Hope and Chains

As part of his July 13 Roanoke speech, about which I blogged a couple of weeks ago, Obama had this to say:

We got the slowest job growth in decades.  We got deficits as far as the eye can see.  Your incomes and your wages didn’t go up.  And it culminated in a crisis because there weren’t enough regulations on Wall Street and they could make reckless bets with other people’s money that resulted in this financial crisis, and you had to foot the bill.  So that’s where their theory turned out.

‘Their theory” referred, of course, specifically the previous Republican administration of George Bush, and generally to all previous Republican administrations. Slow job growth, deficits as far as the eye could see, and no growth in personal income was because “because there weren’t enough regulations on Wall Street …”

Almost a month later to the day, Joe Biden stumped before a predominately black audience in Danville, Virginia near the North Carolina line and, like his boss, went off script, and in his best faux southern drawl had this to say:

Romney wants to let the – he said in the first hundred days he’s gonna let the big banks once again write their own rules … Unnnn-chain Wall Street … They gawn' put y'all back in chains.

I’ve listened to various renditions of the video and I believe I have accurately captured Biden’s disgusting minstrel enunciation as he delivered it. His Bojangles conflation of antebellum slavery with a GOP recapture of Congress and the White House sent handlers scrambling to say his comments were taken out of context – the same excuse they’d used to provide cover for Obama in Roanoke – but that dog won’t hunt (an southern aphorism Biden probably doesn’t understand) because the video is all over the Internet. Instead of repudiating the “chains” remarks, Obama fobbed them off, saying, "The truth is that during the course of these campaigns, folks like to get obsessed with how something was phrased even if everybody personally understands that's not how it was meant." Hmm. I wonder if that excuse would work for Todd Akin’s rape comment?

How would an Italian audience have felt if Biden had suddenly began adding the letter “a” to word-endings to create a sense of oneness with the audience – Ima gonna tella ya somthin’ – or if speaking to a German audience, suppose his “w”s became “v”s as if he were one with them – Vell, der verd en der strassa ace nut guud. I think they’d be incensed with speaker’s feeble attempt to impersonate them and would consider it a put-down and an insult.

That’s the way Doug Wilder, former Governor of Virginia and grandson of slaves, saw it. He said the “chains” reference was gratuitous, an appeal to make the Romney allegation racial, which it wasn’t, and revelatory of Biden’s own deep-seated if not subconscious racism. Wilder concluded:

Biden separated himself from what he accused the [Romney] people of doing. As a matter of fact what he said is, they are going to do something to y'all, not to me, not us. So he was still involved with that separate America. And I'm sick and tired of being considered something other than an American… Slavery is nothing to joke about.

The off-the-cuff “back in chains” plantation imagery was not an ill-considered misspeaking. It was chosen to inflame the audience. I was raised in segregated Birmingham, Alabama with its “White” and “Colored” water fountains and toilets and “Whites Only” facilities. As a child, I didn’t “get” the purpose of segregation. So, I didn’t understand why this audience didn’t jump to their feet and boo Biden for making such a stupid remark. Did he or his audience really believe that the “chains” remark accurately describes race relations today, or are Biden and Obama trying to take us back to that time with their racially divisive rhetoric?

Obama and Harry Reid obsess over Romney’s tax returns, but I’ve heard no one accuse him of racism. George Romney, Mitt’s father, was at the forefront of the civil rights movement in the 1960s when I was a newly-minted college graduate. I became politically savvy at an early age, and the people I saw fighting equal rights for blacks were whites with names like Lester Maddox, Orville Faubus, Herman Talmadge, and George Wallace, all of whom had Democrat after their names. Mitt Romney’s civil rights record is unimpeachable. He may not get many black votes for President but he got a standing ovation after speaking to the recent NCAAP convention. Obama didn’t even show up. He sent Big Mouth Biden as his surrogate.

This administration seems to go out of its way to insult black audiences and black audiences seem not to be put off by the insults. For example, I recall then-Senator Hillary Clinton speaking at the black Canaan Baptist Church of Christ in Harlem in celebration of Martin Luther King Day as she began her campaign for President.

For the last five years, we’ve had no power at all. And that makes a big difference, because when you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation. And yew know what ah’m  talkin’ about.

Her fake southern dialect, the “we” reference (you mean the audience or politicians?), and the “plantation” analogy was the condescension of a wealthy white woman appealing to identify politics with an audience whose votes she needed … “And yew know what ah’m  talkin’ about.” Ugh!

Biden says Romney is going to put people in chains. Really? Let’s talk about how Obama’s policies have put current and future American society in chains. Let’s talk about the chains of regulation, most of them illegal since he by-passed Congress and enacted regulation by Executive Order.

In the first three years of the Obama administration, he enacted 106 new regulations whose cost was 500% of the Bush presidency’s first three years’ of new regulations. The annual cost of complying with Bush’s new policies was $8 billion versus $46 billion for complying with Obama’s policies. And that’s just what’s currently known about compliance cost. ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and Obama’s cabinet agencies can add to compliance cost with the sweep of a pen. The imperial power Obama has ceded to government agencies creates uncertainties that inhibit risk-taking, they delay or shelve business plans that could grow the economy and jobs, and they are a virtual black hole of added cost depending on the whims of an unelected bureaucrat.

A recent Gallup poll reported that 46% of small business owners are not hiring because of the uncertainties of new government regulations, and the hiring plans of 48% are frozen by the potential costs of ObamaCare – including its 21 new taxes.

John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market has been an outspoken critic of Obama’s policies. He recently had this to say:

In some cases, regulations have gone too far and it really makes it difficult for small businesses.  There’s too much bureaucracy and red tape; taxes on business are very high.  So we’re not creating the enabling conditions that allow businesses to get started

In Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, which was published just after Jobs’ death, Issacson reported:

[Jobs] described [to Obama] how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do that these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs

When he retired from Congress and his failed run for the presidency, George McGovern, the leading liberal in the Senate, tried his hand at business. He tried to start a bed and breakfast in Connecticut but government red tape and regulations ate seven years of his Senate savings, forcing him to go bust. He learned about being a business owner the hard way, which caused him to say:

If I had known more firsthand about the concerns and problems of American businesspeople while I was a U.S. senator and later a presidential nominee, that knowledge would have made me a better legislator and a more worthy aspirant to the White House.

