CHAPTER VI.
POLITICS FOR SKEPTICS

While reading a short story in a science fiction anthology a few years ago, I stumbled across a phrase which has stuck in my mind ever since. Roughly paraphrased, what the author said was, "the hardest lesson you can I earn in life is the simple habit of leaving of leaving other people the hell alone!" When I read about contemporary American politics, I am repeatedly drawn back to that observation. It is so true, that it hurts. 
I must admit to having some biases concerning political matters. I am not what you would consider a political person. Partly, I'm just not a group creature. I don't care for crowds. Partly also, I've seen a lot of situations where the political process runs amuck and produces something approaching insanity. 
In a small way, the twenty-plus years of my military career exposed me to some significant National political issues. Because the expense of military weapon systems is so large, they inevitably become a subject of political concern and argument. In consequence, the armed forces try to educate their officers concerning the rules and process of the Congressional political process. Knowledge of the workings of Congress is at times important in getting military programs funded. Unfortunately, too much knowledge of the process also tends to make skeptics out of diligent officers who are trying to get systems and hardware built. "Getting things done" is not high on our national list of political priorities. Ensuring that projects come to "my district” is far more important. 
In both the formal political business of the nation and on a more basic level in local affairs, I have seen an old truism proven repeatedly: a committee is an organism with multiple arms and legs, none of which know what the others are doing. When the political process is used in an attempt to "solve" some problem, quite frequently the process actually creates four other worse problems, while leaving the original issue pretty much untouched. 
As I grow older, I am moved by my experience toward a conclusion which some people might consider unkind or perhaps even radical: if a person truly wants to grow up and become a functioning adult, he or she will eventually be forced to stop being "political" in the ways most Americans now are political these days.
This is not to say that you must become a hermit or withdraw from normal social affairs. It is only to suggest that you may be required to change the ways in which you are formally political, and to re-examine your assumptions about the nature of the business which can properly be transacted in a political framework. That's a tough enough course by itself, without resorting to a hermit’s life. 
If you look up a definition of politics in most textbooks on political science, you're likely to get pages of material which bring you only slightly closer to understanding the concept. For the purposes I am interested in pursuing here, we can be a little simpler than that. For me, politics is the process by which groups decide who exercises decision-making power over whom, and by what means this power will be enforced. The operative words here are "group", "decision making", and "power". 
The major interests of political science have to do with "social" decisions which affect groups, and individuals within groups. Invariably, the decisions of greatest interest are those which involve the power of some group members to compel other group members to behave in a prescribed way. Such compulsion varies from the simple threat of rejection from the group, up to and including strewing wrong-doers' innards on the ground at the village gate as a discouragement to other potential heretics. 
When you choose to regard a subject "political", you place it in what is called the public domain. By this label, you imply that decision making on this subject is in some way of sufficient importance that decisions cannot be left to individuals to make for themselves. Instead, someone within the group, or -- in a democracy -- the group as a whole political body, must make the decision. Once made, the decision is enforced on everyone in a targeted group. When a decision is political, it is usually the case that some part of a group is empowered to decide for everybody, what is to be done or forbidden. Such decisions are called "policy". 
When I study American society in our times, I am led to three skeptical conclusions concerning the state of our politics: (1) there is almost no subject in America today which is not in some way political, (2) very few Americans seem to have the faintest idea of how their political system actually works or how it affects them personally, and (3) a fairly large number of Americans don't really want to know how the political system works. Such knowledge might make us responsible for the terrible mess we've made of it! 
Consider: what subject involving two or more people can you name these days which is not political in some way? Education? Sorry… You voted on the last bond issue didn't you? Industry and business? Government regulation of business is an issue on the editorial pages of any newspaper you read. Medicine? Not when Medicare and medical insurance reform are looming as the economic blockbuster of the century. The family? Not when States reserve the right to take children away from parents judged to be too sick or too weird to "bring them up right". Religion? Maybe we're closer there, but I note that religious groups continue to lobby for restrictions on abortion, while remaining outspoken in defense of their non-profit (tax free) status. 
A good case can be made for the idea that America in the twentieth century has become one of the most political cultures in the history of mankind. Of course, we've got a lot of company in this trend. The Soviets and their socialist cousins were running neck and neck with us, if not slightly leading the pack, just before that system collapsed in abject economic and political failure. All over the world, the trend seems to be the same. As populations increase, more and more decision making power is migrating from the hands of individuals into the paws of collective bodies, mostly governments. In the words of an earlier era, we are "letting George do it" (or Ivan or Deng or Margaret, or whomever). 
Parallel to the American preoccupation with political decisions is a related social phenomenon: we've become court crazy. It seems these days that whenever people disagree on any issue, their first impulse is to haul their mess into court and create a new set of rules for financial and legal liability. Compromise seems to be a lost art. We see not only the historically familiar disputes over property lines, contracts, insurance, and fraud, but also some really weird cases. 
Children have sued their parents for damages wrought during upbringing. A fired employee has sued his former employer for injuries caused by a refusal to provide letters of recommendation. Live-in lovers have established a new branch of "palimony" law. Manufacturers are being charged for damages done by products sold ten years before product safety laws were placed on the books. Everybody seems to be suing various governments for real or imagined irreparable harm to the personal interests and well being of citizens. 
As I think I may have said elsewhere, it doesn't take much skepticism for a person to wonder if something isn't a little cock-eyed here! Can it be that we are trooping off to court because we have forgotten how to settle our disputes amicably between ourselves? Or have we become so greedy that we no longer care to make the attempt? 
Americans as a society know remarkably little about how their political system works or how decisions get made for them. We don't even know who governs us! Just about every survey of the electorate shows a dismally low name recognition rate for almost all political figures other than Presidential candidates. A large proportion of average Americans also disagree with several of the principles stated in their constitutional Bill of Rights. Heck, even I am sometimes disgusted by restrictions (some might say "legal technicalities) placed on police officers investigating or arresting criminals who are well known to be criminals. But that is a story for another book. 
Meanwhile, if you want to take an excursion through fantasy land, just ask somebody on an average city street, how much of his wages he pays directly or indirectly in taxes to various units of government, or how much profit is being made by the "greedy corporations who run America". Remember while you are doing this survey, that most citizens are unaware that one employee out of nine works for some branch of government and that over 45% of all American earnings are redistributed through taxes. Likewise, many Americans routinely estimate corporate profits at three to four times the actual rate. 
