An All-Volunteer Military

Some people claim that the US has had an all-volunteer military for the past 40 years. Not true.

When we talk about volunteer organizations, we mean the employees work for free. Volunteer firefighters, search and rescue volunteers, disaster recovery volunteers, and little league coaches are volunteers, and that means they donate their time.

People who work for the Defense Department and other military-related agencies are paid to do it. They are volunteers in the same sense that all paid employees of all organizations are volunteers: they aren't forced to work for the organization. It's nice that the people who are paid by the defense department aren't conscripted to do so, and that they won't get thrown in jail if they don't. And it's good that they get paid for their work.

It's hard to argue that much of the trillion dollar military budget is of general benefit to society. It certainly isn't necessary for defending the nation's borders; the nuclear subs, bombers, and missile silos do a good job of that, and they collectively account for a small fraction of the budget. And why would we need a separate "homeland" security department if the "defense" department was really there simply to defend US borders from an attack by another country?

But this is a debatable point. A lot of Americans, like Mitt Romney, like having a big military, and would even like it to be even bigger. That's OK. A lot of Americans like big things: TVs, SUVs, houses, breasts, etc. It's a free country, and people are entitled to their opinions.

But what we need is a truly all-volunteer military. All those who like a big military should volunteer to work for it. True, it can be a very dangerous profession, and one that can lead to serious long-term physical and psychological damage. This is an even stronger argument for having the folks that like their military to be big be the ones volunteering to work for it.

Failing that, at the very least, it should be paid for on a voluntary basis. This is very doable; all we need is a check-off at the end of the IRS form 1040, similar to the one where you can donate a dollar of your tax refund to the presidential election fund. But it might need to be a bit more than a dollar. Let's do the math:

Assuming that mostly conservatives like a big military, and that they make up about half the population, that accounts for about 60 million households. But it's a safe bet that most of them would prefer that someone else pay for it: that's exactly why they think it's about the only thing that should be funded with taxes. Assuming a tenth of them are actually willing to step up to the plate, that accounts for a large number--six million households--who can cover the tab for the military. So, dividing this into the trillion dollar cost of the US military, the amount next to the check-off box would need to be only:

Ö   $167,000

Let's Vote On Everything!

I just got my ballot in the mail. It includes the following:

• Some people I've never heard of running for the board of an obscure special district (the Conservation of Angular Momentum District)
• Election of an employee of an obscure and relatively insignificant unit of state government (the Oregon State state department, similar to the Department of Redundancy Department)
• Election of some government lawyers
• Election of a police officer for the county
• A Consititutional amendment keeping any unit of government in Oregon, at any level, from even thinking about adopting a tax on sales of land and buildings. Oddly, it does not include a cap on the amount that real estate salespeople can siphon off on the sale of your home.
• A decision on techniques commercial fishermen should use to catch fish
• A decision on the difference between a square knot and a granny knot
• A decision, based on the evidence, as to whether the scientists in Geneva really detected the Higgs boson.

Why stop here? Let's vote on the hiring of all 161,000 employees of state and local government. And let's vote on each of the roughly 52 million policy and administrative decisions that are made each year by the elected and appointed officials in the state. This would include, of course, tomorrow's menu choices at the high school, and the color of the carpet in the hallway outside the Governor's office.

Or how about this? Maybe have the CEO's of the various executive branches (governor, county administrator) or whoever they delegate do the actual hiring of all their respective executive branch employees BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT WE PAY THEM TO DO.

Let's roll all the obscure under-the-radar special districts (over 50,000 in the US at last count) into the nearest real government (counties, or cities when most of the district is in a city).

And except for a few public-value-based straw polls, like making Oregon the pot capital of America (new state tourism motto: Come Get High With Us!), remove the Yes and No boxes from ballot initiatives and replace them with a single box labelled: "What good is the best legislature that money can buy if it doesn't make decisions on stuff like this??"