Too bad the guy living in the White House now never held a real job that would have taught him the same lesson.

Chains? Let’s talk about the chains Obama euphemistically calls taxes – not taxes that are needed to raise government revenue but taxes that are guaranteed to produce less than expected revenue – taxes whose purpose is to punish success and allow the Maximum Leader to shovel his “fairness” horse hockey when half the workforce is already exempt from taxpaying.

“I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible,” Milton Friedman said in a 2003 interview. Wonder what the late Nobel Prize winning economist would think about the so-called $494 billion tax increase that now hangs like the sword of Damocles over the heads of 50% of the American workforce who pay taxes? This so-called Taxmageddon will fall in January when the Bush tax cuts expire.

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand,” Friedman said on another occasion. He knew government was good at only one thing – waste. Therefore the way to minimize the scope of government waste faute de mieux was to cut off the revenue spigot. The Federal Reserve has predicted that allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will throw the country back into a recession. Think Obama has any interest in avoiding the risk of that happening by ratcheting back his class warfare policies? I don’t. He would rather add more chains to the country’s job creators – those despicable one-percenters – while 13 million people languish without work … and are consequently not paying taxes.

Obama’s anti-business policies are another pile of chains around the neck of the economy. Remember those bad old days of George Bush’s 5.6% unemployment rate, which presidential wannabe John Kerry called “the worst economic record since the Hoover administration”? I wonder what the French-looking gentlemen thinks of Obama’s 8.3% unemployment, which is more like 11% if those who’ve quit looking for work are included in the count? Obama’s anti-business chains have managed to keep unemployment above 8% for 42 months – the longest in post-war history.

Nevertheless, Obama refused to allow the job-creating Keystone XL pipeline to be built, so he could pander to his “green” crowd, EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, continues her quest to be Obama’s champ-peen job-killer, even though the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit smacked her down for the sixth time this week for her illegal Cross-State Air Pollution Rule, Obama’s amateurish negotiations on free trade agreements moreover have killed innumerable jobs in a tip of the hat to unions, and recently Obama illegally eliminated the work requirement as a condition for receiving welfare assistance – a provision of the Clinton welfare reform legislation. We’ve yet to see the job-killing capacity of ObamaCare. Lots of chains there.

How about the chains on future generations of taxpayers – including those yet unborn – which Obama’s trillion dollar a year deficit spending has contributed to the $16 trillion national debt, which grows almost $4 billion per day,  has grown to  and the interest that must be paid on it? Obama’s 2010 budget projected government debt would fall to 67% of GDP this year, but the CBO says it will rise to 70% of GDP instead. Even more frightening is the ever-important debt to tax revenue ratio which has leapt from 165% the year Obama moved into the White House to 262% this year according to the IMF. Among developed economies only Ireland and Spain have worst ratios.

Talk about “plantations” and “chains” – what would you call the fact that 100 million people … more people than ever before … depend on federal government for food, housing, student aid, income assistance, and other forms of assistance. Can that still be considered a democracy?

It’s disgraceful that government policies have caused one in five families to be recipients of food stamps. We’ve become Food Stamp Nation under Obama in which half the food stamp aid goes to families with children who have received aid for almost nine years. Think of the increasing dependency of people on government. which Since government has no money itself, it must take it from those who work. Well, let me restate that. It must take it from the half of the workforce who pay federal taxes.

The food stamp program was designed to be a “hand up” to independency. Instead, it has become a handout to greater dependency. The number of able-bodied adults without children on food stamps has doubled, increasing from 1.7 million people in 2009 to 3.9 million in 2010 and costing taxpayers an extra $4 billion per year. Where is this leading future generations, an increasing percentage of whom don’t know what it is like to work full time?

“They gawn' put y'all back in chains”? With its regulations, taxes, deficit spending, anti-business policies, and increased government dependency program, the failed socialism programs of the Obama administration have done more to enslave American society and limit its freedom than any previous administration. I don’t get it.

During the Obama Administration Americans lost 40% of their wealth. That puts them back where they were in 1992. Why aren’t people demonstrating their outrage?

When he debated the hapless and out-matched Jimmy Carter in 1980, Ronald Reagan delivered the knockout punch with this summation. We usually remember only the first question. Read them all.

Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we're as strong as we were four years ago? And if you answer all of those questions 'yes', why then, I think your choice is very obvious as to whom you will vote for. If you don't agree, if you don't think that this course that we've been on for the last four years is what you would like to see us follow for the next four, then I could suggest another choice that you have.

How would you answer? Your family? Friends? There are about 70 days to decide if you haven’t.

Vote November 6. Vote Republican or Democrat – for President and Congress – but vote. A failure to vote is a half vote for each candidate.

How Will You Measure Your Life?

It’s a question that more than philosophers should be asking, and Clayton Christensen’s new book confronts it in an atypical manner. After reading his brief tome, whose title is the question, I immediately bought copies for each of my adult children and additionally decided its ideas merited comment in this week’s blog.

Christensen comes out of my professional field, i.e. the field of business and technology. I first learned of him when I read his book, The Innovator’s Solution, about eight years ago. I was so intrigued with the concept of “disruptive technology,” which is what he called it, that I read the prequel, The Innovator’s Dilemma, and the sequel, What’s Next?

Leaving my office one day this past spring, I heard Christensen being interviewed by Hugh Hewitt about his newest book, How Will You Measure Your Life? So, in deference to the Christensen “brand,” I bought and read it one evening.