I suspect that a really subtle phenomenon lies beneath the phenomenon of average citizens asking more and more of the political system, while knowing less and Iess about how it actually works. This phenomenon might be a variation on something which psychologists call "denial".  At some level which is almost unconscious in each of us, there is a creeping refusal to accept responsibility for the roles which we play as individuals when we are involved in collective action with other people in a group. Like drunks who will not examine their own behavior, we are all to some degree, "in denial". 
Human beings are still basically herd animals. In return for acceptance into social groups, we are willing to make our individual values or morals conform to group values and morals. One of the most painfully embarrassing things you can ask an immature human being -- an adolescent, for instance -- to do, is to deliberately mark himself by behavior or appearance "different" from that of his or her peer group. To a remarkably great degree, the same forces act in the affairs of presumably mature adults. We would all rather do things which we absolutely know to be stupid, rather than do things which we merely suspect will be unpopular. 
The reality of herd behavior is one of the thornier issues with which we ask moral philosophers to grapple. As a political reality, it is also concretely dangerous to human welfare. People in groups will do strange things to others in the name of social good -- things which an uninvolved observer will immediately recognize as just plain crazy, and with which almost all group members will later (when challenged) declare a degree of personal discomfort. It is amazing how many of the shouting members of an angry lynch mob later become "innocent bystanders to a riot", even in their own selective memories. 
There are processes of group interaction which have no real parallel in individual experience. For instance, one sees an effect called "group think", one of the plagues of modem organizational management. This mind game occurs in close-knit organizations which are run by cliques. When such a group arrives at a consensus of belief, anyone who challenges the consensus does so at the risk of expulsion and scorn. The outcome of such a pattern is that the clique rejects new ideas or creativity in favor of buddy-buddy good feelings and conformity. In Corporate board roans, an atmosphere of group-think among senior vice presidents can produce decisions which wipe out whole enterprises. "Everybody agreed... it must have been the right thing to do." 
 Observe, for instance, the American automobile industry and its large-car mania, long persistent in the face of the clear preference of most Americans for smaller, better made products. Somewhere in Detroit, one must suspect that a large amount of isolated group-think was going on during the 1970s; during the same period American automotive giants were lobbying Congress for protection from "unfair" foreign competition and the Japanese were doubling their market share in new car sales. 
When you examine some of the more extreme political movements in the world, you will see behavior by large masses of people which would be grounds for clinical confinement if it occurred in individuals without group sanction. Most of the Nazi leadership and many of the movement's adherents would probably have qualified for psychiatric detention in a more enlightened age. Horrors such as the Jonestown massacre and the Dravidian Siege at Waco Texas have been similarly led. Beliefs which impress most people on an individual level as unrealistic or even outright batty are capable of attracting a following when preached by a skilled orator before a crowd. Millions are hungry for dogmas to believe in.
Even people who would normally impress you as sane, informed, cultured, or perhaps even wise, will do the darnedest nonsense to themselves -- and especially to others -- in the name of social order. I forget just who first voiced the sentiment, but in the company of writers wiser than myself, I am increasingly of the opinion that many of the worst evils in the history of mankind have been done in the name of "somebody else's own good." Likewise, as Robert A. Heinlein may have said, there are few critters more dangerous to life and limb than a well-meaning altruist with a lot of friends. 
It is reasonable to expect that the gregarious desire to belong to the human herd will continue for many generations to be a powerful influence on individual behavior in our species. This desire is a part of being human. At the same time, one can hope that the nature of the herds we join may evolve toward something more positive and constructive than we often observe today. If such an evolution is ever to happen, it seems to me that common people are going to have to struggle in person with some of the demons and dilemmas which we now delegate to the moral philosophers. Maybe we'll have to learn to think a little more clearly and responsibly, instead of "letting George do it". This chapter suggests names for a few of the demons we may have to face. 
-- America, Land of the Free-
It seems to me that there is a crisis underway in American political thinking these days. After many years of believing ourselves to be a uniquely gifted and free-thinking culture, Americans seem to be growing uncomfortably aware that our behavior has not always been a good demonstration of our faith. If the truth were told, the great majority of us are scared silly-pea-green of anything remotely resembling freedom. This is particularly true of the economic freedom to fail. As a culture, we have become far more interested in security than in freedom. 
Our wariness of personal failure seems to have come into full flower following a relatively distinct turning point in modern history: the Great Depression of the 1930's. For reasons which few economists seemed to understand at the time -- and which many have since misinterpreted for political gain -- the boom town economy of the American giant tripped over its own shoe laces and fell for ten years to its knees. During years of struggle and want, a major revolution occurred in our thinking. For the first time, people who were regarded as the leading lights of society came to believe that the only effective stimulant which could bring back prosperity was a Government large enough and powerful enough to intervene as required, to "fine tune" the economic machine. Thus began the growth of the American welfare state. 
If you ask many common people what they want most from their government these days, they will probably tell you that they want it to stop interfering in their lives. This theme was consistent in the eight years of the Reagan Administration and has continued on a lower key, since. However, if you ask the same people which Government services they are willing to give up to accomplish this worthy objective, they are likely to look at you rather blankly or to speak in vague generalities about excess military spending. Give something up? Who are we kidding? Americans don't want less government. They only want less of it for themselves and more of it for the other guy. 
Let's be specific: we all want a cut in taxes, right? Well, the Reagan Administration succeeded in cutting taxes -- at the cost of an exploding National Debt. Taxes may have decreased, but government spending sure didn't. 
We're all uncomfortable with bureaucratic interference in business and industry, right? Only...let's be sure that Government puts a restrictive tariff on those darned foreigners in our industry who are importing cheap goods of higher quality than ours. We howl in outrage when Social Security taxes rise toward sixteen percent of personal income (counting the employer share). But we stubbornly refuse to ask ourselves how the Social Security system is supposed to survive in another twenty years, when only two people will be working for each person drawing benefits. Who's going to pay for all this? George? 
Americans in the early 1980s thought of themselves as relatively superior and more "free" than the socialists in other countries who were taxing themselves to death to pay for a huge government and a cradle to grave welfare system. People smugly pointed to Sweden with a tax rate of over 50% and rising foreign debts, and to Denmark with similar problems. The British, poor folks, had become a rather shabby backwater social democracy. Well, before we become too smug, let's look at reality in our own back yard. 
