisons presence spread.

The prison is at Pelican Bay. You certainly have heard of it, wherever you are in the world. Thanks both to Catherine and the world of poetry. Poetry is surprisingly important.

Our better world

I am particularly grateful to Steven Pinker, a professor at Harvard, who is continually publishing material showing that homicide, murder and death from military action has been in a steady decline for centuries.

Our individual worlds have not only gotten safer from other humans. At the same time our world has gotten safer from our long-term enemies: the microbes.

This article that appeared in Slate makes the point that there are several long-term improvements in addition to Pinker's specialty of intra-human attacks.  Good.

I would like to point out that in the past 200 years we have also conquered most microbes, many hereditary physical deformities and we have wiped out hunger and famine in 98% of the world.

While Pinker won't say it and neither will the rest of the Lefty world, all of these improvements in our lives are attributable to the rise of industrial commerce.

If we take a pro-commerce stance we will witness even more rapid improvements in the human condition, domestically and worldwide.

Do you work hard?

I have long been concerned about the parasitic nature of government employees. There is nothing meritocratic about this group of people. Since there is no way for them to be fired and promotion is not based on productive output, their only contribution is based solely on seniority and academic records.

In the absence of output to measure, one may conclude that many government employees have a minimum competence, minimum drive and if they stay in the system, most achieve a static emotional life.  Of course there are exceptions who love their work

I say all these bad things largely because I live in the city of San Francisco, that has 26,000 city employees, nearly all of whom are paid over $100,000 a year and who retire at levels equal to or exceeding that. This is far above the wage scale in the private sector in San Francisco.

Now I have in my hand the wage scale and actual wages for all California government employees. This list is shocking.

But first, a digression. Out of the 135 million people in the United States who are employed or do work of any sort, nearly 20 million of them work for the government. That is one out of six people.

In California there are 2.5 million government employees. Here is a list of their wages, including benefits. You will get to page 11 before you reach the salary and benefit level under $500,000 per year. That is nearly 700 California government employees receiving wages and benefits over half a million dollars.

At the city level, there are only five city employees in the state of California, who earned over half a million dollars a year.

On the same chart of city wages, you have to go 14 pages to find the first person who earns less than $300,000 a year. That is roughly 850 California city employees who earn between $300,000 and $500,000 in wages and benefits. The person who is listed for  that first job under $300,000 is the chief financial officer in the suburban town of Palo Alto.

There is one reason for such a large number of highly paid people; it is the ability of unions to be exclusive bargaining agents for government employees and to simultaneously be able to extract dues from these employees to use in lobbying elected officials who set the wages.

I find it hard to be comfortable with these facts of life. We need government. But we don't need expensive, bloated and inefficient government.

I've demonstrated in several blogs that nearly all fire departments are three times larger than they need to be; police departments are equally excessive in size…. and the rest of most government agencies are bloated to levels that are unreasonable compared to other parts of the efficient world. There is no known mechanism forcing an efficient government output.

Time for action.