Christensen begins by relating the experience of his Harvard Business School reunions. (I should mention that Harvard University, like me, does not believe business is an area of study for undergraduates; its well-known curriculum awards only Master degrees and doctorates.) Every five years, a reunion would reunite the members of a graduating class, and like most school reunions, the first ones are the best attended. Those are the years during which graduates are early in their careers, learning their trade, making their mark in companies, marrying, and having children.

But as years passed, later reunions saw fewer of Christensen’s aging classmates. Many stopped coming, embarrassed by the dissimilar trajectories of their professional and personal lives. Among those who continued to attend were a striking number with unhappy personal lives despite enviable success in their professional lives. Some attended with a second or third spouse. One hadn’t spoken to his children in three years and lived on the opposite coast from them. A classmate had been caught up in an insider trading scandal that became the subject of the book, Den of Thieves. Another was in jail for an illicit sexual affair with a teenager who had worked on his political campaign. He was married and had three children. Still another, perhaps the most notorious of Christensen’s classmates, Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO of Enron, is serving time in a federal prison for cooking his company’s books, and had suffered the loss of his youngest child, 20-year old John Skilling, who took his life in an overdose after breaking up with a girlfriend.

Skilling, Christensen recalled, was a good man. He was smart, worked hard, and loved his family. He had been the youngest partner at McKinsey, the well-known business consulting firm, and Skilling had been paid $100 million as CEO of Enron. Yet he had divorced and remarried, engaged in illegal activity, and watched his life unravel. Something had sent him off in a different direction than the man Christensen knew.

Why, Christensen asked? People don’t leave school intent on engaging in activity that will result in divorce, estrangement from their children, or being sent to jail. Yet something happened in the choices some of his classmates made that sent their lives veering off in unintended but nevertheless self-determined directions.

For sure, unexpected encounters with “things that go bump in the night” happen in all of our lives, and Christensen is no exception. A diabetic most of his life, he suffered in the span of three years a heart attack, follicular lymphoma – the type of cancer that killed his father – and a stroke that resulted in expressive aphasia, causing him to have to relearn how to speak. Despite chance collisions with unplanned and often unhappy events, our lives are nevertheless forged by our choices. As the ghost of Jacob Marley related his life to Scrooge in Dickens’ tale of Christmas, "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it,” Marley said. 

Christensen, now a professor at Harvard Business School, has spent the last day of class for many semesters by asking students to turn the theories they had been studying during their academic careers on themselves and predict what outcomes will occur if their own lives were the object of study. A good theory, after all, is characterized by its ability to predict. If theories predict likely business outcomes (businesses don’t really exhibit behavior; they exhibit the collective behavior of their managers) then wouldn’t those same theories predict the outcomes of behaviors in individual personal lives?

The students were asked to apply their knowledge to answer three questions. First, would their theories predict if they would be happy in their careers? Second, would their theories determine if their relationships with their spouse and family would become an enduring source of happiness? And third, can their theories predict with certainty that they would avoid jail or prison time? The last question reflected Christensen’s own experience with members of his graduation class.

In 2010, Christensen was asked to speak to not just his own class but to the entire graduating body. He was to summarize what he and his students had learned from focusing their business theories on themselves. Standing on the podium, made bald by his chemotherapy treatments, Christensen spoke about the things that were most important in life – not just when faced with life-threatening events as he was that day – but day after day during which time life is being forged “link by link, yard by yard” as Marley’s ghost had described. He spoke of life’s purpose, of setting boundaries on behavior, and of money versus family. The lecture has become one of the most popular published by Harvard.

In the audience that day was James Allworth, a student of Christensen’s, and Karen Dillon, the editor of the Harvard Business Review. Both were moved by Christensen’s comments though they came from different generations and perspectives of life. He later asked them to help him make his views available to a broader audience, and the book, How Will You Measure Your Life, is the result of their collective endeavor made even more difficult by Christensen’s later speech-impairing stroke.

I’m not going to summarize the book. Instead, I will give you a flavor of it in the remaining paragraphs of this blog so you can read it for yourself if its message appeals to you.

So let’s get started.

Pick up almost any survey of work satisfaction and it’s surprising how many people are engaged in jobs that aren’t fulfilling to them. The youthful hope to do something that would change the world – or the little part of it in which they labored – remained unrequited for many. If the truth be known, work for a majority of people becomes something they do to allow them to do what they really want to do. Sometime in the early years of their work careers many people make compromises that they intend to be temporary – accepting less than the type of work they prefer because its income, for example, would allow repayment of student loans. Once the loans were repaid, they intended to take a job doing the work they really love – or so they said. Or people may accept jobs because the income allows them to marry and buy a big house, or to get the kids in the best schools, or (fill in the blank for yourself.) But one day they wake up and find the maintenance of their current life style won’t allow them to pursue the work they love without major financial sacrifices. They find themselves trapped and the road back to their dreams grows harder and harder. And as the years go by and their dreams fade, they convince themselves that what they hoped to do as their life’s calling was the unrealistic expectation of their younger selves when they didn’t know how the real world operated.

What a tragedy! Most of us will work for 45 years, if not more, spending a third of every day during those years engaged in activity that for too many does not lift the spirit. “Do a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life,” the saying goes. Yet many will never find the work they love. And as a consequence they will look forward to retirement as a prisoner looks forward to the day when his sentence has been served.

How does this happen? Could the students of Professor Christensen apply their theoretical knowledge to predict whether they would find fulfilling and well-spent careers?

The answer can be found in the work of the late psychologist Frederick Herzberg, which was standard fare for understanding motivation when I was a graduate student. Job satisfaction is commonly believed to lie on a continuum which ranges from delight to misery. In fact, Herzburg’s research brought him to understand that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not on the same continuum but rather on different ones. Thus, he alternately called his theory the Two Factor Theory or Motivation-Hygiene Theory.

This is how Herzburg’s theory works.

