Archive for July, 2010

Yesterday, the Massachusetts Senate approved an act that takes away the MA citizens’ right to select our nation’s president.  I find that very troubling.  From my understanding, our nation was set up as a republic that gave more power to the states versus the federal government.  The reason for this was to ensure as much individual freedom as possible by making government as large as desired locally, and the smallest to still be functional, nationally.

That is changing now.  And not for the better, in my opinion.  Massachusetts will become the sixth (as stated in the article below) state to give up the right for their citizens to vote for president.  They have decided that no matter how your state votes, they will vote for the presidential candidate that the nation chooses.  That’s called diluting one’s vote.  It’s also called populism.

If the desire, as stated by those that vote for this type of legislation, is that it will be more fair and get people to think their vote matters more.  They are wrong and illogical.  Though the intent is nice, the path leads in the opposite direction.  I, for one, will feel disenfranchised by this.  I live in a state where the vast majority voted for Kerry in 2004, yet it’s electoral votes would have been given to George Bush.  How is that empowering for the voters of this state?  (Clue:  It’s not).

If the intent was to ensure more weight for the individual, why not allow proportional voting where the states electoral votes mimic the outcome fo the state’s popular vote rather than the all-or-nothing method currently employed by the majority of states?  In that way, you leverage your local community rather than being diluted by those in distant parts of the nation.

To win future elections, candidates will spend all the time in the most densely populated areas as that will be where the return on investment will be greatest.  Is that fair?  Our candidates platform will be  built on the needs/desires of a select few that reside within the major cities, never finding it valuable to go to Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana,  the Dakotas, Montana, or Colorado.  They, as recognized states within this republic, will go unheard.

WBEZ Interview with then Senator B. Obama, 2001.

OBAMA: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples. So that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as people tried to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. It says what the states can’t do to you, it says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf. And that hasn’t shifted.

“… but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.”

Feel Better?

I just don’t understand this need to prop up the media organizations with federal assistance.  Some fear that we will see the industry drop in numbers and that this will, in some way, limit our freedom of speech.  So, their answer?  Let’s get the government involved!  Yup, that will cure our ills and make speech even more free and opinions much more diverse.

The WSJ has an opinion piece on why we should protect these large dinosaurs.  I have some questions.  First,  aren’t we there already? AP, NewsCorp, ABC, …  Last time I checked, most news articles that are in print or on air are produced by a select few global news organizations.  So, any government involvement will not be to prevent the pool from getting smaller, it will be in protecting the small number we already have.  And, if you are going to be one of the select few chosen to survive with the assistance of federal monies, it is only logical that the federal government get to make up some of the rules on fairness and accuracy, no?  They want that in Healthcare, Auto Bailout, and in the Financial Reform Act, so why not here,also?  Oh, but the feds will need to lean on the expertise of the industry (those select few that have the ability to spend on lobbyists) to craft the new rules.  And the cycle goes until federal help turns into a federally-endorsed oligopoly on news outlets.  Step by step, inch by inch…

So, more questions;

I would like to highlight a post from American Majority that does a great job of describing the difference that I, too,  see between the progressive movement and those that favor the route chosen by our founding fathers.

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”  – James Madison.

I like this quote as it succinctly describes the difference between those that want central government and those that want limited government.  We can argue if the federal government should get involved in healthcare, roads, energy policy, etc, but the practical problem that we are attempting to solve as a society should not neglect the wisdom of our founding fathers.

(Thank you to American Majority for highlighting this quote).

From Wikipedia,

A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system which, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. They are undesirable in any system whose goal is high availability, be it a network, software application or other industrial system.

The assessment of a potentially single location of failure identifies the critical components of a complex system that would provoke a total systems failure in case of malfunction. Highly reliable systems may not rely on any such individual component.

