What You Know Is Wrong, If What We Feel Is More Popular!

In 1976 American culture was changed forever. Mark Goodson and Paul Todman released Family Feud on an unsuspecting public. For those of you who do not remember how the show worked, here's a quick review.

Representatives of each family of contestants are posed questions that have already been answered by a survey of 100 people although, sometimes, the surveyed audience would be further narrowed down (e.g. "100 women"). An answer is considered correct if it is one of the concealed answers on the game board.  More points are given for answers that have been given by more people in the survey. Sample questions might include,  “name a vacation spot” or “things that go on a pizza”. Keep in mind that neither of these examples are questions, yet for the purposes of Family Feud were considered queries.

Housewives and other shut-ins loved The Feud. As opposed to shows that catered to brainiacs or people who graduated the eighth grade, like Jeopardy... Family Feud was something everyone could play.  Which is an easier question to answer, "name something you would give your mother on her birthday" (again not in question form) or "how many of the capital cities in the United States have the word "City" in their names?"

Obviously people who are aficionados of RAND McNally  are predisposed to answering  the second question correctly. Consumers that watch television are much more at ease in responding to the first.

The popularity of the Family Feud  infected newsrooms. No longer did journalists have to do reporting, they could do polls. Public opinion trumps facts in today's media culture. 65% of cheating spouses feel it is okay to lie about sex when covering an affair, remember this headline from the autumn of Monica?  How about this classic lead, only 38% of Americans believe President Bush is taking the country in the right direction.

The networks use polls to redefine and shape the words used in our culture. The New York Times ran a wonderful piece on what defines a family. Just like Family Feud, if you survey 100 Hasidic Jews,  “What should you give your mother for Christmas?”,  the answer would be completely different than if you surveyed 100 Amish farmers.

Polls are used to obscure and homogenize morality and vocabulary. Popular nomenclature trumps values. What you know to be true is eclipsed by what everyone else feels. It is as if you could effectively argue to your mother, "Johnny gets to stay up past midnight, drinking gin with his dad, look at Playboy, and take the puppy's temperature with his finger... so I should get to too." 

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/what-is-a-family/

When Money Comes From Magic Aardvarks, Does it Matter How You Spend It?

Sometimes two stories come together in the most perfect way. The first story comes from Portland, Oregon. The city of Portland has decided that bus drivers deserve $100,000 year salaries. What's more amazing are the 7 to 12 pages of
comments in The Oregonian sticking up for the bus drivers.

There are two problems within the story. The first is the acceptance of the premise that the bus driver through either seniority, outstanding driving record, ability to always bring donuts on Wednesday or some other extraordinary skill is
entitled to take 10th of $1 million a year from the hands of working stiffs.

Think back to Ralph Kramden.  In Jackie Gleason's day bus drivers lived in tenements. What is likely to send you straight to the moon...it takes five families making $80,000 a year and being taxed at 25% to pay for just the salary of this municipal servant.  That's five families giving up one quarter of their income so that a bus driver can live on a salary 25% greater than the families they serve.  In addition to laying off the bus driver, whoever allowed his salary to become so inflated and so out of  line with the compensation of the people who pay him should also be fired.

Now comes the outrageous part.

The state of California and the federal government have decided to construct a high-speed bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Obviously with jet service between the two cities at the top and the bottom of each hour and
flight times of 40  minutes, the public was clamoring for a 3 1/2 hour transit time between the two cities via Bakersfield.Then when you are flush with the trillion or so dollars in stimulus money, doesn't really matter what you spend on?

Where are the environmental impact studies, noise studies, pollution studies, effect on wildlife studies, effect on historic neighborhood studies and land-use studies that the state imposes on private business? If only half of these requirements were imposed on this project it would never be funded.

Are there families in Kern County wanting to spend $25 apiece to ride a bullet train to Los Angeles, then get on a bus and travel to Disneyland, spend the day, get back on the bus, and finally take the train back to the city which produces the largest
number of rutabagas and turnips on the West Coast?

Is building this project justified by an increased terror threat? Clearly terrorists could never find a way to sabotage 600 to 800 miles of track. Is this project advanced based upon the jobs created? it would take 500 families making $80,000 a
year to pay for each mile of this project, assuming construction costs could be constrained to $10 million a mile. but since the money to  develop the train line has to be borrowed there is an additional 15 families paying interest for each mile of the project.

Now throw in the Portland bus driver concept. How many hundred thousand dollar year employees does the system mandate?  What is  their cost in salaries, benefits  and the
legacy payments? 