If we were to observe the way the attributes of work influence our job satisfaction, we would eventually conclude that two factors were in play – one group of influences we could call satisfiers or motivators and another group we could call dissatisfiers or hygiene factors. Herzberg preferred avoiding the use of the term “demotivators” because it implied it was the opposite of “motivation” which it isn’t. In the sense that the word is used by Herzberg, “hygiene” has nothing to do with personal cleanliness. It is a description of the work environment – both the physical environment and psychological/emotional environment in which we work.

The reason that Herzberg used the term “hygiene” factors was that a workplace can be “cleaned up” by a company’s managers in the sense that no longer are there present any dissatisfiers like stupid work rules, low pay, insensitive management practices, or impossible performance expectations, to name a few. But it is important to understand that a “hygienic” workplace does not cause motivated work to occur. In other words, because motivators and hygiene factors are two different types of influencers, the removal of dissatisfiers does not cause satisfaction and motivation to magically appear. One set – dissatisfying hygiene factors – must be removed by managers. Another set – motivators – must be consciously put in their place by managers.

Common hygiene factors are pay, status, rank and its trappings, the workplace environment, job security, and the quality of supervision – things that can make you unhappy but whose absence are incapable of producing lasting happiness. On the other hand, motivators are attributes of the work itself – e.g. how challenging is the work, recognition received for doing it, opportunities it creates to allow one to grow as a person, and the preparation for additional responsibility the work provides. These are things that enrich the work we do.

A common delusion is that pay is a motivator or incentive. It is not. Mismanaged pay practices will cause unhappiness and fair pay practices will eliminate unhappiness. But money cannot cause a person to be happy in a bad job. Pay is perhaps the most important hygiene factor in that a pay raise will produce a temporary lift, but I can assure you that a person in an uninspiring job will feel just as deprived making $100,000 annually as she once felt when making $75,000.

The reason that Christensen and all of us see people who are unhappy in their work lives is that people often take jobs or make career decisions based on hygiene factors rather than motivation factors. This was the point Christensen was trying to get his students to understand by applying Herzberg’s theory to themselves. The theory doesn’t say that hygiene factors are unimportant. But a job that reeks in hygiene factors and no motivators will be a bad job to perform.

A case in point. When I was in graduate school, I recall a story one of my professors told our class to which I’ve only found one online reference as I write this blog. I believe I have the essential facts correct. During the Great Depression a psychology researcher hired a group of men to dig a hole. Upon completing it, they were told to fill it up. After that they were told to dig out the hole again and then again told to fill it up. Despite being fairly paid in desperate economic times, the men quit after three days exasperated at the meaningless of the work. Pay is a hygiene factor. Purpose is a motivator.

I recall when I was a young engineer the things that were most attractive to me were pay, title, the size and location of my offices (windows were always a key status symbol), if I had (versus shared) a secretary, even the number of buttons on my phone. These were all highly visible hygiene factors. I doubt that in my 20s and perhaps early 30s I could have been persuaded to stop chasing hygiene factors and look instead for meaningful work – until I ran headlong into a couple of jobs that paid well and had lots of status symbols, but I hated the work and eventually quit. Only by personal experience did I learn, as the researcher and the hole diggers proved, nothing can compensate for having to perform a bad job.

Why do people join the armed services, subject themselves to unending training, put themselves in harm’s way – all for relatively little pay and often not a lot of appreciation from the countrymen they are protecting? Why do people join aid organizations that deliver help to corners of the world which are hostile and uncooperative? Why work in a non-profit organization which pays little, or teach children whose parents often won’t attend meetings for the benefit of their children and whose budgets often require teachers to buy school room supplies and teaching aids out of their meager paycheck? The answer is passion. Passion! These people don’t have bad jobs. They have hard jobs, jobs done under difficult and challenging circumstances, jobs that are missing a considerable number of hygiene factors, but they are good jobs for those that hold them and are dedicated to do the jobs well.

We often chase pay and prestige in the jobs we are seduced to take, thinking that lifestyle will make us happy because it will make the world think well of us – perhaps even envy us. We later learn that we’ve made the wrong choice when we start counting the time remaining until we can retire and do what we want. How much more important it is to spend life doing work we love regardless of its pay and ignoring what the world thinks of it. “Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness,” the Scot essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote 170 years ago. Sage advice. Too often ignored.

Christensen continues his book with additional examples of how business theories work in private life. He presents the theories of Professor Henry Mintzberg – devoted to deliberate versus emergent business strategies – showing how they apply equally well for managing the twists and turns of one’s career strategy. Christensen introduces the theories of capital investment and explains the theoretical foundation for outsourcing work in order to lead his students to an understanding of the second question he asked them: how to be assured of enduring family intimacy. And the third question – how to stay out of jail – can be answered by fully understanding the theory of marginal thinking, which comes from microeconomics, and its limitations.

The associations of academic theory to life’s outcomes are not contrived. A good theory does indeed predict, as you will see if you decide to read the book How Will You Measure Your Life?

This is a book I wish I’d read at a much younger age. More important, I hope I would have been capable of understanding it.

“If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that”

When Obama is speechifying on the campaign stump before an usually receptive crowd, he often goes off script and his words reveal his true self. That happened a couple of weeks ago when he was stumping before a gushing crowd of adorers in Roanoke, Virginia – a must win state for Obama. His comments subsequently created a rage and backlash from entrepreneurs and small business owners around the country whom he let know deserved no credit for their business accomplishments. The government deserves the credit:

… look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

Let me deal with the Internet lie straightaway – in fact, I may blog on “the government invented the Internet” horse hockey in the future and include Al Gore’s claim to have helped bring it into existence.