Heads Should Roll

The Oregonian reported today that a group of chest-thumping legislators are demanding to know why no one was fired over the Department of Revenue's mistake in issuing a $2 million tax refund based on a fraudulent return. The legislators were from both parties: it was a bipartisan kangaroo court!

Why was no one fired? Well, let's see. Even if the Department of Revenue were a private corporation, firing employees just isn't as much fun as it used to be. Trial lawyers, in a feeding frenzy at the trough of employment lawsuits, have created a world in which relations between organizations and their employees is set by case law, not by any rational approach to human relations. Sure, people can be fired for cause, as long as they aren't part of a protected class, which now includes all carbon-based organisms.

But the Department of Revenue operates under the further burden of being a government agency. The employees who should have been reviewing the tax return are protected by a collective bargaining agreement that allows almost any management decision to be second-guessed by an arbitrator who is for all intents and purposes controlled by the union. If Portland police officers can't be fired for using bad judgment that results in someone's death, or a teacher can't be fired for being unlicensed (licensing is admittedly a silly idea, but it is nonetheless a legislatively-imposed requirement), then how in the world could DOR fire an overworked employee for not having the time to do a thorough job?

And who came up with the insanity that is the Public Employees Collective Bargaining Act? Could it be......the legislature? Sure, it was a different bunch than the current group of grandstanders, but refusal to repeal a bad law is just as reprehensible as passing it in the first place.

And the situation is more complicated. After years of wage freezes and furlough days, many of the good employees have long since left; all that remain are dissillusioned and abused folks just hanging on for their PERS payoff. Budget cuts have created unrealistic workloads; especially in the human services area, it is humanly impossible to meet the demand for service. And who, exactly, is responsible for this situation? Maybe...the legislature?

Aristotle tells us that statesmen can be regular folks and not professional politicians, but they should at least possess moral virtue and the knowledge and judgment to govern effectively.

So the solution is simple. When a group of legislators ask such a flagrantly stupid (and hypocritical) question as, "why didn't someone get fired?"they should be, well, fired.

Oregon Continues to Legislate Morality

Providing jobs for returning veterans is a noble cause; many local governments and private companies in fact do so. In its zeal to demonstrate concern for veterans, the Oregon legislature has moved the practice from a nice thing to do to one that is mandatory for state agencies (and for the state’s whipping boys, the cities and counties in the state).

A November 11, 2011 article in the Oregonian describes a settlement reached between the Oregon State Hospital and a disabled army reserve veteran resulting from the hospital’s failure to “consider his status as a disabled veteran when weighing his application for a promotion.” In addition to a cash payment to the veteran, as part of the settlement, the hospital agreed to provide training for its staff in applying the point preference system in hiring and promoting vets.

Human resource systems in large bureaucracies such as the state government reduce human beings to a single number (made up of the sum of “points”) when making hiring and promotion decisions. Two individuals with the exact same point count will, presumably, perform exactly the same in a work situation. To give veterans an edge, state agencies and local governments must give them more points for being a veteran, and even more points for being a disabled veteran (the soldier in the Oregonian story was disabled through a knee injury in a training exercise).

Realizing that the law doesn’t go far enough, the Oregon legislature is using its between-sessions break to consider a number of refinements. Rep. Orem Bukshot (R-Toadleg) said, “points are good, but if we’re giving points for some lieutenant shuffling papers on an army base in Arizona, shouldn’t we give more points for some guy who’s actually dodging bullets on the front line in Afghanistan?” Not to be outdone, his counterpart in the Senate, Margaret Beekeep (D-Shiphole) said, “I will insist that more points be given for disabilities that arise through combat.” In an example provided through a press release, a limb lost due to an exploding IED would be awarded 22 points, while a limb lost in a truck accident on I-5 next to Fort Lewis while picking up a pizza order would be awarded only 13.5 points.