The argument is rather convincing that Americans aren't any less socialist than our overseas friends. We're only a bit less honest about our socialism. We've spent every bit as much and more on the same welfare programs. Unlike our western allies, we have been unwilling to tax ourselves directly at a sufficient rate to pay our bills. We've borrowed to keep up. US State and National debt is now over $15,000 dollars per man, woman and child, and has more than tripled in the last twelve years. Much of this debt has been financed by selling bonds and Treasury Bills to foreign investors. The United States has become the largest debtor nation in the world. A few of us are beginning to wonder what will happen if any large part of this debt must ever be repaid. 
While Government has been busily spending itself (and us) into the poor house, smaller economic institutions have followed suit with a host of ethically and financially doubtful practices in the credit and banking industry. In 1988, over 200 of the nation's commercial banks were in immediate danger of failure, and a whopping 20 percent of the over 14,000 US banks and savings and loans had net losses. Nearly a hundred banks were being allowed to operate under direct supervision by the Federal Reserve System, after having drawn down their assets so badly that they could not meet current obligations. In normal times, we would say such a bank had "failed". Between 1988 and 1991, over 500 banks per year actually closed.
 Very little is said in newspapers about the strange practice of allowing failed banks to continue accepting depositor money. This silence may possibly have something to do with the fact that the expense of reorganizing the banks and writing off their bad loans exceeds the resources of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which supposedly guarantees our bank deposits up to $100,000 dollars. So much for the "full faith and credit of the U.S. Government." 
What we've refused to pay for directly, we're paying for indirectly: in monetary inflation, lower labor productivity, and lower standards of living. During the 1970s and 1980s, wages did not keep up with inflation. Particularly for lower wage earners, increased Social Security taxes actually reduced disposable income. Suddenly, after decades of everything getting better and better for everybody (or so we thought), things are beginning to look worse and worse for a large number of us. Americans don't know how to handle such situations very well. Suddenly we begin to feel decidedly British, and it hurts like hell. 
We continue stubbornly to ignore some of the larger factors which contribute to the loss in our purchasing power: diversions of economic value into unproductive activities administered by government. If you want to see any group in America become social democrats (another term for the advocates of the welfare state), just try to threaten its government subsidy. 
We pay tobacco farmers to produce lung cancer and heart disease. We pay dairy farmers to over-produce milk which must frequently be destroyed. We pay wheat farmers to over-produce grain so that we can make US-government subsidized grain sales which augment the poor harvests of a Soviet system which we once loudly denounced in other areas of our public life as "the enemy". We pay artists to produce works for which there would otherwise be no market. We pay road builders to add miles of concrete to a sprawling interstate highway system, while the road networks inside our major cities -- including the nation's capital -- are becoming un-driveab1e and a high proportion of the nation's bridges are unsafe. 
For years, we paid cities to employ unemployable people in so-called "training" programs, to keep potential trouble makers off the streets. Such programs were cut back in the early Reagan years. However, political pressure continues for a major increase in the legal minimum wage -- sufficient, probably, to force many people out of the marginally productive jobs for which entry-level training programs prepare them. 
We reward single mothers with increased support payments when they conceive children out of wedlock, and then we wonder why poor black families are less stable than their white middle class counterparts. We reward owners of single-family homes with tax exemptions and then wonder why affordable multi-family housing is in shortage and prices for single family homes are climbing out of reach. We support doctors by an ever-broader network of medical insurance subsidies, and then wonder why medical costs keep going up and up. 
My, how times have changed. It is now respectable to consider yourself an advocate of socialized medicine -- especially if you don't call it that -- but decidedly suspect to be thought of as a "self-made person." If that change isn't proof of an almost complete inversion in our political thinking during the last 40 years, I don't know what is. 
The distortions in our political values seem to have direct parallels in our economic life. These days, the quick road to riches is not to come up with a neat new idea, hire new people into new jobs, and build a new business. The quick road now is to mortgage yourself over your eyebrows in junk bond debt, buy up the common stock of a profitable business, throw out the existing managers, carve up the enterprise into pieces small enough to sell off and then layoff people by the hundreds. The process is called "hostile merger". While it runs on unchecked, American industries are forced to reduce capital investment in new plants and equipment in order to generate war-chest funds to fight off corporate raiders. 
The jury still seems to be out on the question of whether such mergers will ultimately improve corporate efficiency. In the meantime, it seems to me that the primary people to benefit from the recent wave of merger activity in America are business brokers and a few senior executives; not stock 
In the meantime, massive debts have been run up by merger brokers. In 1988, the exposure in US banks in short term bonds for leveraged buyouts (LBOs) was about a quarter of their exposure to Third World debts. Some financial analysts suspect that the next "debt crisis" could be a series of defaults on LBO debts caused by the inability of heavily indebted companies to meet their interest obligations during the next recession. If such defaults were accompanied by defaults on Third World debt, we could all find ourselves, as a waggish commentator once put it, "in Deep Doo-Doo". 
More than a few political analysts are convinced that the American economy is headed for just such troubles. One school holds that we will see another and far more terrible Great Depression. This point of view is summarized up in Dr. Ravi Batra's The Great Depress on of 1990 (Simon and Shuster, NY 1987). Although the scenario of Batra's book has not unfolded, Americans remain profoundly anxious about the state of their economy. Other authors such as Howard J. Ruff and Douglas R. Casey have long predicted a general monetary collapse along the lines of the hyper-inflations which occurred in the German Weimar Republic in the early 1920s, and which are continually (and currently) underway in Brazil, Argentina, and perhaps Russia. 
At this point in time, the exact nature of the economic disruptions which may be lying in wait for us during the next decade can still be debated. It does not seem to me, however, that we can reasonably debate whether there will be disruptions. Not withstanding the best efforts of well intended politicians, we may just find ourselves having to pay the piper. That payment is going to hurt, and for some of us it will hurt terribly. 