Gordon Crovitz wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal soon after Obama’s “government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off [it]” hogwash. The Crovitz editorial triggered teeth-gnashing among the “yes but” liberal bloggers, articles, and apologists with transparent government sympathies. To them and others who believe that a benevolent and enterprising government ever created anything so others could make money off of it, my offer a couple of blogs ago to sell them the Golden Gate Bridge still stands. My question for them is this: where would government get the capital for such an undertaking since the government possesses no money of its own? Private citizens, of course. Moreover, why and how would government find the economic motivation and managerial ability to create such a commercially successful project as the Internet? This is the same government that can’t run a postal service or Amtrak profitably! This is the same government that invested a trillion dollars of the people’s money in Solyndra, Beacon Power, Spectra Watt, Brightsource, Eastern Energy, Raser Technologies, and an unending list of snake oil schemes, all of which are bankrupt.

The tree of technology has many branches. Technology develops – indeed morphs – by borrowing the fruits of lower branches and using them to make something quite different than where the lower branch was headed. Henry Ford, for example, combined well proven technologies – the meat packing industry (disassembly), the canning industry (continuous flow production), cereals and granaries (conveyors and hoppers), and the machine tools industry (interchangeable parts) – to create the automobile and its continuous flow manufacturing process. That Ford had no government help doing this is notable. Moreover, by his own admission, he invented none of these technologies. Yet only a fool would deny that Ford’s borrowing from the technology tree and his reconfiguration of existing technologies into a new thing was not an “invention.”

That’s the way technology and business breakthroughs develop. If the meat packing or canning industry were to claim that they invented the auto and assembly line, it would be laughable. In like manner, the ARPANET and modern Internet are distant cousins, but it’s ludicrous to claim – as the government apologists do – that the ARPANET became the Internet and, therefore, since the government financed the development of ARPANET (for a totally different reason and with taxpayer money to boot) that the government should be credited as the creator of the Internet.

Continuing, it is outrageous for Obama to claim that entrepreneurial achievements pale because “somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that.” Uh, say again? The “somebody” who invested in roads and bridges would be individual and business taxpayers last time I checked. The builders of the roads and bridges would be private designers and contractors. The rationale for building roads and bridges would be the over-regulated, over-taxed commercial activity created by the sweat and risk-taking of private businesses, last time I checked. Absent private demand for infrastructure, you’d have another Amtrak government boondoggle – a train that no one uses and whose continued losses are foisted on taxpayers.

Obama’s socialist worldview, which slipped out in the Roanoke speech, comes from his own experience. Obama naturally thinks others are the fount of every blessing because that’s the way it was in his life. Without well-heeled, influential, and often white sponsors to shepherd him into privileged opportunities, make doors open, arrange influencers to throw their connections behind him, where would he be? He has never held a real job. He has never accomplished anything of particular merit. He’s not even managed anything in government such as a city mayor or state governor must do. All of his life, Obama has been a taker, not a maker. All of his accomplishments – including fundraising and campaign management – were done by others. Even as President, he didn’t manage his own political agenda. ObamaCare was delegated to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and in effect Obama said, “Let me know when it’s done and I’ll sign it.” A guy for whom all the doors are opened and the heavy lifting is done by others would obviously think that that’s the way it is in business formation – all of the important work is done by others including the federal government.

Of course, realizing how politically and utterly stupid Obama’s Roanoke comments were, his handlers went into full damage control mode, telling the press that the outrage sparked by his remarks was due to “out of context” reporting by the media. No it wasn’t. The text of the speech is posted by the White House Press Secretary’s Office online. Inconveniently, the speech video is also online dismissing any argument that the text of the speech said one thing and the actual speech said another.

It’s plain to see in the video that from the outset, the adoring crowd and the gushing periodic interruptions of “Four more years” became the Siren’s Song that lured Obama into revealing the real deal Obama – the Obama without the fraudulent façade of his public persona replete with polished, teleprompter-fed rhetoric. Ah! Would that Obama had used beeswax as Odysseus and his fellow seafarers were encouraged to do, for he revealed that he really does believe business creators are undeserving of the success of their accomplishments – that lots of smart people and lots of hard working people labored out of sight, unrecognized for their contributions, and were exploited by the guy who gets the glory – Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Charles Schwab … you name them – because that’s the way Obama’s world works.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’ve never met a successful entrepreneur who believed that his success was a solitary accomplishment. Not only did they know that their success was helped by others, but also they made sure to reward the helping hands, in some cases making the key contributors very wealthy. But without Steve Jobs there would be no Apple, I don’t care how many smart, hard working people might have been employed there. Without Bill Gates, there would not have been a Microsoft despite the contributions of others. Without Fred Smith there would have been no Federal Express and who knows where American business would be today if his “Absolutely, Positively, Overnight” had not replaced the glacially incompetent performance of the postal service.

Curiously, Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor of Cherokee Nation fame, whose bush league senatorial campaign to oust Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) from Teddy Kennedy’s old seat is funnier to watch than old Laurel and Hardy movies, personifies the same anti-business instincts of Obama. A speech she delivered last September sounds as if Obama plagiarized it. Listen to her:

You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.

“The rest of us?” You mean there is one group that uses the roads, the educated workforce, the police and fire protection – the apparent “takers” – and then there’s “the rest of us” – the “makers” – who paid for these munificent blessings? Pray tell, Professor Full of Gas – or whatever you call yourself when imitating a real Cherokee – who paid for roads, education, and public safety? Uh? A little louder Full of Gas, I can’t hear you. Ah, the taxpayer, you say. Well, that eliminates half of the workforce because they pay no taxes. So “the rest of us” would be the other half, i.e. private businesses and the workforce they created – society’s real makers – wouldn’t you agree? In fact, half of “the rest of us” would include the 400 people who pay 50% of all taxes paid. Why, I could put 400 people in my office building, Gas, and still have room to spare.

Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.

I don’t think entrepreneurs need risible investment advice from Elizabeth Warren, who’s never created a single job or created wealth for others, to tell them to “pay forward for the next kid.”

The entrepreneurs I know feel an enormous debt to society and devote their wealth and expertise to generous giving for a good part of their lifetimes. Andrew Carnegie, who sold his steel business to J.P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel Company and became the richest man in the world as a consequence, gave most of it away before he died. In 1889, he wrote The Gospel of Wealth, whose homilies advocated that all personal wealth beyond what was needed to care for one's family should be regarded as a trust fund administered for the benefit of the community.