Lobbyists from a variety of professional guilds protected by the state have taken notice, and have drafted further amendments. Similar points would be awarded for police officers, firefighters, nurses, pastors and rabbis, social workers, sewer workers, garbage collectors, ambulance drivers, and teachers. Injuries sustained while working would result in extra points; fatal injuries would receive the maximum possible points (100). The proposed amendments would make the point count process mandatory for all employers in the state, including fast food outlets and berry farms.

In recognition of the fact that the forthcoming legislation will make it virtually impossible for normal people to understand the legal requirements for hiring and promotion, a new unit of the State Department of Administrative Services has been created to make the hiring and promotion decisions for all organizations in Oregon, including private companies and nonprofits. This division is encountering difficulty in filling its available positions. In response, the governor has formally petitioned President Obama to initiate another war of adventure, in order to increase the supply of available disabled veterans.

Mass Transit

Scientific Earth, July 9, 3012

Eight centuries after the development of anti-gravity vehicles, we take it for granted that humans have always traveled alone or in small groups. Indeed, we see no reason to build vehicles for more than eight people. And historically, this pattern has been repeated. Early humans travelled on foot, and then on animals such as horses or elephants. With the invention of the wheel, they used small vehicles called chariots or carriages, and later bicycles (the precursor to the velomobiles still used today). During the Fossil Fuel Era, humans travelled alone or in small groups (typically the size of a family) in wheeled vehicles called automobiles.

But archeologists have uncovered evidence of other (larger) vehicles, used for a brief period during the Fossil Fuel Era (roughly a thousand years ago). Some of these could seat up to fifty people (sitting and standing). Inexplicably, even after the development of pneumatic tires and wide hard-surface paths called "roads," humans continued to use vehicles with metal wheels running on metal tracks, severly limiting choices of origins and destinations. These could carry several hundred people at a time.

It isn't clear what purpose this form of transportation served; it is hard to imagine a society in which that many people would share a both a common origin and a common destination for travelling. Anthropologists speculate that these vehicles were used to transport slaves, or to carry prisoners to locations for the performance of forced labor.

Union Rights

New Jersey, June 19 , 2012 – Don Vito Corleone has filed suit in federal court alleging that the State of New Jersey has abridged his rights. The whole point of organized crime, he argues, is lost if the state removes his right to enforce membership in the syndicate. The ability of crime bosses to break a few kneecaps is essential to maintaining unity in the family in their continuing struggle to protect their interests. If individuals were free to choose whether or not to join the organization, the system would encourage freeloading, where the mobsters could merely ride on the coattails of the godfather, without actually contributing to the fight. This situation, says Corleone, is intolerable.

The don, through a press release, emphasized the strong popular support organized crime enjoys in society, and warned New Jersey legislators that they would interfere in syndicate rights only to their peril. Thousands of Americans benefit from the services of prostitutes, illegal drugs, and gambling, and organized crime is an important source of jobs and prosperity.

The family has mounted a recall effort against the legislators who have attacked the rights of crime bosses. Campaign funds have poured in from the Cosa Nostra, which according to the US Supreme Courts, has the same free speech rights as any other person. “If New Jersey goes, it will only be a matter of time before the rights of criminal groups to organize are lost everywhere,” Corleone stated.

A Problem of Pronouns (Part 2)

The Hatfields and McCoys and the Abuse of “You” and “Me”

“You violated over one hundred Indian treaties” or “We failed to end slavery in this country until the middle of the 19^th century.”

A second problem of the (intentional) sloppy use of pronouns is the perpetuation of tribal conflicts. The statement, “We failed to end slavery until the mid 19th century” is meaningless. If the word “we” is replaced by “I” (first person singular), it can’t be true, since I wasn’t alive then. If it is replaced by “you” (everyone left in “we” when I am removed), then it is equally meaningless, since you weren’t alive then either.

A politically-correct use of the word “we” when referring to some historical sense of guilt can easily be corrected by substituting the word “I.” If it doesn’t make sense (“I interned the Japanese Americans during WWII” or “I displaced the Native Americans when I migrated westward”), then use of the word “we” isn’t appropriate either.