It seems to me that at the base of the tottering mountain of our economic and political debts is a sort of keystone -- the key idea, if you will, to understanding what is going on and why it is going on. That idea is simply this: the greatest of all freedoms in a democracy, and perhaps the most dangerous, is the freedom to make darned fools of ourselves in our public life. We can be foolish about almost anything we please, free from the controlling or arbitrating influence of any all-powerful authority. However, foolishness has inevitable consequences not only for individuals but also for societies. We're about to get a large dose of consequences. 
The particular foolishness which we have committed is hard to label. In part, I suspect we have badly confused our noble aspirations with our workable possibilities. Simply because goals seem "worthy", this does not mean that every goal is immediately obtainable. Worthy aspirations are simply not enough. To reach goals, we must consume limited resources and assets, or invest our savings to create new resources and assets. It is easy to ignore the reality of limited means, while imbibing the heady good spirits of a political campaign. 
Our national leaders in recent years have been elected increasingly for their ability to convince us that our worthy desires are all obtainable at no great cost to ourselves or others. As the evidence of impending economic disorder has mounted, the oratory of political life has become more and more disconnected from unpleasant reality; we all want to believe that there is some way out of every economic woe, which does not involve sacrifice or pain or disorder for any large number of people, and most especially, sacrifice for us personally. 
When a political figure of more than common intellectual honesty challenges this belief, he or she predictably offends the electorate so badly that voters flee to his opponents in a disorderly scramble. Americans have hidden from themselves the real costs of our aspirations. Like gambling addicts, we have stuffed away our bills and dunning notices until the drawers of our national account cabinets are overflowing, and our creditors are about to come pounding on our doors. We have been free to be foolish or wise, spendthrift or prudent. Having chosen to be foolish and spendthrift, we may well lose much of our freedom at some point not long distant, in a harsh correction of our errors
-- Social Good - And Other stops on the Road to Perdition –-
If your life is at all similar to mine, you have probably wondered how a nice bunch of folks like us got into a jam as bad as the one we're in now. I don't have any simple answer to that -- after all, I'm an engineer by trade, not a politician -- but I'm beginning to suspect that a major portion of the large problems of contemporary life revolves around our notions of something called "social good". 
In the discussion which follows here, I will draw from ideas expressed by several writers from the Libertarian school of political thought. While I don't always agree with what I regard as the over-simplifications in their work, the Libertarians at least seem offer a good jumping off place for looking at important questions about American political life. 
There is a political school of thought which suggests that some minimum set of government services, commodities, and regulatory capabilities is a necessary condition for considering a society to be "civilized". These services and capabilities become "social" goods -- things shared by the society; by "all of us", as common rights. The basic idea is that some services simply can't be done -- or hired done -- by individuals or small groups, acting in their own behalf. Other activities need to be controlled because when uncooperative individuals do them, everybody suffers. The social scientists maintain that it is the proper function of government to administer social services and controls, in the name of the "all of us". The problem here is that the breadth of services and controls which most people consider socially desirable has grown markedly over the last fifty years. 
Most of us would probably agree that when our neighbor runs amuck and starts shooting out street lamps, it is awfully nice to have a policeman in the neighborhood. The same goes for neighboring nation states, only then we call our policemen soldiers. The controlled and sanctioned use of force against criminals and tyrants is considered by some Libertarians to be the only legitimate charter of government. Other conservative thinkers would extend the principle to provide a court system in which police power may be used not only against violence but also against fraud and to enforce contracts between individuals. 
Moving a little further a field, we can find reasonable support for a government power to license the skills of people upon whose performance the lives and livelihood of other people depend. It is very difficult for the common citizen to determine when an air traffic controller or a surgeon is "qualified" for his or her chosen career. Bureaucracies are believed to be able (sometimes) to do a bit better than the common citizen in such determinations. There is also a good reason for having uniform rules of the road for motor vehicle drivers, and for having a government authority to enforce such rules and ensure that drivers know them. 
At about this point, however, we find that the idea of "social good" enforced by government authority can become far more pervasive than Libertarian thinkers believe is healthy for a free society. Late in the 19th century, private banks minted "bank notes" and ran the money system of America. Unfortunately, some bankers discovered the art of "creating" money out of thin -air by printing and circulating bank notes not-backed by savings deposits or gold. Government then got into the banking business by creating a uniform paper currency and forcing all private competitors out of the money printing business. Modern advocates of ''hard money" (the gold standard) believe this intrusion started us all down a slippery slide to national bankruptcy. Whatever the justice of this argument, it is hard to escape the observation that modern government has been far more effective in manipulating and debasing monetary values than private banks were in the 1870s and 1880s. 
If private banks came in for a lot of criticism in the late 19th century, so also did owners of large business conglomerates called "trusts". Around the turn of the century, a lot of people decided -that they were being injured by price fixing and monopoly practices of the corporate trusts and demanded that government break up these "cabals". Theodore Roosevelt came to prominence on an election platform of "trust busting". Understandably, a growing amount of government power was required to accomplish this presumably worthy activity. 
About the same time, a lot of people decided that public interests and the well being of society were not well served by forcing large numbers of women and children to work 14 hour days in sweat shops. Child labor laws were followed by general controls on working hours and later by minimum wage laws. 
As the First World War loomed on the horizon, government regulatory power -- and expense -- had grown beyond the level which could be supported by tariffs and customs duties on international trade. Thus a Federal income tax was imposed to raise revenues essential to the war effort. It is hard to believe now that the maximum tax rate was then under seven percent. Funny how these things grow, over the years. 
In the 1920's, people decided that drunken celebrators and alcoholics were an evil which should be eliminated in the name of social good. The resulting constitutional debacle was called Prohibition, repealed reluctantly a few years later. During the 1930's, government was asked to take over control of even larger portions of the banking and currency system, after the nation plunged into the Great Depression. Out of the depths of this economic black hole also came the beginnings of our present system of social security and unemployment insurance. 
During the 1950's, the role of government expanded into less obviously economic domains. A 50 year involvement in education was broadened at the federal level to pursue the social goal of racial integration. Government became -- in the absence of other effective institutions -- the agent of equal employment opportunity, open housing, and a host of supports for minority groups, the poor and disadvantaged. At the same time, governments became the medium through which social activists demanded that industry improve the safety of the work place and clean up waste by-products previously dumped unceremoniously into lakes and land fills. 