When I hear Obama, Warren, and people of that ilk talking about achievement, private enterprise, the economics of equitable distribution – subjects that are light years outside of their expertise – I’m reminded of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s observation of a dog walking on his hind legs – it’s not done well and it’s surprising that it’s done at all.

President Ronald Reagan got it right when he said in a June 1983 speech to the National Federation of Independent Business

The character and conscience of small business built this nation. … They are the heroes of economic life and those who begrudge them their rewards demonstrate a failure to understand their role and their promise. Well wouldn’t it be nice to hear a little more about the forgotten heroes of America? Those who create most of our new jobs like the owners of stores down the street, the faithful who support our churches, synagogues, schools and communities. The brave men and women everywhere who produce our goods, feed a hungry world, and keep our families warm while they invest in the future to build a better America. That’s where miracles are made. Not in Washington DC.

Contrast Reagan’s view with Obama’s as shown in the farcical Life of Julia appearing on his election campaign website. Julia’s partner in life is not a husband, although she does decide to have a child; her partner is the federal government à la Barack Obama. The all-wise, ever-nurturing, deep-pocketed avuncular government cares for Julia from cradle to grave. Why, it’s just like “Whistle up a Rainbow”! Whenever you’re in need just clap your hands and the government Genie is there to help. This is the way Obama sees life – the Life of Julia, a production co-starring government and people incapable of taking charge of their own lives.

There’s no room in that picture for Howard Schultz, who took a commodity – coffee – and turned it into Starbucks, a multi-billion dollar business. There’s no room for András Gróf, a Hungarian Jew who survived Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the Soviet Red Army invasion of his homeland, the Hungarian uprising, and who came to the US at age 20 with essentially no money in his pockets and unable to speak English. He taught himself English, maneuvered his way through three college degrees, including a Ph.D., anglicized his name to Andrew “Andy” Grove, and joined Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore as the third employee of a start-up company that became Intel, which he would guide as CEO through its most productive years. About 90% of the computers made today run on Intel microprocessors.

In Obama’s view of the world there could never be a Clarence Birdseye who, at the beginning of the 20th century, was taught by the indigenous Inuit of Labrador and Newfoundland to ice fish in temperatures 40 degrees below zero. He noticed when he caught fish, they froze immediately in the frigid air and when they were defrosted, sometimes much later, they were as fresh as the moment they were caught. With $7 in capital he developed the process of flash-freezing, went bankrupt, and started over building a second company. Distribution was a problem because grocers had no way to hold frozen food, so Birdseye had to invent the entire distribution chain, including the refrigerated rail cars and retail frozen food display cases in order to have a successful venture. Clarence Birdseye pioneered the frozen food we eat today and his company is still with us as the Birds Eye Foods division of General Food Corporation.

People like Birdseye, Grove, Moore, Noyce, Schultz, Jobs, Gates, Schwab, Fred Smith – people who changed the quality of American life and with it the world – have no place in Obama’s world or speeches because they weren’t co-productions of government. In contrast theirs are stories of failure and determination, under-capitalization, and hard-earned success, often after combatting interference by incompetent government.

To wit:

As he waxed eloquent in his Roanoke speech, Obama claimed government credit for building the Golden Gate Bridge. He obviously hasn’t read Kevin Star’s book, Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge. Not only did the federal government not build the bridge as Obama claimed but it did everything to prevent its building for almost a decade. It’s a tale that would make Kafka envious.

Most local San Franciscans wanted a bridge but the property for its logical end points was owned by the government – more specifically, the Department of War – which wouldn’t sell. Political pressure eventually forced the sale, but the government refused to sell to a private contractor. The only acceptable buyer would be a state commission. Federal unions held up the project even longer as they tried to elbow their way to the table for a cut of the action. The advent of the Great Depression of 1929 finally called a halt to government silliness as bond financing dried up and doomed the project. Or so it seemed. Enter Amadeo Peter Giannini, Chairman and President of the Bank of America, who made private capital available to build the bridge without union labor, which contributed to bringing it in under budget. Not a dime of government money was involved. Not an hour of government participation occurred. The Golden Gate Bridge was a production of private enterprise.

Now you know the rest of the story.

The novelist and philosopher, Ayn Rand, was strongly individualistic. She is best known for her works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. In a lecture given in late 1961 she observed:

Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

Vote November 6. And send this blog link to your friends asking them to do likewise.

Who Needs Congress?

According to the New York Times, sometime last fall Obama decided to use presidential power more aggressively – even unconstitutionally – to overcome what he perceived to be the infirmities of a gridlocked Congress. No matter that during the first two years of his kingly reign he had bullet-proof majorities in both houses of Congress when he frittered away a golden window of opportunity to set the country on a sound economic path. Instead he consumed two years and political capital making sausage in an ill-starred effort to hijack the largest and most sophisticated healthcare system in the world – a project that earned him few kudos and which only barely survived constitutionality by Alice in Wonderland judicial logic.

Projecting a “man on the move” image in a catchy slogan, Obama decided that he would push the presidential power envelope for the last two years of his reign under the aegis of “We Can’t Wait.” Every time Congress would divert from his timetable to engage in posturing for their constituency or devote energy to ideological repartee, Obama would begin looking for ways to do an end run in order to comport with his new “man of action” persona. No matter that his by-passing Congress caused the Framers of the Constitution to spin in their graves when he did violence to the document that has guided American governance for almost 225 years. Obama warned, “If Congress refuses to act, I’ve said that I’ll continue to do everything in my power to act without them” – a power conspicuously unstated in the Constitution.

I wrote at length in an earlier blog about Obama’s constitutional abuses, but it’s worth restating that the genius of the Founders’ design of divided government was to make it difficult to get things done. Therefore, citizens and politicians who wring their hands and bemoan the “gridlock” in Washington are obviously ignorant that gridlock was a design feature in order to entangle in debate the abuses the Founders knew future Congresses and Presidents would heap upon the backs of citizens.

