Political Leadership—Principles or Positions on Issues?

We have politicians promising all kinds of government solutions, programs, and controls of almost everything imaginable: our health, our income, our education, our travel, our security, our energy usage, our consumption of all kinds of things. The presidential candidates’ Christmas message is to portray themselves as Santa Claus, the source of gifts to citizens—health care, etc. And yet some still lament the lack of creative leadership, lack of fresh new proposals, lack of new ideas from our presidential candidates as if all the things government is already trying to do and in addition those now promised by politicians were still not enough to attract their vote. But this is not leadership.

Promising all kinds of solution and programs is not leadership but about promising the many almost anything as if government is the source of the common good, the solution to any problem, and the origin of benefits to ordinary citizens. Leadership is not about offering a supermarket of promises and programs to voters. Leadership is not about having definite views on everything, having a ready solution to anything, having certitude and taking charge of every situation. So many convictions overwhelm each other; they suggest the politician is a mile wide and an inch deep in the politicians understanding of leadership. Leadership is about something deeper than “the issues;” it is about principles.

Paul Johnson, the eminent historian, points out that great leaders anchor their actions in a few, perhaps 3 or 4, fundamental and clear principles. Principles are not issues; they are basic organizers for human activity such as upholding the rule of law at home and abroad, keeping government activities and taxes to a minimum, and encouraging individuals to do as much and achieve as much as they can. We do not all agree on these particular principles but to be a great leader means to understand and anchor actions in something much deeper than issues.

In contrast to true leadership, consider the main message of most current presidential candidates; it is the reverse of empowering and encouraging citizens in their activities. They, in effect, advocate a great proliferation of government programs and controls to do things for and to citizens. They are removing citizen’s role. They are not leading people; they are removing citizen activity by subordinating citizens to government. Government programs necessarily depend on obedience, not intelligence from citizens.

Great leaders have a kind of will power that gives them a defining role and centered purpose. Will power subordinates the immediate demands and political expediencies to a long range sense of direction. It is not a stubbornness but is an organization into a coherent vision of the future which guides action often in spite of the immediate and changing opinion of the day. Will power gives leaders the ability to persevere in the face of adversity, as George Washington spectacularly did, that comes with a deeper, more integrated understanding of the human condition.

Leaders can also, of course, communicate such as to inspire and create commitment from others. They are also somehow magnanimous in ignoring the mean sprited such that they seem to have a virtuous quality not born of political expediency. Politicans promise programs to solve problems but even presidents cannot deliver on their campaign promises. Presidents don’t pass legislation or control the national budget or manage the economy but by promising such things they lead voters to think voting is about voting for such things. So voters are given to voting for politicians based on their stand on the issues or even on a single issue. But great leaders are not selling programs and cures; they are leading by helping us to participate in a vision, to sense how we might achieve the great.

Political leadership is not the salesmanship so currently on display from most of the presidential candidates. If we take the lessons of great leaders we might learn from history, we might seek candidates who have far less to say about issues and much more to say about a deeper understanding of the source of societal good, its sources in human activity, and the relationship of government to that human activity that is constructing the good of society.

Do Free Exchanges in Health Care Lower the Costs?

Michael Rotheschild in his book, Bionomics, reported that researchers had yet to find a single private industry in which costs and prices did not drop over time. The increase in efficiency occurs because, as Michael Rotheschild pointed out, economies, businesses, industries are living systems of exchange and as such learn and adapt in their behaviors over time. This institutional learning produces greater efficiencies, better products, and more diversification.

However, the same is not true for areas dominated by government agencies, government controls, and government funding such as the post office and public education. In those industries costs either rise over time or remain about constant. They never decline. The idea that having a single provider produces increases rather than decreases in costs over time seems counter intuitive.

