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Take some time to carefully read this blog post titled Government is Magic. The post is from a blog called Sultan Knish and in it you’ll be reminded of what a cargo cult is. Then you’ll understand that our country has become one big cargo cult.
Our technocracy is detached from competence. It’s not the technocracy of engineers, but of “thinkers” who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.
These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn’t fix a toaster.
The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.
It’s hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that “progress” makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress.
Healthcare.gov showed us that behind all the smoother and shinier designs was the same old clunky government where everything gets done because the right companies hire the right lobbyists and everything costs ten times what it should.
If the government can’t build a health care website, how is it going to actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at the problem and then look for programs it doesn’t like to squeeze for extra cash.
The Navy had to be cut to the bone and the Benghazi mission had to make do without security so that a Canadian company which began employing a classmate of Michelle Obama’s could score over half a billion to build a broken website. Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s criticism of his Navy cuts by telling him that we don’t fight with bayonets and horses anymore. Bayonets and horses are outdated. In our glorious modernity, we spend fortunes to build websites that don’t work instead. …
… The United States government is the ultimate giant unworkable mess. It is a living cargo cult where everyone marches around following routines that are supposed to yield great prosperity, but never do. The processes themselves are broken and make no sense, but the cargo culturers of the government cannot and will not hear that. They know that the government will magically make everything work.
Because government is progress. Government is modernity. Government is magic.
The cargo culters on the islands, who once witnessed the might and power of the American military during WW2 make American flags and uniforms, they build airstrips and wooden control towers, and wait for the planes to land and make them rich. They don’t understand why these things should work, but they do them anyway because that is how they remember it happening.
Our own cargo culters invoke FDR and JFK, they talk about the New Deal and the Great Society, they make grand promises and roll out big programs, and then they wait for it all to work. They don’t understand themselves how or why it would work. But government is magic and the appearance of a thing is just as good as a real deal.
Build a website and it will work. Pass a law and they will come. Get a degree and you’re competent.
There is no need to know how to do a thing. You don’t need engineers or competent men. All you need to do is remember the great dreams of the past, listen to a few inspirational JFK speeches and then carve a computer out of wood and wait for free health care to arrive.
In cargo cult America, the food is free, the cell phones are free and the money can be printed forever because government is magic.
All of this reminded Pickerhead of Reynolds’ Law as given to us by Philo of Alexandria.
I haven’t been blogging much lately, because I haven’t had many thoughts that haven’t been better expressed elsewhere. But I have to draw attention to a remark of Glenn Reynolds, which seems to me to express an important and little-noticed point:
“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
I dub this Reynolds’ Law: “Subsidizing the markers of status doesn’t produce the character traits that result in that status; it undermines them.” It’s easy to see why. If people don’t need to defer gratification, work hard, etc., in order to achieve the status they desire, they’ll be less inclined to do those things. The greater the government subsidy, the greater the effect, and the more net harm produced. …
In his blog Pejman Yousefzadeh posts on a recent NY Times editorial that tries to come to grip with the failures of the healthcare rollout. Here’s a paragraph from the Times’ piece that provides a perfect example of the cargo cult among the bien pensants – We want something good to happen. So we pass a law and the wonderful things will naturally flow from out pure intentions. Here’s the editors of the Times with the reasoning that allows them to overlook disaster;
… This overblown controversy has also obscured the crux of what health care reform is trying to do, which is to guarantee that everyone can buy insurance without being turned away or charged exorbitant rates for pre-existing conditions and that everyone can receive benefits that really protect them against financial or medical disaster, not illusory benefits that prove inadequate when a crisis strikes. …
The Churchill bust banished by the president is now in the CapitolBuilding. Andrew Malcolm with the story.
You may recall one of the first things the brand-new 44th president did 1,749 days ago was have the honored bust of Winston Churchill, Britain’s legendary war leader, prime minister and author, removed from the Oval Office.
Many people suspect Barack Obama harbors ill-disguised ill feelings toward Great Britain stemming from its long colonial rule of Kenya, homeland of Obama’s father.
Besides exiling the Churchill bust, Obama has been involved in notoriously cheesy gift exchanges with Britons, including Queen Elizabeth, who once received an i-Pod chock-full of Obama’s own speeches. Obama has also been photographed numerous times with his feet on the historic presidential desk, another gift from Britain made from pieces of a British man-o-war.
Such suspicions of a Chicago politician from the South Side are, of course, silly and ridiculous. A man of Obama’s effete education, pettiness and arrogance would never stoop to such juvenile behavior, or if you’re reading this in Britain or Canada, behaviour.
So, it was with some emotion and perhaps a little political nose-thumbing this past week that Republican House Speaker John Boehner presided over the installation of a new, larger-than-life Churchill bust in a place of honor in the U.S. Capitol. Ex-Sen. John Kerry even attended. …