Nevertheless wrapping himself in the mantle of the “man of the people,” Obama pronounced with Solonic virtue:

Without a doubt, the most urgent challenge that we face right now is getting our economy to grow faster and to create more jobs…. we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will.

Yet clueless about how jobs are created and how an economy grows, he pushed a Socialist big-government command and control agenda for Congress to enact that even members of his own caucus scoffed at. Without term limits, Congress is loath to jeopardize its reelection chances by moving to the left of the people as the President would have them do – a lesson Congress recently learned by the disappearance of Pelosi’s Kool-Aid drinkers in the 2010 election. There was no way for Obama to get the money needed to finance his highway-schools jobs bill without Congress, so that idea thankfully went nowhere.

He was more successful by-passing Congress in getting his cronies in key government positions to help enact elements of his radical agenda. The first step was to neutralize the constitutional “advise and consent” role of the Senate by simply calling some key positions “czars,” allowing their appointment without a Senate confirmation process.

As for those appointees who couldn’t forego Senate confirmation and who got stalled in the process, Presidents have been known to wait until Congress goes on a break, during which he appoints their guy in a recess appointment. In one case, Obama didn’t even give Congress a chance to stall his nominee. He picked Donald Berwick and gave him a recess appointment to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services even as Congress was preparing to hear his confirmation justification. Berwick was among the most controversial candidates Obama could have put forward, and when he learned the congressional dossier was incriminating, Obama decided a “dead of night” recess appointment was the only way Berwick would become Administrator, albeit temporarily.

But Obama doesn’t always wait for the Senate to leave town in order to make a recess appointment. Last winter, Republicans held brief but legitimate Senate sessions for the express purpose of preventing His Majesty from making recess appointments. He made them anyway. Obama appointed Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Board and three others to the National Labor Relations Board. He didn’t do it legally; but given his status as Maximum Leader, he simply declared the Senate pro forma sessions a Republican sham and handed down his verdict that the Senate was not in session. Obama had spoken.

Anyone with an IQ above room temperature should understand that independent bodies in divided government set their own rules of procedure and no other independent body may violate them. Harry Reid developed pro forma sessions to an art form during the administration of Bush 43 to prevent him from circumventing confirmation hearings to make recess appointments. However, Reid was remarkably silent when Obama ridiculed the tactic and brushed aside the rules of the chamber that Reid is in charge of as the Democrat Majority Leader. You’d think Reid would take umbrage with Obama’s interference. By trivializing Senate rules, Obama trivialized Senate relevance and Senate integrity, not to mention Reid himself – something the slow-witted Reid never comprehended.

In announcing the recess appointment of Cordray and the three NLRB members, Obama threw down the gauntlet at the feet of Congress and standing under a “We Can’t Wait” banner, officious declared,

… when Congress refuses to act and – as a result – hurts our economy and puts people at risk, I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them. [Where is that in the Constitution?] I’ve got an obligation to act on behalf of the American people. And I’m not going to stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people that we were elected to serve. [Where is that in the Constitution?] Not with so much at stake, not at this make-or-break moment for middle-class Americans. We’re not going to let that happen. I refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer. [Where is that in the Constitution?]

The 55 men who met in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to design our government required even the most mundane appointments of the President to have the approval of the Senate. The purpose was to assure the President didn’t have a free hand to put his cronies in power without oversight. If a President couldn’t get the Senate to approve his nominee, even a qualified nominee, he simply was not appointed and the President submitted another candidate. No trickery to by-pass the will of the Senate was employed in the early days of the Republic. Here’s why.

Article II, Section 2, paragraph 3 of the Constitution says:

The President shall have power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

In the days before cell phones and email, it was essential for the President to fill offices that became vacant in order to keep the offices of the government running. But pay close attention to what the Constitution says “… vacancies that may happen DURING THE RECESS …” If the vacancy occurred during congressional recess, there was no practical way to call the Senate back into session, many of whom were on their farms and would have to spend weeks or months of travel returning to Washington. So the Constitution provided for temporary appointments that expired at the end of the session, restoring the Senate’s authority to approve the appointment.

The vacancy filled by Berwick and Obama’s four other people did not occur during recess. They occurred before recess and Obama waited until the Senate was out of town, in the case of Berwick. However, the Senate was never out of town, according to its rules, when Obama recessed Cordray and others, but he appointed them anyway – illegally.

Obama has ignored the constitutional role of Congress in other ways.

Without the authorization of Congress, he increased the regulation of greenhouse emissions when no provision of the law authorized him to do so. He unilaterally waived the No Child Left Behind Law for two dozen states because he grew tired of waiting for Congress to revise the law’s requirements. Another dozen states have pending waivers.

As discussed in last week’s blog, Obama unilaterally enacted the provisions of the DREAM bill because Congress had failed to pass it into law. In effect, Obama said “I’m going to act as if the bill became law and act accordingly.” He is both President and Congress.

In February 2011, Obama issued an Executive Order instructing the DOJ to suspend enforcement of the Defense of Marriage Act. It is federal law and bars recognition of same-sex marriages on constitutional grounds. He once advocated DOMA, but when polling showed his support was working against him, his thinking “evolved” [his term] into opposition to DOMA and he unilaterally subverted the will of Congress.

Earlier this month Obama illegally waived the work requirement of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families legislation which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. Absent the work requirement, welfare rolls predictably began to swell. Already there are a record number of American receiving food stamps.

Throughout his presidency, Obama has shown disdain toward the constitutional restraints on his inclination to act as a monarch, not an elected head of a republican government. He wants to limit our salt and fat intake, dictate our medical treatments, and outlaw incandescent light bulbs to manage our energy consumption, and require school children to get a minimum amount of physical activity. His meddling in individual choice is what makes him such a dangerous threat to individual liberty. Earlier this year, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) delivered a series of floor speeches accusing Obama of acting “more and more like a king that the Constitution was designed to replace” and implored colleagues of both parties to push back against his “power grabs.” Have you seen anything to suggest our elected congressional members took any of Grassley’s comments to heart? I haven’t.