Having a single provider would seem to be more efficient than allowing multiple providers to offer the same products. But the difference is that learning organizations "feed" off their increases in efficiency, product quality, and consumer satisfaction whereas government agencies "feed" off a guaranteed revenue stream of public funding regardless of consumer satisfaction. Consumers don't control the purse strings of government agencies with their choices, and so government agencies have no incentive to respond to their needs. They can, and almost must, take their customer gor granted.

Furthermore, since government agencies have no market in which consumer choices discipline their products and cost, even if government agencies had the incentive to do so, they cannot be given free use of funds. They must by law be directed in how to spend the funds; they simply cannot conduct R&D processes even if they waned to.

Economists found the principle of the learning organization produced a 20% increase in efficiency of production for each doubling of production. Some industries are higher, others lower, but for all industries, whatever their rate, the rate remains constant per doubling of production.

We should assume this economic principle would hold true for health care services as well. To test the idea, we would have to look at some sector of health care that is not currently controlled by government regulations or funding.

There are some sectors that still remain relatively free from domination by government. What economists find in comparisons among free and unfree sectors is that the private, relatively free sectors do indeed decrease their costs over time whereas the regulated sectors with third party funding always produce increasing costs over time. One such sector is cosmetic surgery which is almost never included in employee insurance or government funding.

Health economist Devon Herrick testified before Congress regarding these trends in the cost of health care services for cosmetic surgery. Since these are generally not paid for by government controlled payment plans, they provide a comparison between the free market and government controlled systems.

clipped from www.theobjectivestandard.com [D]espite a marked increase in demand between 1992 and the present, cosmetic surgeons’ fees remained relatively stable. The average increase in prices for medical services from 1992 through 2005 was 77 percent. The increase in the price of all goods, as measured by the consumer price index (CPI), was 39 percent. Cosmetic surgery prices only went up about 22 percent. Thus, while the price of medical services generally rose almost twice as fast as the CPI, the price of cosmetic surgery went up slightly more than half as much. Put another way, while the real price of health care paid for by third parties rose, the real price of self-pay medicine fell.

This Testimony for Submission to the House Education and Labor Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions, March 15, 2007 by Devon Herrick makes other comparisons to answer the question, “Why Are Health Costs Rising?” In another example he reports on costs over time in the area of corrective eye surgery:

In 1999, only a few years after LASIK was approved, the price was about $2,100 per eye, according to the ophthalmic market research firm MarketScope. Within a short time, competition drove the price down to slightly more than $1,600. The cost per eye of the standard LASIK is now about 20 percent lower than six years earlier. Competition held prices in check until a new innovation arrived for which patients were willing to pay more. By 2003 surgeons began to perform a newer, more-advanced custom wavefront-guided LASIK procedure.

For some reason, ideas for having the government directly provide or pay for health care seem to hold considerable appeal to citizens and politicians. But for economists, these ideas aren't valid. They understand that systems of third party funding cannot and do not work either in theory or in fact. It is possible that if the public understood how to recognize in a policy proposal a design based on third party funding so they could compare it to free systems, they might be able to recognize its long run dangers.

If we want to help certain classes of people, the principle should be to entitle them directly so they are empowered as consumers. Entitling the needy directly is far more cost effective than blanketing everyone with a system of third party funding for health care. Entitling the needy preserves the incentives and drive for increasing efficiency, expanding consumer choices, and increasing quality. Systems of third party funding do just the opposite. Costs cannot be controlled over the long run without some form of rationing, quality cannot be maintained, and consumers' choices must be restricted. As a result, they harm the good of society and are immoral even though they may be promoted on the best of intentions.

How to Escape the Third Party Problem of Government in Health Care…and Public Education

Health Care Proposals

I found an nicely abbreviated summary of the public policy options written by Arnold Kling. He looks at three key outcomes that health care designs must produce and ranks the various proposals.

The first outcome we all want is access to health care by low income and under insured citizens, not just the rich and employed. He ranks the various designs from "Good" to "Bad" to "Ugly".

He does the same ranking for a second outcome, the quality of health care services or more accurately how quality is supposedly maintained by the design.