The pronoun “you” is even more problematic, because it is both singular (you as an individual) and plural (you and everyone like you). Its indiscriminate use automatically creates “us and them” divisions and class separation. “You discriminated against us.” “You invaded my country.” “You need to solve your problem with fatherless families.”

The use of “you” and “we” in this way can put the listener on the defensive, and create barriers to solutions to real problems. Consider instead the statement, “Due to historical patterns of discrimination, an African American child born in poverty has an especially difficult time achieving the American dream.” There isn’t any “you” and “we” here, or an implication that I personally discriminated against this child’s ancestors. It is more likely that the listener, as a fellow human being, will be more sympathetic to the plight of this child and open to solutions.

This isn’t to suggest that historic conflicts between races, tribal groups, or classes haven’t existed, or aren’t important. But solutions are more likely to come through appeals to common humanity and concern for others. When a speaker puts himself or herself in the “we” camp and the listener in the “you” camp, the divisions and conflicts are perpetuated.

A Problem of Pronouns (Part 1)

“Our world is facing an energy crisis. The solution is simple: we need to drive fuel-efficient cars, live in smaller homes, and buy ‘green’ energy.”

You have heard or read this kind of statement before. Even if you agree with it, the statement makes a serious error in the use of the pronoun “we.” This isn’t uncommon; in many ways, sloppy use of the English language masks underlying assumptions that we too often gloss over.

When a person says that “we” need to change our behavior, they really mean that you need to change your behavior. The speaker can easily change his or her actions or habits; it is the only thing they have control over. What they really want to do is change the behavior of others. If all they are doing is exhorting people for voluntary compliance, the deception would be excusable. But in many cases, the ones saying “we need to do this or that” are really arguing that the government should force you to do whatever it is they want done.

Why do they do this? For one reason, it avoids the problem of hypocrisy. People urging a more energy-efficient lifestyle may well drive pickup trucks and live in large houses. When they say “we” need to conserve more, they mean “I will when you have to.”

A second reason is that the use of the indeterminate “we” may get you to agree with them before you really understand the implications. The statement, “we need to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses,” sounds innocuous, if vague. It’s hard to disagree with. Consider, instead, the statement, “The government should tax you more if you drive a lot, or drive a big car. And the government should add a tax to power plants that burn hydrocarbons, making your electricity bill go up.” Now hold on a minute; I thought the global warming problem was caused by farmers burning the Brazilian forest.

It's not that pleas for collective action are wrong. Our country and the world are facing serious challenges in the environment, the use of bio technology, global trade, violence, poverty, and disease. But the people proposing solutions to these problems should be more specific (and honest) in identifying exactly whose behavior needs to be changed, and how.

College Sports

With pride in his voice, my friend Quincy shared some news this week: his son Joshua had been accepted to the University of Washington on a drinking scholarship.

Our colleague from Japan, Ichiro, politely shared that he found it interesting that American universities grant scholarships for drinking and other recreational pastimes. He noted that, if you think about it, a “drinking scholarship” is an oxymoron. He wondered how this might affect America’s future global competitiveness.

Quincy responded that drinking provides the individual with many skills that contribute to a successful life: a sense of camaraderie, a competitive urge associated with drinking games, and increased ability in uninhibited expression of opinions. I wondered if it contributed some negative ones, too: tribalism due to the fanning of rivalries with drinkers from other colleges, and even between fraternities on the same campus. And college drinking seems to encourage fighting. Could our college and high school drinking culture be part of the reason that America seems to view international relations as simply an opportunity to fight other tribes?

I asked Quincy if he was worried about the health aspects of college drinking. Studies seem to point to brain injuries caused by repeated bouts of binge drinking. And, at least from what I see on TV, many college drinkers are grossly overweight. Maybe, I speculated, drinking has overtaken baseball as our national pastime because it’s a sport where it’s OK to be fat. And it seems college drinkers are also more likely to engage in other dangerous activities, such as taking drugs and playing football.