Though CIRCLE’s main ‘beef’ with large, centralized governments is the high risk (and historical precedence) that they turn against individual freedom and towards tyranny, another issue high on our list is the very idea that the centralization of action produces the most efficient results.  It’s  illogical at its core, at least to us engineers.  That idea of centralization leads to a design flaw called a single point of failure.  As defined above, SPOF’s are bad for any high reliability system.  They are to be avoided at all costs.

To design a large system that is to 1) run under all conditions, 2) be stable no matter the input, and 3) react in deterministic ways, with a single point of failure is ludicrous.  Just think about this hypothetical,

Imagine if we had a communication company that built their business around one cable that went between New York and San Francisco.  Let’s say they expanded their presence up and down the coasts but had all calls routed from one coast to the other over that one cable.  Would that be smart?  What would happen if a ditch digger in the Midwest hit and cut it by accident?  It wouldn’t be good.  The company’s repair crews, of course, would be on the East and West Coast as that is where the customers are, but the cut in the line would be in a small town in Indiana, or a rural stretch of Route 66 in North Texas.  Days would be required to get there and then more time needed to repair it.  No communication between the left and right sides of the country until it got repaired.  The media outlets would scream about how the company was unprepared for such a catastrophic event.

The media would be right but for the wrong reason.  It wasn’t the response that was the issue, it was the design.  They set themselves up for a relatively minor accident (incorrect placement of hole) to result in a complete outage.  Poor design trumps the poor response.

Yet, that is the path our elected officials in the federal government, and many in society, continue to follow.  Every issue is met with the need to centralize the solution.  It’s why the downturn in house prices resulted in a global financial crisis (don’t believe me?  Read The Big Short, The Devil’s Casino, and On The Brink, then get back to me).  Our federal government endorsed 3 ratings agencies, implicitly guaranteed over 50% of mortgages, and instituted policies within the banking system that resulted in a system with a single point of failure.  Nationwide decline in real estate prices?  Kaboom!

It’s the desired route by many when it comes to healthcare.  Instead of reducing the barriers of entry, allowing more to offer healthcare services (state certificates of need for new hospitals and clinics, high compliance costs, etc), the proposed solution is a single payer system.  One group, making decisions on what is allowable, determining treatment prices, providing best practices.  How sturdy do you think that system would be?  Not very, if you ask me.

Reaction to the gulf oil spill?  One central command that approves all offers of international assistance and course of action.  Yet, he doesn’t have the ability to communicate with everyone.  He doesn’t own the resources needed to collect the oil.  But hasn’t he (Thad Allen) been anointed by our president as “in charge”?  SPOF.  We have 4 governors waiting for various federal government agencies to approve things.  We have companies around the world capable of helping but sitting on the sidelines until EPA, Coast Guard, White House officials give the a-okay to act.  This actually isn’t one SPOF, it’s many.  And they are all connected to one basic assumption that central planning and centralized action can solve complex problems. [Don't get me wrong, coordination is needed and useful but that is absent in this instance.  It's the difference between an orchestra conductor and a puppet master.  We need a conductor, we have a puppet master.]

Want another example?  How about the water main that ruptured in Boston a few months ago?  We wrote about it here.  In the infinite wisdom of someone that appears to have very little to spare, it was decided that one mother of a pipe should handle all the water for 2 million people north of Boston.  SPOF.

And just last night, NPR reported on the ongoing issues with school lunches in the Boston Public Schools.  They want one provider for all schools within the system.  They spent much time writing the request for proposal only to get one response.  The problem is so complex that only one company felt willing to take on the challenge.  SPOF.  [ To make this even more entertaining, it turns out that the biggest issue is with 60% of the schools and that a nice solution exists for that segment, but the COO of BPS wants only one provider for all the schools.]

Either by luck or skill, our founding fathers appeared to be quite smart design engineers.  Understanding the risks of single points of failure, they came up with a great idea that respected the complexity of life, handing the responsibility to act in the hands of the individual, leaving the federal government in charge of defending borders and individual freedom.