Would it be better if the federal government just commissioned  a $500 million bronze statue. (Imagine Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama drinking a beer as LBJ picked his dogs up by their ears, standing  over 900 feet high.) This would clearly be as beneficial as a bullet train, plus it does not come with bloated salaries to maintain and service the  byproduct of wasted tax dollars.

Regulation Is Always The Answer?

Few things in life are as enjoyable as somebody telling you how you must do something. What takes the joy to ecstasy, is when the person telling you has no clue as to what you are doing, what needs to be done or even the slightest clue as to what the job is about.

The best example is  the“new standard” for healthcare insurance. The current administration's effort to save the American people from the consequences of having health insurance, is about to destroy the industry. The supreme intellects who write policy and legislation have decided that healthcare insurers must spend between 80 to 85% of the premiums on claims.

Surprisingly the media has no natural curiosity as to what this could do. The biggest problem in insurance today is the disconnect between the payment, the treatment  and the care given. Somehow the  consumer's voice is never taken into account. The doctor will get paid a predetermined amount for service rendered, the insurance company will pay, and the consumer “gets well”.  The problem here is not the amount of money spent, the problem is the lack of input the consumer has on their treatment.

So, on a fine white charger, in storms the government to solve the problem. As opposed to giving the consumer a voice,  the government has mandated a payment schedule. In classic bureaucratic behavior, they assume more money is the answer. To ensure the "more money" is spent correctly, they devise a gauntlet of forms, bureaus, ombudsmen and other  regulators to ensure  no nickel is wasted. This results in the cost of the nickel being saved, to be about $15 per nickel.

In trying to find points of agreement, assume the 15 to 20% rule was a good thing, just applied inappropriately. What if one fifth of each budget, for every department of the government, was all that could be allotted to administration and supervision?

Suppose school districts could only have 15 to 20%  of the educationalbudget spent on people who did not have a minimum of six hours a day teaching students.   This is the first thing you would hear, over the screams, "the administrators and peripheral programs are too important to be cut".  Followed by the usual caterwauling associated with bureaucratic faux concern.

Imagine the department of transportation having to spend 80 to 85% of their budget specifically on fixing roads used by cars and trucks. The amount of money siphoned into mass transportation schemes would no longer be there.  The transportation monopoly would crumble. with out the “mass transit service”, perhaps individuals using nothing more than vans could provide shuttles from Starbucks to the workplace.

Say the 15 to 20% rule were applied to the workforce, that each citizen or registered alien got to keep between 85 to 80% of their pay. If the overhead of government were reduced to less than a fifth of all income generated by our nation, would the people have more money to consume our way out of any financial problems? With the tax obligation of most Americans cut in half, the greatest benefactor would be charities. There's never been a more giving people, than people of the United States. Whenever anybody needs anything, we turn out our pockets and find a way to help in the ways that only we can. Social services would have more people volunteering, contributing resources and time to solve virtually every problem in our country and on the planet.

Like most programs born of academia, the 15% rule,  if applied correctly, could have “the unintended consequences”.  The new Congress was elected on a wave of fiscal responsibility. One would hope, they would take Pres. Obama's idea of 15% and apply it across the board. In this way, the president would provide the tool to save our country from its leaders, transforming his reign from one of embarrassment, to one of accomplishment beyond the wildest dreams of even Ronald Reagan.

http://www.insuranceheadlines.com/Health-Insurance/7061.html

Debunking More

More,  more, more,
How you like it?
More, more, more
 -Andrea True

The concept of  “more” is viewed as a disease in  media culture.   "More" is  used as  a  synonym  for greed.  In reality the latter is  a mortal sin and the former is the essence of  the human condition. The desire to have, to acquire and to
accumulate is ingrained in people; it is what we do even when no one is looking.

Every culture across our great, green planet is so enrapture with "more", marketplaces are created virtually every time people meet. Ideas, goods and services are exchanged. Trade and therefore economic activity are beyond the control
of legislation and other tools of government interference.  Proof of this concept is found in black markets which exist to serve as a venue for extralegal goods.

People respond to the challenge of “more” in a number of different ways. Some try to master the creation of multiple skills that give them the opportunity to create
every last thing they could ever want. Others reach a savant level of understanding of a specific skill set and barter their knowledge for goods and services they desire.

Free marketplaces naturally expand and contract in response to need. Proof of this concept is cola flavored beverages. Is the world really clamoring for 25 different ways to drink a Coke? Or is the world looking for 24 alternatives to the
Dominant market player, at a variety of different price points? No one had to legislate the cola market, it took care of itself. When people got tired of cola consumption; along came the coffee market and the bottled water market. Each of these
markets also has 25 or so variants that allow the consumer to dictate the quality and price point that serves them best.

