"Would we be more trusting of government if it could properly launch a health care website, the most public-facing aspect of the most significant social reform in a generation?"
Two counterfactuals within the counterfactual. Quite an achievement.
"Consider the D-Day invasion, the Manhattan Project, the Berlin Airlift, the moon landing: In example after example, the United States government—not the private sector, note—mobilized vast talent to overcome historically unprecedented military, economic, technological, and governance challenges."
Known by the results. These were further examples of sausage in production and a comedy of errors in progress. The sausage of D-Day is well enough known. The moon landing? What could possibly go wrong with a pure oxygen atmosphere surrounding electrical connections? Another counterfactual: what about the health problems accruing from existing for days on end in a pure oxygen atmosphere?
Aside from which, it was the private sector that did all of those things, and private money (including private money paid as taxes) that paid for all of that and private citizens dying on the beaches alongside other private citizens fighting to success on that day. Government just brokered those deals--every single one of them--no mean feat by government, but only that.
Today's government, though, insists on dictating what those deals must be, what they must look like, and how they must be effected. The private sector works for Government, after all.
So will we be known by our results from today. Onliest difference between today and yesterday is that technology today lets us see the production in real-time instead of afterward. And a press that takes advantage of that to be sure and tout the interim mistakes while ignoring the interim successes because--as that same press has long bragged--bad news is what sells.
"Both are missing a crucial point. It’s not government, per se, but our government that screws everything up."
All three are missing the point. European culture and American culture are not at all the same, for all that ours is an evolution of British (Daniel Hannon suggests more broadly of Anglo-Saxon) culture. We're 200+ years past our British roots, with the early decades of those years marked by mutual contempt and enmity. Zelikow notwithstanding (he's right as cited, although too narrow--we don't do a decent job of educating anyone in our K-12 public schools, much less in our "higher" education facilities), our government is the one we have, not someone else's, it's the one we've always had, we've never had a European form or style of government, and we've always had a basic, generalized contempt for government.
That's the culture within which we operate.
"Experienced in being asked to decide what “can” be done, lawyers are not trained to analyze what “should” be done, even in policies having to do with policing or the administration of justice."
The mindset in this illustrates a part of the problem. What "should" be done is a political decision, and so it's best left to the political arm of American culture: not Government, but government's [that spelling, by the way, is deliberate] employers, We the People. But the growing dominance of Government is cracking the foundation of our American culture, reducing our individual self-reliance, our personal responsibility, our sense of individual duty and individual liberty, and transferring those to reliance on Government as no longer broker but as The Solution, can we only get the right technocrats--physical and social--into the right positions.
"It is now rare to find any good records kept of what is said at meetings among American officials. The quality of the records of meetings with foreigners has also deteriorated. The usual excuse given is the horror of leaks. But that horror was perfectly familiar to officials of the wartime and postwar generation as well."
This is too true. My thought when news came out of Comey's having actually made a record of a meeting with the President, and the hue and cry associated with it (how dare he!? or why would he do that?), was Of course he wrote an MFR. That was routine for us in the USAF, even for classified meetings; the aggregate of them allowed a reasonably accurate record to be constructed, and they informed efforts to correct any minutes that were officially generated for some of those. Comey's error was releasing that government-owned record to the public without the owner's permission. And it was government property, not because it was generated on a government laptop, but because it was generated by a current government employee about a government meeting. 'Way too few MFRs get generated today.
Fear of leaks? Critical differences between the "wartime and postwar generation" and now include the lessened respect for necessary secrets today and the speed and ease with which leaks can be generated and disseminated.
"We need to be sure those nukes don’t go off by accident."
That's exceedingly unlikely. The complex part of that system is the human chain leading to the launch of a missile from its silo or the release of a nuke from its aircraft, not the physical system. And we train that all the time. Even from the President's end of the chain. The most likely failure is that they won't go off at all; they'll only fizzle. Nuclear warheads decay with the inevitability of physics. That's why we spend so much on "upgrading" our warheads--much of those upgrades are to replaced decayed fissiles.
Government before 1940 was tiny. The people who led the US in its rise to world power came from outside government, from a culture of invention and management controlled by market mechanisms. The clueless elites in charge today come from an amazingly intellectually corrupt academia, unconnected to any corrective mechanism, and animated by its belief that it must control everything..