During the 1960's, government came to be looked upon by many as the natural provider of a wide range of family and community services: child care, education, counseling and legal service, health care and housing. These direct services were accompanied by a plethora of subsidy activities, often implemented by means of low interest loans. The largest category of social goods provided by government may have been one of the least noticed by average people: federally guaranteed mortgages promoted a demographic revolution as people left their farms for hares in the growing suburbs of our great cities. Hundreds of billions of dollars were also spent on small business loans, Rural Electrification Authority loans, farm subsidies, highway projects, dams, recreational areas, and more. The list lengthens yearly. 
Somewhere along this road to social good, something seems to have gone wrong. Individually, it is possible to justify every service or subsidy which government administers, as being in the best interest of society or of major groups within society. But when you add up all of the multitudinous good which government now does for each of us, what you seem to arrive at is impending personal disaster for almost all of us, beneficiaries and producers alike. 
Conservative thinkers suggest that the peculiar blind alley in which we now find ourselves is not accidental. These authors propose that over-spending is almost inevitably the result of living in a democratic society, where government responds directly to the desires of its citizens. In effect, what we do is to democratically elect a bunch of darned fools who think they know what's "good for us". These folks believe such patent nonsense because we hold a popularity contest called an election, every few years, and send to our seats of government a crop of dedicated public servants who believe they have a "mandate" to deliver the social goods we want. 
What gets lost in this popularity contest is the possibility that the voters may not have a clear idea of just how much social good they are willing to pay for. The institution which starts out as "representative" government can begin to assume many of the aspects of an enormous lottery system which we're playing with our nickels and dimes and billions, hoping to hit a jackpot.  If we do enough of that, we become gambling addicts. 
The lottery system starts out as a process of cooperation and mutual aid which seems to have the very best of motives: the betterment of conditions shared by all of us. We convince our neighbors through the medium of our legislature, that if they will cooperate in helping us to obtain our worthy goals, we will cooperate in helping them to obtain theirs. If we will help pay for their school, they will help pay for our road repairs. If they will pay their share of the upstate power project which doesn't directly benefit them, we will pay our share of the down state harbor project which doesn't directly benefit us. The currency of this political economy is compromise. 
The process can break down, however. This may occur when the exchanges and tradeoffs being made in the political arena became so complex and so pervasive that we lose awareness of what it is that we are trading back and forth. We forget too easily that politics is not immune from the compromises which must occur in any marketplace or any private banking account. Resources are limited. Thus, when we choose to purchase one good or service, we are usually required to defer purchase of some other and presumably less important service until a later time. To have what we need now and to prepare for things we want in the future, we have to be willing to defer pleasure. 
It is very hard to defer pleasure in an environment where projects are thought of and advocated in terms of "just a few pennies per person", distributed across a large population. This kind of thinking creates great pressure on those who resist government spending. Citizens tend to resent the uncooperative soul who suggests that government has became an extended crap game where we secretly believe that if we're only clever enough, we'll be able to walk away with a lot more of the other guys' money than we've put down in taxes or bets. Gambling addicts aren't very tolerant people. Neither are people who are addicted to spending other people's money, provided by government. 
Conservative thinkers also observe that as the number of transactions in the political theater increases, there is a tendency for the nature of government to evolve unpleasantly. Instead of being an agent for the exchange of value between cooperating citizens, the "civil" servant of large government begins to perceive of himself as an independent force, entitled to decide for citizens what is best for them. As government grows, it becomes more and more interruptive of the normal processes of life. It can became the instrument of people who wish to control others, out of a desire to make life safe, certain and predictable. Thus government can became the enemy of unpredictable growth and progress. As a rule, all progress is unpredictable, so you can see where this train of thought takes us. 
Political liberals may howl in outrage at the view of government which I have offered above. They argue that government is a uniquely qualified institution for procuring and distributing common goods and services. The idea is that due to what are called "economies of scale", government can get a price break for the average citizen by buying in quantity. This is an interesting notion. Unfortunately, it doesn't describe the way the real world works.  The primary power of government lies not in persuasion or efficiency, but in coercion – the opposite of efficiency.
When government provides services to the public, its employees generally demand wages at least equal to those of industry -- and retirement benefits well in excess of those in industry. Though I hate to bite the hand which signs my Air Force retirement check, I am forced by simple candor to acknowledge that my lifetime benefit from 21 years of Federal service will exceed that of most civilian business managers by a substantial margin. Nor is my officer's retirement especially exorbitant. If you ever want to come to a quick boil, then do a little research on the retirement plans of US Senators and Representatives! 
More important, however, goods and services which government purchases in the economy must bear hidden costs of government oversight and control. Your taxes pay not only for the product, but also for the salaries of people who are supposed to ensure its quality and conformance to specifications. Although the point has already been over-worked in the common literature, it is worth repeating: government specifications typically add enormous cost without really improving product performance. Libertarians make a convincing argument that whenever you can purchase a commodity freely in an un-regulated marketplace, such goods will always be cheaper than when government buys them for you. 
If we eliminate the illusion of cost savings as a motivation for using government to purchase common services, we must wonder if our demands for government involvement in the economy might be based on motivations a little different than we claim. Some skeptics suggest that government is not so much a supplier of benefits for "all" of us, as it is the provider of last resort for services to some of us at the expense of others. Often, these services create debts that nobody in his right mind believes society can really pay. 
It seems to me that no reasoning person can avoid seeing that the American political system has entered a crisis period. With government debts and unsecured liabilities totaling over ten trillion dollars, we are being forced at last to look hesitantly at the balance between our wants and our means. Government is struggling to bring its accounts into balance, and we are deeply divided over how this task shall be accomplished. One result of this crisis is the clear inability of liberal (generally Democratic) administrations to deliver on premises of government subsidies and grants to worthy causes. Another is a rising discontent on the part of voting citizens with the performance of government in general. 
On one side are arrayed voices of the conservative political schools, counseling reductions of expenditures and less government intrusion in the economy. Working in opposition are advocacy groups which staunchly resist any attempti to reduce spending. Political liberals bewail the lack of social conscience of our budget cutters, while conservatives look nervously over their shoulders, anticipating the advance of Russian (or perhaps Cuban) troops through Florida. The predisposition of the both groups is -- reluctantly -- to raise taxes under various guises. The term "user fee" is beginning to get a decidedly bad reputation with a lot of citizens. 