Fortunes have been made creating markets. New England was once the greatest exporter of ice in the known universe. Ice from in and around Massachusetts was shipped  to
as far away as India.  Frost begat fortunes, then the market figured how to create ice artificially and the wealth from the  frozen pond harvesters magically rained on the people of Chicago. 


Ice on demand created entire new industries, all centered around the packaging and distribution of meat.  At the time, the innovation and new products developed was on par with the internet and digital communication boom of the last 20 years.

What fueled the expansion?   “More”.   People wanted more beef, pork and poultry.

Much like the coffee and bottled water markets of today, old-timers thought "who would ever pay for a frozen steak when you could just go out and slaughter a cow and butcher
the beef yourself".  Frozen food to the rancher was sissified. (I don't believe ranchers of that era used the word sissified.)

The biggest problem with “more” is  its use in controlling behavior, versus allowing behavior to evolve and develop naturally. Too many people in positions of authority apply “more” to regulations. Earlier this week a town in New Jersey
outlawed sleeping in public.

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2010/11/16/nj-town-outlaws-sleeping-in-public/


 No doubt the town already has laws on the books regarding vagrancy, public intoxication and loitering. When used in concert or individually these laws would resolve the “sleeping in public”  issue. However the city fathers did not want to
use the existing laws, which may have been designed to arrest  substance abuse and the proliferation of bums,  to ensnare the public napping, crowd who are just too exhausted to make it home and need to crash on a bench. Proof of overregulation can be found in “drug-free zones” and “hate crimes”.

The regulating class obsesses on controlling other people's “more”. They see each dollar the cavalier consumer spends on frivolous pursuits as a dollar not spent for the collective good.  They fail to see how each dollar, no matter how spent, is
an expression of someone's unique talents being rewarded in a market system that is both natural and just.  Restricting trade enslaves the seller of goods to a less perfect expression of their professionalism, while frustrating the consumer who only wants more. 

When Thinking Dies Regurgitation Flies

Regurgitation, all great literary works - or in this case blogs,  begin with a really classy word. You can tell, this is going to be swell when you see the big R word right up front. 

Regurgitators are therefore the people that regurgitate. Puking food, a mainstay of comedic and dramatic cliché has been with us for decades. Think about it “projectile vomiting”...  it's hard to believe there is anything funnier. After all it's impossible to see a movie without someone “hurling”  after a prolonged night of partying.

The second use of retching, is to show something  emotionally overwhelming. The most common use, is finding a dead body; followed by the holding of the stomach and a quick step scurrying off-camera followed by the telltale sound of the stomach emptying.

The second use of ralphing is the slippery slope that leads to the death of journalism and  deconstruction of democracy. Spewing is  used when “stars”  need to express intensity beyond  the limits of their stagecraft. Heaven forbid, someone break down and cry,  stare without  breathing, while trembling at the jaw, as terror filled their eyes. This would require talent well beyond the limits of attractive, yet vapid matinee idols.  Up chucking is a simple way to say, "wow, this is hard to take".  It also enables directors to use the byproduct of "a crazy night in the trailer" in the first scene shot each day.

Journalism is rotting from the very same condition. Today the similarity of viewpoint, analysis and  editorial content  is embarrassingly, homogenous. The treatment of material is known by the headline. Sources and facts take on a professional wrestling quality. Every article written is a regurgitation of preconceived biases fortified by "experts" with conforming opinions.

School budgets offer the quintessential example of the demagoguery. Have you ever seen an article questioning the amount of money going to the benefits and retirement accounts of the teachers and administrators? Has it ever been suggested that the employees have 401(k) type plans, where the worker assumes the investment risk? Have you ever read about the legacy costs associated with educational professionals? Is there ever a quote from a private school official on how they deal with less money per student and the additional burden of taxation?

Instead what passes for reporting is a litany of the programs to be cut and the poor teachers who care so much for the children. What's worse is that for the last 30 years the song remains the same.

Regurgitation, by regurgitators.  

Democracy only works if the citizens are informed. When  the media  selectively suspend curiosity and take on an advocacy role, the ideals of freedom and liberty are laid to waste. For too long we have been fed feces in the press. Too many people are now puking crap.

Yet through darkness of  this peril, comes a hero... the mighty market. With newspapers and mainstream media on financial life support, citizen journalists can express themselves on public forums where ideas and perspectives can lead to actions and solutions.