Quincy replied that many aspects of life have risks. At least Joshua was going to college. And Joshua himself admitted that it was drinking that got him through high school.

The scholarship requires Joshua to show up on campus early--in the middle of summer, in fact. When I saw him later that week, I asked him if he looked forward to checking out the library and talking to professors before classes began. He gave me a vacant stare and mumbled, “Whatever, man, I’m just lookin’ forward to hanging out with the other members of the drinking team."

Of Course We Have Property Rights

The City of Damascus, Oregon, was incorporated in 2004, but in over seven years it has been unable to adopt a comprehensive plan. The problem, pundits agree, is a division in the community over the issues of property rights and environmental protection. But these issues aren’t mutually exclusive; they aren’t even related.

The “property” that the founders of our nation wanted to protect included far more than land. It encompassed other forms of wealth and possessions, including in those days slaves. But today, in land use disputes, “property” has come to mean land.

Why do we even need to have this debate? Of course you have a right to your property. You can do anything you want on your land. You own it; it’s yours to do with whatever you please.

But you don’t have a right to the property owned by other people, including the right to property owned in common by other people. This means you have no right to connect your property to a municipal water or sewer system, or to use public streets to get access to your property. Those services and privileges have nothing to do with your right to your property. If you want them, you’ll have to bargain for them, as you would whenever you want someone else’s property. That bargain might include some limits in how you use your property, but the choice is yours as to whether to take it or leave it.

You have a right to do whatever you want on your property, but you don’t have a right to alter or harm other people’s property. This means you don’t have a right to burn stuff, or do anything that makes dust, if the dust or smoke particulates drift off your property line. You don’t have a right to add silt or anything else to a river or creek that runs through your property, since that clearly flows onto someone else’s property. You don’t have a right to use a septic tank, since the drain field affects ground water that eventually makes its way off your property onto someone else’s. You certainly don’t have a right to dam or alter the flow of any streams on your property, since that obviously affects the property rights of the people who own property downstream.

You don’t have a right to use a well, since the water you would draw from is connected, underground, to other properties. You might be able to collect and use the rain water that falls from the sky, but there is some question as to whether you really own it. You don’t own rain when it’s in the sky; do you get title to it when it hits the ground? The same applies to the other living things on your property—animals, plants, birds, insects. Do you own them? What if the birds or insects are born on someone else’s property and simply wander onto yours? If you kill them, have you taken someone else’s property?

Some day in the future, private ownership of a piece of God’s earth will seem as strange as the concept of owning another human being. But we’re not there yet. For now, you are free to use your land however you want…as long as you don’t affect in any way the property rights of anyone else.

Finally, A Solution to the Education Problem

American secondary education is, in the words of MIT economist Lester Thurow, a joke. To address the dismal state of the K-12 education system, the Oregon legislature has come up with a solution, in the form of House Bill 4102. The problem, apparently, is that American students perform poorly compared to their counterparts in other developed countries because their schools don't know how to evaluate teachers. HB 4102 comes to the rescue with a mandated evaluation system, requiring all teachers to be graded according to a four-grade scale (from "does not meet performance standards" to "exceeds performance standards").

In a display of chest-beating, Rep. Jeb Snakeingrass (R-Piglick) lectured school superintendents, saying "this is going to be a real evaluation, not one where 99.9% of the teachers are graded at the top."

This fixation on teacher evaluation seems odd, since any parent with children in school knows (or at least can find out) which are the good teachers and which aren't. Teachers themselves know which of their colleagues are great teachers and which are dead wood. Is the lack of formal evaluations really the problem? Of course not.

The state government itself is mostly to blame. It forces on school districts an antiquated collective bargaining law that has given us layoffs based on seniority, bumping rights, budgets that are increasingly consumed by retiree benefits, and a greivance and arbitration process that makes it impossible to fire bad teachers. It forces schools to hire from a very small pool of self-selected guild members without regard to knowledge of subject areas or teaching skills. It forces school boards to hire from a similarly small pool of school administrators, without regard to actual management skills. It (along with the national government) dumps on schools the burden of solving a variety of socio-economic problems that schools aren't equipped to address. It stifles innovation in charter schools, school vouchers, on-line learning, and anything else that might threaten the status quo.