Tax increases pose many dilemmas. The financial position of American corporations has already been badly weakened by tax policies which penalize long term investment in favor of short term gains. Additional business taxes may siphon off further capital needed to improve productivity and upgrade facilities. Such measures might cripple future competitiveness in an increasingly global economic marketplace. This argument was a key element in the failure of the Clinton administration to push through a health reform program in 1993/94. 
By contrast, there are other sources of tax funds that many liberals believe are under-utilized. One of the major impacts of the Reagan years was to decrease the personal income tax rate of the richest members of American society. Liberals focus on such high incomes as a potential source of additional social spending, with nearly undisguised avarice. 
There is a paradox in American attitudes toward wealth. Our hatred and envy of the rich are so well established as to be almost a national characteristic. We seem to believe that it is the thievery and greed of "those people who live up on the hill," that has permitted them to be better off than us poor peons. Paradoxically, there are few of us who do not wish to be a little better off than we are, to live in a fancier house, to wear "better" clothes, to drive a more obviously expensive car. I suspect that the thing about the rich which we most dislike is that we are not among their number.  
The outgrowth of this paradox is that, despite the strong belief of most common citizens to the contrary, America already has one of the highest tax rates in the world on the earnings of the wealthiest in society. Over seventy percent of government revenue is generated from the productive effort of those whom we call "rich". It would also be safe to say that a like percentage of American jobs are created by people whom we consider rich. Before we tax away this job creating capacity, it would seem to me that we ought to wonder how far we can go before we kill the geese which lay our golden economic eggs. 
At the base of many of our dilemmas is a reality which few of us acknowledge: government in America is doing what its citizens demand of it. Contrary to some of what we hear in our news media, "the problem" in American civil life these days is not large government or welfare programs or excess spending on military hardware. The problem is possibly not even our inflated expectations about the things which comprise desirable activity on the part of government. The problem has more to do with the attitude of average citizens who elect representatives and demand that they distribute social goods without regard for consequences or resource limitations. The problem with social good isn't some shadowy "them", up in Washington or the state House. The problem is us.
For a democracy to survive, its citizens must be informed about and willing to respect the limits of possibility which an uncaring reality imposes on our political process. Political compromise must be founded on value to be traded against value, assets accumulated in the past or generated by current investment, to be spent against future goals. Democracy may stand or fall on the question of whether we are willing to limit our political promises to a level supported by the productivity of our society. 

-- Rumors of Wars –
I've spent a large portion of my adult life in the profession of war: building hardware and systems that in one way or another were intended to increase America's national capability to kill large numbers of people -- or to increase the credibility of our threats to do so if some other nation pushed us too far. During a 21 year career in the Air Force, I watched American attitudes swing across a spectrum, as the nation passed from bloody involvement in an Asian war, to disillusioned disengagement, to humiliation in Lebanon, to renewed force expansion under the Reagan administration, then passing into yet another disorderly retrenchment after thousands of US troops fought in Operation Desert storm. Along the way, late in the 1980's, America and her western allies seem to have won the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its client states in the East -- or at least, the other guys whom we considered to be "the enemy" lost. The two concepts do not quite amount to the same thing. 
During the time I've spent in military service, I've came to accept the idea that national military power is inevitably a very political subject. Such power costs too much not to be. I've also learned that the political nature of the subject paradoxically makes it difficult to write about, for those who know the most: namely, experienced leaders or managers who are presently in the military or in its associated civilian bureaucracies. 
Speaking out publicly on matters of military policy or about the cost and effectiveness of particular weapon systems, is strongly discouraged for those who hold (or have held) a commission in the armed forces. This is true because of rules which American society sets forth for soldiers and civilians. Soldiers advise political leaders about the alternatives, but civilians decide what we'll do. Generals inform the President about the "how" of military operations; they are usually forbidden to question the "why". Above all else, senior military leaders are expected to assume that civilian policy decisions are fundamentally wise and legitimate, and then to implement such decisions loyally in concrete terms. When the President says "go", the troops salute and march out. 
It is not surprising that a lot of military chaplains say a weekly prayer for the wisdom of the President. When the boss is wrong -- or even if he's only somewhat misinformed -- the odds increase that some company of grunts is going to wind up in a fire fight, pursuing highly dubious objectives. Fortunately for all of us, when the stakes involve a centrally important national objective, most Presidents feel compelled to consult a large body of expert opinion. That habit tends to slow down and damp out decisions which might otherwise prove disastrous, though it understandably frustrates people who are fond of simple solutions for complex problems. 
When I was a junior officer in the Air Force (as I now recall), I might have considered myself a "Young Turk". I was one of those bright young minds who perceives a high degree of foolishness in some of the decisions made by military superiors and who believes strongly that he could "reform the system", given the chance. Sometimes such bright young minds grow up to be bright middle aged minds who actually get their chance to reform the system. However, there are few Horatio Alger’s in our military services, and I did not happen to be among them.  I "made good", but not in any seriously notable way, and certainly not by becoming a whistle blower or reformer. 
In my service career, I spent most of my time in positions similar to those of thousands of other officers in the military support specialties (that is, in jobs which don't get you shot at personally). I made some peripheral contributions to a few major policy decisions, but most of the time I was just as puzzled and not much better informed than the average civilian, concerning the so-called "big picture". I directed contracts in the multi-million dollar range, but only rarely did I get any personal insight into decisions which national leaders made in establishing or funding those programs. 
Thus, I have few insiders' stories to tell about the US military industrial complex. There are probably fewer than a thousand people in America who know enough about that very large subject, to have an opinion worth reading. Unfortunately, most of those people are too busy actually doing important things to write about governmental affairs. With a few exceptions, most of the writing that does get done seems to be performed by journalists and second-guessers who ought to have the good sense to turn off their word processors -- and who often don't. 
While I have no great expertise to offer concerning the military industrial complex as an institution, I am more familiar with smaller pieces of the beast. I have done my share of reading in professional military journals and in scholarly books published by policy think tanks. From this background, I can offer a few observations on a limited level. 
If you read deeply about military matters, one thing you are likely to notice is that there is practically no consensus on anything. Everybody has an opinion and most of the opinions are mutually exclusive. When the cold war was at its height, most of the arguments were over "force structure". We ought to build more large aircraft carriers and carry the naval war to the enemy, or maybe we ought to build more small aircraft carriers and stop fooling ourselves about the survivability of surface ships in a potentially nuclear conflict. The MX missile was our most important strategic system... or maybe it was the worst mistake we made in 20 years of nuclear confrontation. That's the sort of thing I mean. 
