Legacy Government

We keep speaking of the laws of unintended consequences. But history has painted a rather clear history of stupid government actions and clearly resulting consequences. Not so unpredictable. Let’s just start with one very simple fact that most Americans have experienced or read/seen photographs about. Ruins. Every single archeological ruin was once some great infrastructure project of a society that collapsed or was conquered and subjugated. The United States is one of the oldest continuous governments in the world – 1776 to present. China, India, France, Russia, etc. are great powers whose governments have nowhere near that level of longevity.

Think about nations that spent so much on their military power – from ancient Sparta, the magnificent Chinese Ming Dynasty, the Romans to the recent collapse of the U.S.S.R. – that they crushed the economies necessary to support their arms addiction, ran horrendous deficits and eventually lost the barest level of popular support to survive, some being easy victims for marauding “terrorists” (think Visigoths and Rome; Afghan Mujahedeen and Soviet forces) to erode the underlying government incumbents.

Think of the power elites who so tilted the economies in favor of their “one percenters” – with special titles, land grants and patents (meaning trading monopolies) bestowed by monarchs with callous disregard for the vast hordes of citizens – that popular rebellion crushed the elites who abused the majority: the 1789 French rebellion, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and even the American Revolution itself. When elites have unfair advantage for a long enough period, governments simply cannot stand.

Picture societies whose efforts stripped away natural resources (the mysterious Easter Islands, the Anasazi Indians, for example…. Professor Jared Diamond’sCollapse is good reading on this subject), and the peoples that once lived in these areas just “disappeared.”

The message in all of this is that the United States of America needs to revisit these lessons and begin rejuvenating and reinventing itself or face an accelerating spiral into becoming one more failed state in the ash-heap of history. With polarization statistics resembling unstable banana republics and waves of environmental damage ramping up exponentially as “climate change” deniers slam the brakes on the necessary fixes and lifestyle changes, our great nation creaks and groans with pain.

We watch our infrastructure become “ruins in training” as bridges, water & sewage systems, levees and dams built a long time ago exceed their planned useful life, and  our cars and trucks bounce through potholes on under-maintained roads and highways. As our primary and secondary schools continue to produce students with rapidly degrading skills and the dwindling college population imposes mortgage-level student debt, the competitive advantage that America needs to produce the dollars necessary to upgrade rapidly erodes.

We have big elites that rely on other big elites to support a system that needs young blood and dynamic change. Look at the technology debacle we call Obamacare, a well-intentioned and needed change to our healthcare woes. Two huge factors almost tanked the implementation of this program: (i) hiring tired old mega-contractors with too much government bureaucratic experience and virtually no consumer-interface understanding (versus the young, cutting-edge cyber-successful new players on the block) and (ii) trying to make legacy cyber-data storage that was never meant to be shared become a part of new huge system where information flows freely (much like asking a person who speaks only an esoteric tribal language to begin instantly reading and interpreting Shakespeare in English!).

We live based our past, assume our greatness is a legacy we cannot lose and do not have to work to sustain. We are not only history averse, we are fact averse. How else can you explain that 24% of our nation does not believe that man has anything to do with climate change… as they live through floods or droughts or storms that they have never experienced in their lifetimes? As we cut government, our efforts are not based on what we need to cut but on where our elected officials see an impact on their electability. Never what’s best for the country, selfishness that accelerates our demise. Take what you can when you can and kick the can down the road! We now have a rather huge stack of kicked cans to deal with.

Does the federal government need cutting? Does the sun rise? But it’s about how and where you trim. The GOP, which voted to cut security for our diplomatic installations and then complained about the lack of security in Benghazi… or trashed the unforgivable “appointment” practices in VA hospitals after they cut the military budget (not part of the VA budget) that provides necessary support to the hospitals.

Here’s the “big picture” example cited in the May 20^th Washington Post: “A new report on the state of the federal workforce can cause angst even in the sanguine… The title, “Embracing Change,” does not begin to convey the severity of the change that federal chief human capital officers (CHCOs) said is needed in a series of interviews with the Partnership for Public Service, a good-government group that focuses on federal workplace issues, and the Grant Thornton consulting firm.

Those interviews, with 62 CHCOs and other personnel leaders at 43 agencies, present a picture of a government that risks malfunction if serious repairs are not made soon. The report will be released at a forum Wednesday.

Consider these findings:

●“[I]f government policies and policymakers continue to undermine the federal workforce, the weakening of that workforce could overwhelm government’s capacity to carry out its responsibilities.”

●Federal leaders “need to help undo the deep institutional neglect within major segments of the federal workforce.”

●Tight budgets and growing workloads “have damaged the federal workforce’s ability to meet demands effectively and efficiently.”

●“Significant challenges must be overcome to rebuild a federal workforce that has been battered on a number of fronts over the past few years.”

In the end, the government and society do not fix themselves. With all of the tax and regulatory preferences, we don’t have a free market, not that a free market would ever require polluters to mend their ways. We lack leadership, our voting constituency is becoming increasingly ignorant (choosing “news” sources for their slant rather than the truth)… we are becoming a nation in serious denial with a rather absolute unwillingness to make the tough decisions to stay on top.

I’m Peter Dekom, and selfishness needs to be replaced with dynamic leadership, lacking on both sides of the aisle rather completely.