"Would we be more trusting of government if it could properly launch a health care website, the most public-facing aspect of the most significant social reform in a generation?"
Two counterfactuals within the counterfactual. Quite an achievement.
"Consider the D-Day invasion, the Manhattan Project, the Berlin Airlift, the moon landing: In example after example, the United States government—not the private sector, note—mobilized vast talent to overcome historically unprecedented military, economic, technological, and governance challenges."
Known by the results. These were further examples of sausage in production and a comedy of errors in progress. The sausage of D-Day is well enough known. The moon landing? What could possibly go wrong with a pure oxygen atmosphere surrounding electrical connections? Another counterfactual: what about the health problems accruing from existing for days on end in a pure oxygen atmosphere?
Aside from which, it was the private sector that did all of those things, and private money (including private money paid as taxes) that paid for all of that and private citizens dying on the beaches alongside other private citizens fighting to success on that day. Government just brokered those deals--every single one of them--no mean feat by government, but only that.
Today's government, though, insists on dictating what those deals must be, what they must look like, and how they must be effected. The private sector works for Government, after all.
So will we be known by our results from today. Onliest difference between today and yesterday is that technology today lets us see the production in real-time instead of afterward. And a press that takes advantage of that to be sure and tout the interim mistakes while ignoring the interim successes because--as that same press has long bragged--bad news is what sells.
"Both are missing a crucial point. It’s not government, per se, but our government that screws everything up."
All three are missing the point. European culture and American culture are not at all the same, for all that ours is an evolution of British (Daniel Hannon suggests more broadly of Anglo-Saxon) culture. We're 200+ years past our British roots, with the early decades of those years marked by mutual contempt and enmity. Zelikow notwithstanding (he's right as cited, although too narrow--we don't do a decent job of educating anyone in our K-12 public schools, much less in our "higher" education facilities), our government is the one we have, not someone else's, it's the one we've always had, we've never had a European form or style of government, and we've always had a basic, generalized contempt for government.
That's the culture within which we operate.
"Experienced in being asked to decide what “can” be done, lawyers are not trained to analyze what “should” be done, even in policies having to do with policing or the administration of justice."
The mindset in this illustrates a part of the problem. What "should" be done is a political decision, and so it's best left to the political arm of American culture: not Government, but government's [that spelling, by the way, is deliberate] employers, We the People. But the growing dominance of Government is cracking the foundation of our American culture, reducing our individual self-reliance, our personal responsibility, our sense of individual duty and individual liberty, and transferring those to reliance on Government as no longer broker but as The Solution, can we only get the right technocrats--physical and social--into the right positions.
"It is now rare to find any good records kept of what is said at meetings among American officials. The quality of the records of meetings with foreigners has also deteriorated. The usual excuse given is the horror of leaks. But that horror was perfectly familiar to officials of the wartime and postwar generation as well."
This is too true. My thought when news came out of Comey's having actually made a record of a meeting with the President, and the hue and cry associated with it (how dare he!? or why would he do that?), was Of course he wrote an MFR. That was routine for us in the USAF, even for classified meetings; the aggregate of them allowed a reasonably accurate record to be constructed, and they informed efforts to correct any minutes that were officially generated for some of those. Comey's error was releasing that government-owned record to the public without the owner's permission. And it was government property, not because it was generated on a government laptop, but because it was generated by a current government employee about a government meeting. 'Way too few MFRs get generated today.
Fear of leaks? Critical differences between the "wartime and postwar generation" and now include the lessened respect for necessary secrets today and the speed and ease with which leaks can be generated and disseminated.
"We need to be sure those nukes don’t go off by accident."
That's exceedingly unlikely. The complex part of that system is the human chain leading to the launch of a missile from its silo or the release of a nuke from its aircraft, not the physical system. And we train that all the time. Even from the President's end of the chain. The most likely failure is that they won't go off at all; they'll only fizzle. Nuclear warheads decay with the inevitability of physics. That's why we spend so much on "upgrading" our warheads--much of those upgrades are to replaced decayed fissiles.
Eric Hines
Government before 1940 was tiny. The people who led the US in its rise to world power came from outside government, from a culture of invention and management controlled by market mechanisms. The clueless elites in charge today come from an amazingly intellectually corrupt academia, unconnected to any corrective mechanism, and animated by its belief that it must control everything..