It might be comforting to believe that such surface confusion was all a smoke screen; that somewhere buried deep in a Washington DC basement lived a colony of gnomes who knew the real story and had all the important data cards laid out on the table. It might have been comforting, but as far as I was ever able to determine, it wouldn't have been true. Anybody seeking in the US Capitol, a council of wise elders who really understand national military strategy, is likely to be in for a disappointment. They aren’t home.
 	What we've got instead in Washington is an institution which was designed on purpose to be incapable of producing -- or enforcing -- a unified point of view: Congress and the Presidency. That's the kind of country we are. We distrust governments, to the limited extent that we pay them any attention at all. Our founding fathers designed a system of checks and balances into our constitution which assured that no government would get so big for its britches that it could command general unconditional obedience to narrowly defined goals. Everybody gets a degree of "say" in how things are run -- even the darned fools; sometimes especially the darned fools, because they tend to be loudest. 
 While I was serving in the military, I frequently found myself frustrated by this condition of American political life. It seems to take forever for the country to decide to do anything, or to stop doing something it's already doing. Unfortunately, military men and women die quickly even if decisions come slowly. My contemporaries in military service saw a lot of that in Vietnam in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Such memories have been passed along to younger military decision makers who must now evaluate an even more bewildering post-cold war world, to advise presidents and legislators on the appropriate roles for military forces and the appropriate military force structures to support national goals. 
Such advice is not made easier by the fact that Americans tend to be alarmingly unsophisticated in dealing with other countries. We are widely known in the world as isolationists and as moralists. We basically do not wish to be involved with the concerns of other countries.  When we do find ourselves unwillingly getting bogged down in such connections, we tend to smother our discomfort by creating "holy crusades", as we intervene to save various groups of benighted natives from themselves. 
Many commentators have also remarked on the role which television now seems to play in swaying public opinion -- both pro and con -- concerning such moral crusades. We feel obligated to stop the bloodshed we see happening each night on "News at Six", in Mogadishu or Port Au Prince, by deploying "peace keeper" forces. Then, the public reacts in outrage as television portrays the blood shed by our own military people, caught in cross-fires between rival factions and ethnic groups in foreign lands. Bring the troops home, we demand. 
 	Americans are an impatient people. After a few months or years of arguing with enemies or allies, we get tired of the argument and inaction, and decide to DO SOMETHING NOW!  If these dumb foreigners won't play by our rules, then we'll just send in some marines and show 'em who's right. We're fond of quick solutions to problems which we have imagined to be created by characters who wear clearly designated black or white hats. When the marshal comes to town, the bad guys had better vamoose. 
Unfortunately for the marshal, the bad guys in a lot of towns these days tend to be well dug in, armed with modern weapons (many of which are US manufactured), and supported by a lot of local citizens. If we don't want to get most of our posse sent back in body bags, the sorts of places we can send the marshal are becoming too unimportant to be worth the trouble. President Reagan's skirmish with the Grenadian leftists may have fit this category. Thankfully, a lot of Congressmen decided in the late 1980s that Nicaragua was a lot tougher town than they wanted to try and pacify, despite persistent efforts by some Reagan Administration insiders to get us involved in that Central American mess. We were also fortunate that a fellow named Saddam Hussein turned out to be militarily inept, despite his personal charisma. Had Hussein and his generals been just a bit more adaptable or a bit more prepared, Desert storm could easily have killed many more western troops than it did. 
What all of this comes back to is paradoxically a matter of dollars and cents. Though Americans don't seem to understand strategy or policy very well, we have better instincts about money. The business of war has become a hideously expensive enterprise. We are coming to understand -- perhaps haltingly and imprecisely, but none the less, to understand -- that such expense is simply not justifiable unless truly important national objectives are at stake. 
There is a horrendous inventory of military hardware floating around in the world these days. Just about any tin pot dictator can get his hands on a few Exocet missiles or some VN nerve gas. For some regional mini-powers such as North Korea, weapon inventories are staggering. Moreover, the destructive power of conventional weapons is an order of magnitude greater than it was even 20 years ago. A single F-15 fighter aircraft can drop more tons of bombs with greater effect than a B-17 bomber of the 1940s. A single self-guided surface-hugging missile costing a few hundred thousand dollars can sink a major naval warship costing hundreds of millions. 
War has al ways been a catastrophe for those involved. However, it is arguable that only in modem times have we learned that war is also a catastrophe for everybody else. Large scale modem warfare can rapidly become an orgy of explosives, poison, blood and disease which leaves the "winner" as depleted as the "loser". Moreover, the always-artificial distinction between soldiers and civilians has grown ever thinner, in modem terrorist conflict as in so-called "civil" wars. 
In the post-cold-war world as in earlier times, such catastrophes do not even require a major use of so-called "weapons of mass destruction", such as military artillery. Improvements in our basic transportation systems and in personal automatic weapons have been effective enough to make violence possible on a truly horrific scale, almost anywhere in the world. Georgian and Russian peasant casual ties during the Stalin purges of the 1930' s numbered in the tens of millions, as did Jewish deaths in Fascist death camps of the 1940's, in even greater millions. In Cambodia of the 1970's, a national revolutionary leadership killed in excess of a million people almost without notice in the world outside Cambodia. In central Africa, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in 1993-94 by machetes and small arms in an outbreak of ethnic warfare between Tutsi and Hutu tribes. 
Against this background, I would offer an assertion which might seem strange, coming from one who has long served in the military forces of his country: I'm coming to believe that the political leader who would willingly plan and initiate a large scale conflict using weapons of modern warfare against a similarly armed opponent -- or against an unarmed population -- is just plain crazy. As such, he or she should either be confined to an asylum for the criminally insane or quietly and quickly assassinated. I don't particularly care whether such a leader speaks Russian, English, Xhosa or Farsi. If America is to continue to exercise great power status in the emerging post-cold-war world, then I think we should seriously consider training fewer tank commanders and more long-range snipers and special forces commandos. We may also be challenged to re-think the circumstances in which our troops will be employed and the national interests which we deem important enough to justify such action. 