Nowhere has Obama’s imperial presidency showed its colors so completely than in its interference in state attempts to purge voter rolls of illegal voters. You’d think that Democrats would be as concerned as Republicans to have voter rolls accurate. Not so in the swing states where Latinos make a sizable block of voters, some illegally – Florida (15%), Texas (20%), Arizona (16%), Colorado (13%), California (18%), Nevada (15%). and New Mexico (41%).

With Florida Governor Scott working to clean up his rolls – along with Governors of other states – Attorney General Holder asked the Senate Judiciary Committee, “Do we want to be the first generation to restrict the ability of American citizens to vote? Huh? Cleaning up voter rolls is restricting American citizens from voting. Holder went on, “We have a bad history in that regard . . .”

Well then let’s start having a good history in that regard – like purging illegals from the rolls.

By national law (aka Motor Voter Law) Governor Scott is required to, “systematically remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters. This is for purposes of “ensur[ing] that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained.” It doesn’t get any plainer than that, does it?

Yet the federal government is growing increasingly bolder in interfering with state elections that don’t go “their” way – like the 2000 debacle in Palm Beach County Florida, land of “hanging chads,” where poll officials claimed voters planned to vote for Candidate X but the ballot looked like they were voting for Candidate Y and the voters got so confused they didn’t vote for either guy. What followed were armies of fools peering through magnifying glasses at dimpled chads attempting to augur the will of allegedly confused voters so the poll captains could cast the vote for the candidate with the deepest dimple. Federal interference in the Florida 2000 election became the butt of Saturday Night Live jokes, making the residents of Palm Beach County appear incapable of following the instructions of a “paint by the numbers” assignment.

Notwithstanding Eric Holder’s inane comments of restricting voter rights, when Florida voting officials compared voter lists with the Social Security Death Index (you go to jail if you continue to receive Social Security checks after the payee is dead) guess what? They found that 51,308 registered voters had inconveniently died but were registered to vote. Wonder how many kept voting? Can you still vote in “life after death”?

Foolishly thinking the federal government might have an interest in helping clean up illegal voting, Florida asked Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security for a copy of its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) national citizenship database. Everyone knows Janet Napolitano wants to do the right thing, right? Yeah, sure. Homeland Security dragged its feet in Florida’s request, as well as requests from Colorado, Michigan, and North Carolina. Ken Detzner the Secretary of State for Florida has nine months of emails that prove conclusively the Obama’s DHS has no intention of providing information that would purge criminals and illegals from voter rolls. Why? You guess.

So Detzner said, “Hey, why don’t we compare drivers’ license rolls to voter rolls – it’s not an optimum solution, but what the heck, drivers’ licenses contain citizenship information, so let’s see what it reveals.” Lo and behold, a side by side match showed 182,000 illegal were registered voters. That’s what Janet Napolitano and Obama were hiding.

To be fair, some of the people who were illegal when they got licenses, obtained legal status afterward. So let’s cull those out. SAVE could have made this easier, but Napolitano wasn’t into helping states purge voter rolls. Without the help of SAVE, this was a big job, so a statistically-significant sample of 2,600 random names were drawn from the 186,000 possible aliens and criminals who were on the voter rolls of Florida. The sample showed 500 (19%) had become naturalized, 104 (4%) were alien illegal voters of whom 56 (2%) had feloniously voted. If this sample was extrapolated to the universe of 186,000 then 7,280 were illegally registered and 3,920 voted illegally – which is a felony.

But 3,920 illegal votes aren’t that many, some would argue. Well, maybe not in Chicago, but one illegal vote is one too many outside of Obama’s home town. Consider once again a repeat of the charade of the 2000 Florida election which was so close that for days the news photos showed bug-eyed poll judges staring through magnifying glasses looking for the slightest evidence that Palm Beach County residents got confused when candidate names and lines pointing to his punch holes didn’t line up within one angstrom unit. Bush won by 537 votes. (Subsequent vote counts showed a wider margin.) But given an election as close at that one, should we be concerned about 3,920 illegal votes? I think so.

Instead of helping Florida and the other states clean up their election rolls, Obama unleashed his attack dog, Eric Holder, to sue the states to prevent their compliance with federal election laws. Obama said Florida’s statewide voter roll purge violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act, even though only five of Florida’s 67 counties are affected by the 1965 Act. Detzner explained: “As for the role of the supervisors of elections in Florida’s five covered counties, they are simply administering a law that the Department of Justice has duly pre-cleared. Darn those facts! They’re always getting in the way of politics.

So as its next trick, Holder said Florida can’t clean its voter roll within 90 days of a federal election, which excludes clearing rolls within 90 days of the August 14 congressional primary. Let’s see … the November 6 election is within 90 days of the August 14 primary, which is within 90 days of July 4, which comes within 90 days of Valentine’s Day, which is within 90 days of Christmas. I got it! No voter roll cleanup is possible since The Flood. Noah, did you get that?

This led Secretary of State Detzner to write to DOJ:

The practice DOJ now appears to be endorsing is as follows: the federal Department of Homeland Security may, for months, violate federal law and deny Florida and other states access to the SAVE database so that the federal Department of Justice may then assert that the resulting delays in a state’s election-integrity efforts violate the time periods established in another federal law.

Immigration sideshows recently launched by Obama are intended to help Obama, not immigrants. What Obama really wants from you Spanish-speakers is your vote, not your well-being.

The sooner you wake up and realize that, the sooner you and all of us can tell the candidates for President, Congress, or dog-catcher that we are citizens, not votes, and they’d best begin treating us as citizens or start looking for a real job – one that requires work, not periodically showing up for a sound bite or photo op.