The third outcome is cost, the biggest problem in our current health care mess since it involves entitlements that will produce rapidly escalating costs and huge unfunded mandates in the future.

I don't think this table will find much acceptance among people who don't understand the third party problem. None-the-less, it might trigger some further investigation by us as we try to undertand why the various proposals would produce widely different outcomes in access, quality, and cost.

clipped from www.tcsdaily.com Access Quality Cost Good --clinics --vouchers --high-risk pools data analysis data analysis Bad --mandates --Medicaid --Medicare P4P cost containment Ugly national health services malpractice suits licensing regulations The table above summarizes our experience in terms of three goals of health care policy: improving access to care; improving the quality of care; and lowering the cost of our health care system.

If we understand how 3rd party funding works, or rather fails, to maintain access, quality, and cost efficiency, we can generalize this evaluation of health care proposals to other institutions. Public schooling needs this kind of evaluation.

Public Schooling

Public schooling relies on a single government provider, the school district, that is equivalent in design to a single national health service provider in health care,i.e., socialized medicine since the government owns the mean of delivery. The government agency controls and delivers all public education services just as a national health service agency would for socialized medicine.

In public education, the only exception to a forced choice from a single provider is the small number of charter schools some states have allowed, and the rich. Public education is means tested. If you are of poor means, you get what your local public school has to offer, and if you are poor you probably live in a poor neighborhood with the strong likleyhood of a poor school. If you are rich, you can afford a private school. In both systems, citizens suffer from shortage of services.


Public schooling relies on performance standards that are not even pay for performance standards. No lawsuits are allowed since their is no consumer and no consumer protection laws in public education. Public education essentially lacks any means by which to maintain quality since there is no consequence for the failure of student learning. By legislative policy, public schools are designed to produce schools and teaching, not learning. There is simply no consequence to the adults running the system if kids don't learn.

As to cost, public schools depend on a guaranteed revenue stream from the state and local property taxes. If the adults don't get the pay and benefit increases they want, they can strike. Public opinion usually supports the teachers and seldom supports school boards since it is the kids who suffer the consequences of a strike. Boards simply can't take a strike and they have no choices to the union who holds a monopoly control (legally mandated by the legislature) over the labor force.

Public schooling is at the bottom of the table, in the ugly category. If by public policy we institute a single payer or single provider system, we will by design build in the basic problems of third party systems. Public schools produce a 25% drop out rate. Of 3/4 who survive through to graduation, about 1/3 make it to a satisfactory level of academic achievement.

How's your fractions? What is the success rate of public schooling?
It is 1/3 of 3/4 which is 1/4 or 25%. Using a design similar to public schooling for health care would produce the same problems of access, quality, and efficiency that we have in public schooling.

The Cost of Government

Here's what Don Boudreaux has to say about the platitude of taxes as the cost of a civilized society:

clipped from marketcorrection.powerblogs.com At least two errors of logic mar Thad Williamson's argument that taxes are the price we pay for prosperity ("No Taxes Would Mean No Prosperity," April 30). First, just because government performs some task - say, running schools - does not mean that such tasks would not be performed better by the private sector. Second, even if government performs some vital tasks that cannot be done by the private sector, Mr. Williamson is wrong to conclude that we, therefore, have no moral right to our pre-tax incomes. Tasks necessary to sustain life and society are performed also by clothes makers and home builders, yet no one argues that those of us who wear clothes and live indoors lose moral claims to our incomes as a result. Taxes Are Among the Costs of Ignorance

Religion and American Democracy—Explaining Political Theology

A CATO discussion of the relationship between theology and American Democracy, i.e., political theology, provides an interesting example for an analysis by a developmental epistemology. Is American Democracy founded and/or guided by religious principles or is it secular in its foundations thus effectively separating Church and State?