The phrase "no more Vietnams" has gotten some bad press in recent years. Conservative writers have derided the slogan as a simplistic rejection of the need to make hard national and military choices in the service of good causes. However, I believe conservatives have missed some essentials when they respond in this way. The Vietnam conflict could not be won because Americans were not prepared to do what had to be done to win it: we were unwilling to fight total war with an opponent whose level of political (or perhaps moral) conviction exceeded our own. We brought Western ideas about limited ends and limited means into an Eastern conflict which knew no such niceties, nor cared. And we lost. 
Thus, for Americans, "no more Vietnams" is more than a mere slogan. It also represents a change in public attitude. I, for one, believe this change may prove to be a constructive one. Americans are again becoming resistant to being drawn into foreign wars as a sponsor or ally, in conflicts where each side is as corrupt or willfully blind or self-serving as the other. We are reluctant to commit American soldiers to fight and die by inches for undefined, intangible, or unobtainable objectives unrelated to any obvious National necessity. We demand that our political leaders demonstrate to our satisfaction that the causes we are being asked to pursue and the choices we must make are real causes and real choices, rather than mere political posturing or game playing. 
At least a few of us are also growing profoundly tired of seeing the nation's wealth spent by the tens or hundreds of billions, to fight wars which might never have been necessary if we had offered mere tens of millions in economic aid to desperate leaders a few years earlier. Political violence thrives best in an atmosphere of economic deprivation. Military force is possibly the least effective means for dealing with deprivation. By the time military force must be used, harsh economic want and ethnic polarization have already unleashed forces which render real healing of conditions impossible for generations. 
 	I realize that this discussion may be frustrating for some people who would seek simple military solutions to the international political problems which will likely confront America in the 21st century. It is ever so satisfying to believe that use of our military might is justified by our moral rightness in an evil world. It may be satisfying, but twenty years of professional military service and education convince me that such beliefs aren't true. Americans may well be unique, but they are far from uniquely moral or gifted. We live in a multi-polar world vastly different from that in which our parents were born. Military might is probably the least effective of all the instruments of national power, so far as changing human behavior. Moreover, we are not without responsibility for some of the evils of the world. We have had the economic means to solve a lot of medium sized problems which have later become large and bloody problems. 
-- Myth Collides with Reality -- 
There is a fair amount of evidence that some favorite American political and economic myths may be about to run into unforgiving realities. The mythologies are likely to suffer more in that encounter than the realities -- but we may all suffer some pain in the bargain. 
The myth of "social good" is even now colliding with the reality of a limited public purse. Our past free spending is going to be reduced, whether we like it or not. The shortfall between our expectations and our capacities seems likely to be corrected, for the most part, by a reduction in our standard of living. Whether this reduction is relatively short or unendurably long may partly depend on our willingness to learn that neither governments nor individuals can create prosperity out of thin air. When governments act to assist one group in society, they must also steal from some other group. The stealing can take the form of taxation or monetary inflation, but make no mistake: it is theft, whatever the presumed worthiness of its goals. 
If Americans turn out to be willing to learn this lesson, we might see a general shrinkage in government and its "services", and the emergence of a more self-reliant society. We already observe a general distrust of those whom we elect to government positions. Such apprehension also extends increasingly to bankers and to lawyers wham we are beginning to associate with some of the worst excesses of our national public life. 
What remains to be seen is whether average citizens are willing to see through the promises, the posturing, and the simple, power-mad greed of political life, to recognize the veniality of some of those whom we have elected to our political leadership. An open question is also whether we have the strength and vision to reject not only individual politicians, but also some large part of the political process itself. If we do not, then the pain of any general economic realignment will later prove to have been for naught;" reconstruction from the collapse will, a few years later, reproduce the some problems we have now. 
While Americans begin to confront hard realities, it is cold comfort to realize that other great powers in the world are going through equally harrowing challenges. The Soviet empire brought its army home after an unsuccessful eight year war in Afghanistan. Other divisions of the same army have been withdrawn from Poland, East Germany, and the remainder of Eastern Europe, returning to former Soviet republics so poor that housing for the returning troops is frequently being built with Western money. The patchwork quilt of captive "republics" within the Soviet Union has unraveled due to demands of ethnic groups for changes to political boundaries. In 1994, there were at least four civil wars underway in areas of the former Soviet Union. After years of boasting that it would soon catch up and surpass the West in economic development, the Soviet Union has disintegrated into a group of backward Third World states, struggling to feed and clothe their citizens despite its superpower armed forces. 
As America and the East struggle with their internal problems, new powers and problems are emerging in the rest of the world. Many of the changes underway seem to point toward a day in which America and Americans will be required to negotiate with other world powers, rather than dictating outcomes. Most of the twenty largest banks in the world are now headquartered not in New York, but in Tokyo. Of the ten largest cities in the world, eight are in Third World countries or "developing nations" such as Korea and Argentina. Most of the world's petroleum energy is produced in such nations and consumed in the United States, Europe, or Japan. At the same time, developing nations are ever more deeply mired in international debt. This is a combination pregnant with potential confrontation. The world is a dangerous and unpredictable place to live, these days. 
For whatever comfort it may be, I think I can state with confidence that the world is not as immediately dangerous as it was ten years ago, in terms of the potential for general nuclear war. Nuclear arms reductions of the 1980's are only a small step back from confrontation; perhaps they are only window dressing.   What may be more important is Iess obvious. After 30 years of threat and counter-threat, I believe that the most informed military and civilian decision makers in developed countries are finally becoming aware that nuclear conflict is simply not a credible means to any obtainable objective. Even acknowledging some finite degree of risk associated with the disorderly breakup of the Soviet Union, it is hard to foresee any circumstance in present international politics, which could lead to an exchange of hundreds of nuclear missile warheads. 
The world remains polarized in factions and counter-factions. But national leaders are more aware with every passing year of the need to manage political conflict before unforgivable demands are made or un-recallable words are spoken publicly. Prudence isn't comfortable, but it may be progress. Strangely enough, we find quite a number of political skeptics working quietly to promote such progress. People who are leery of inflated egos and inflated ideologies, perhaps feel freer to heap deserved scorn on short term political power-mongering. We are beginning to consider longer term and more important objectives like human survival. There are perhaps more rumors of war now, than there are actual wars.