George Rebane

Last Saturday’s (28may16) newspapers offered up dollops of leftwing wisdom from the great and the small, both issuing from what to me and mine has always been a Neverland of cogent thought.  From Hiroshima (pronounced Hiroshma, not Hero-shiima) we heard once more the words of our leader pleading for an Earth that never was and never will be (more here), ignoring the fundamental tenets of human character that have driven geo-political history since man made marks on stone – a sentiment also recently immortalized by Mr Rodney King.

But what really caught my eye was Mr Darrell Berkheimer’s ‘A myth about government socialism’ in the 28may16 Union.  We have visited with Mr Berkheimer before (here), but his most recent offering left me a conundrum.  Is the man abysmally ignorant about the workings of governments, socio-economic systems, private industry, fundamentals of economics, and the basics of human behavior, or is he a sinister cynic writing for an audience with such hoped for deficits?  In his favor, I adduce a case for the former.

In an opening volley of logic he asks, “Well, if socialism is so bad, why do we have so much of it?”, thereby positing that if there is a lot of something, a fortiori it must be good.  How does that jibe with the worldwide drug epidemic?

He then launches into a comparative analysis of government vs private sector, providing a laundry list of social services such as retirement, education, mail, “trains”, highways, … ; and then concludes that all of these are better performed by government in spite of the years long evidence that government performs most of these with astounding levels of incompetence, indifference, and insolvency.  Such performance in the private sector would quickly put an end to the deficient enterprises, for the simple reason (lost on Berkheimer) of competition.  The deficient enterprises could only remain in business with the help of the government gun, a well-practiced institution today known as corporatism.

Mr Berkheimer then launches into a series of evidentiary explanations about the relative virtues of government over the private sector.  He starts with citing project overruns on government contracts including the military, shoveling all the blame into the contractors’ corner.  This simple-minded argument bolsters the conclusion that Berkheimer knows nothing about government budgeting, contracting, and its procurement process – and we must note that the operational word here is ‘nothing’.  How socialists cum communists err in this area alone has launched many a volume for those who care to become informed.

A major underpinning of how Berkheimer explains private sector overruns is that they “pay exorbitant salaries and bonuses to CEOs and CFOs”, expenses which government is not burdened with unless we read daily accounts of enormous benefit packages (along with awaiting trillions in unfunded liabilities) that government bureaucrats harvest daily from the taxpayer.  And so he tells us he also knows nothing about corporate budgeting and finance.

To put a bow on it, he attributes such private sector inefficiencies to the “need to pay stockholder dividends and members of a board of directors.”  The man thereby demonstrates another chasm in his knowledge base.  The management bonuses and director fees are negotiated as a function of the company’s performance by the principals of the private enterprise, and are solely their affair to do with their funds as they see fit.  And “stockholder dividends” is one of the great enablers of Adams’ invisible hand that informs and invites capital to flow where it will be most productive – an endeavor in which governments over the ages have shown to be and, with very few exceptions, are still today dismally incompetent.

As a dyed-in-wool socialist/communist Mr Berkheimer stridently claims that government can better manage the development and delivery of goods and services than private enterprise, arguing “When (companies) try, they cut corners. And some people, or agencies, who should qualify for services are either denied service, or are not provided all that they should receive. (emphases mine)  Doesn’t it make sense that if monies must go to a CEO, directors, stockholders, agents, taxes, marketing and lobbyists, then those amounts can’t go to providing services?”  Who, pray, should then decide what a company “should” produce and provide its ‘qualified’ (by whom) customers?  Spoken again like one of Lenin’s Lads.

Finally, our columnist attempts to toss a sop to private enterprise, but again misses the mark. “Looking to the other side of the coin, however, I think corporations and businesses usually will be better at manufacturing products and spawning innovative technology.”  And what would cause a corporation or any other business to undertake the risk to develop a product, set up a factory, and then manufacture a finished goods inventory without any guarantee of being rewarded?  Mind boggling.

Mr Berkheimer appropriately caps his dissertation with the conclusion that “governments are the better provider for our social needs. And we are long overdue to add universal health care to that list.”  My own conclusion is that his reading of ‘Sustainability and Single Payer Revealed’ would be an exercise in futility.

[update]  Today Hilary Hodge, another one of The Union’s regular leftwing luminaries, explains how our democracy should work.  In her column she teaches us that –

We elect people to represent our interests and our concerns at the local, state, and national levels. Our elected officials aren’t supposed to be floating their personal agendas. Our elected officials are supposed to be making policy initiated from their electorate. For some reason, in recent years, this concept has gotten away from the American people and has gotten far away from American government. We do not elect people so that they may feed us some sort of political platform and then jam their own agendas through our government in order to get laws passed that do not serve the community as a whole.

Unfortunately the lady was not taught in her unionized schools that our Founders understood that public will is fickle, uninformed, manipulable by demogauges, and highly volatile.  For that reason they gave us not a fragile democracy, but instead a sturdy democratic republic (“… if you can keep it.” Ben Franklin).

In such a republic at election time politicians explain to us their ideologies (principles, values, world truths, tenets of governance, …), their understanding of current problems, their intended approach to address such problems, and in general their vision for the jurisdiction they seek to represent.  The operational word here is THEIR, not the electorate’s.

Considering such presentations of the various politicians during the electoral campaign, the voters individually decide which of them most closely represent their own views and values, and then vote accordingly.  The Founders did all they could to give us a system that would shield us from the inevitable turbulence of public opinion after the election is over.  They knew that the self-serving shysters in the political arena would seek to retain their sinecures primarily through the corruption of following public opinion and telling voters what they want to hear, regardless of what they wind up doing.

Ms Hodge, whom we have visited before (here), continues in her deep ignorance of all this and advises us to exactly counter America’s founding principles with –

We should not be electing people who tell us “Here’s what I’m going to do.”  We should be electing people who ask us, “What do you want me to do?”

More food for the crickets that you simply can't make up.