The state legislature has created the mess, and now has the gall to blame teachers and superintendents for it. This is no different than a parent burning a child with a cigarette, and then slapping the child for crying.

But we shouldn't be surprised. The legislators are themselves, after all, a product of the same rotten education system, and must be excused for both ignorance and failing to meet "performance standards."

The Best Professional Entertainers

People seem infatuated with reality TV. We have Survivor and Biggest Loser, American Idol and X-Factor, whatever that means. There are actors with little personality, and "personalities" with little acting skill.

Another form of reality entertainment comes in the form of "professional sports" (an oxymoronic phrase, if you think about it). Professional wrestling may not really be real, but then again, neither is Kim Kardashian.

Other professional entertainers (sometimes called the "news media") make their living by talking or writing about these people, typically with breathless sincerity. They follow the other entertainers around, obsessed with the most trivial details of their lives, both on and off the stage.

They're all pikers. The real pros are national presidential candidates. These folks are beyond the petty details of film locations and production budgets. They don't have to stoop to deals with cable networks or news syndicates. All they need to do is show up. With a dozen microphones stuck in their face, they simply need to utter a heartfelt twenty-word philosophy of life, and the other professional entertainers go to work with hours of analysis, criticism, commentary and opinion.

How is this not a reality TV game show? Who's ahead today? Who's beating up on whom? Where's the next plot twist, when something scandalous sneaks out of a closet, or a black sheep relative surfaces? There is certainly no more depth or insight in all the commentary than there is in, say, the endless replay of a fumbled football or debate over whether the starlet really has implants.

At this point in the playoff season, the professional entertainment world is obsessed with the Republican presidential primary. The column inches of newsprint and terabytes of electronic media devoted to this is nauseating. And the interesting thing is, like a "professional sports" event, it doesn't make any difference.

Why is the Republican presidential primary completely irrelevant to real life (as opposed to reality TV life)? Simple, for two reasons:

First, Barack Obama will have to really screw up not to get re-elected. So far, he's been very careful not to do anything, and it's hard to trip up if you're not moving.

Second, the election game is about policies and positions, but these are irrelevant. The most junior congressperson from Froghop, Nebraska has more votes (exactly one out of 535) in passing legislation than the president (exactly zero out of 535). Sure, the president can veto stuff, but almost nothing makes it out of both houses of congress, so that's not much fun. The president can, in theory, use his "bully pulpit" to go straight to the people to put pressure on the legislators to pass something. The only problem is that while the president is at the pulpit, the rest of us have our fingers in our ears, yelling blah blah blah while watching X Factor with one eye and Facebook with the other.

The US Constitution, believe it or not, assigns the president the job of being the chief executive officer of the government organization, and leaves the policy stuff pretty much to the legislative branch. For someone interested in the federal government's ability to mismanage almost everything (see TSA), it would be a good exercise to find out if any of the candidates are any good at managing something. But wait--they're not applying for a serious management job in a fairly big organization--they're PROFESSIONAL ENTERTAINERS.

Mitt Romney, for example, takes credit for turning around the management of the 2002 Winter Olympics, but even if that's true, no one is interested in it. Can you imagine the yawns and eye-rolling if Romney actually started talking about delegation, motivation, values-oriented leadership, strategic planning and project management? He would get no more than two words into it before a bored reporter would scream the question, "what's your stance on abortion?"  This, in spite of the fact that presidents have been too old and male to need them, and none have so far been competent to perform one (except of the bureaucratic variety).

Clearly, the chances of the American electorate actually, by accident, putting a good chief executive officer in the White House, are about as slim as the chance of congress actually balancing the budget.

The solution? A constitutional amendment to limit the presidency to a single one-year term. Then each season we could have a different crop of professional entertainers to....well, entertain us.