To start the discussion, Mark Lilla laid out his thesis of secular foundations:

But once you understand that, the radicalness and newness of the American secular idea is what looms large. I think this is what Mark is emphasizing: not that America is a secular country or that Americans are secular people — but rather that their religious life and nature are framed and made possible by a deeply secular constitution. American politics is very religious; American foundational politics is very secular. This combination is what makes this country different; and its blessed exception to most historical rules can blind us to the fragility of the achievement and the strength of its ideological and political enemies.

In the discussion that followed Andrew Sullivan summarized Lilla:

I think this is what Mark is emphasizing: not that America is a secular country or that Americans are secular people — but rather that their religious life and nature are framed and made possible by a deeply secular constitution. American politics is very religious; American foundational politics is very secular. This combination is what makes this country different; and its blessed exception to most historical rules can blind us to the fragility of the achievement and the strength of its ideological and political enemies.

To debate the emergence of American Democracy to either secular or religious foundation seems to be an argument between two reductionist. A developmental framework might find that the American form of government brought together a number of ideas, themselves having their own individual developments, into a completely new framework that replaced the previous forms of governance. A parallel development might be cited in the replacement of Aristotelian physics with Newtonian physics.

It was not the discovery of new facts or even the formulation of new concepts that caused the scientific revolution. Even though Aristotleian physics had been shown repeatedly to be inconsistent, illogical, and counter to factual evidence, it was not until the complete reconstruction and formulation of a new and different scientific framework occurred that the old Aristotelian science could be replaced. Even though Aristotelian physics had been long outmoded it was not until Newtonian principles provided an acceptable, new framework for reasoning, posing experitmental problems, gathering evidence, demonstrating correspondance with reality, and all the rest that made widespread acceptance suddenly possible.

Now consider how religion and governance have been linked throughout history until American Democracy reformulated concept and principles to coordinate them into an integrated framework. This framework of property rights, individual liberies, trial by peer juries, civilian control of the military, divided government and limitation of powers, etc, had roots in fragmentary forms earlier in history. The invention and genius was to organize them into a coherent, workable whole. Not only did this whole have a coherence that made its logic inescapably obvious to the writers, the inidividual concepts such as property rights also achieved a new found logical necessity when organized into an overall framework.

Thus, the revolution in governance came about not because of some separation of Church and State (although that was one of its results) nor did it have its roots in any divine religious principles. It came about, or more accurately, it developed out of a natural process of abstraction, differentiation, and integration of governance and concepts of human activity just as those processes are integral to scientific progress. The seat of these processes clearly were the Founding Fathers but their discussions and reflection using the previous experiences of human governance developed out of the problems they posed to themselves. It was the ability to pose the problems of human governance more than anything that drove their processes of thought such that collectively and individually the American form of Democracy developed and then was formalized in written documents. The importance of getting the problem right was perhaps the underlying reason for why the Declaration of Independence took on such importance.

So to say the American form of Democracy “evolved” is to recognize that the vector to history lies in the constant constructions out of previous idea, constructions, and frameworks and that American Democracy required certain of these previous political constructions and attempts at governance—property rights, voting, monarchies, etc.—before these ideas could become reflected and reconstructed into a more coherent form of governance. The previous history and ideas of governance captured by earlier writers, provided intellectual aliment but it was the work of abstracting and reformulation that combined many previous notions into a new, more valid form of governance that marked the radical leap forward by the Founding Fathers.

By the new coherence and inescapable political logic it introduced, American Democracy also necessarily enriched many individual concepts that now became elements of the system. For example, the Greek idea of voting and democracy by the polis is relatively unimportant in American Democracy because the system gave it more specificity as when it could be used, who used it, how it was to be used and so on. In essence American Democracy fundamentally redefined democracy and voting by radically delimiting it. Democratic voting as a means of governance is unwieldy and unworkable. It often doesn’t know its limits or capabilities. The Founding Fathers understood these problems and that they had to protect the governance process from the stupidity of ignorant citizens and the radicalism of mob rule that can result from unfettered democracy. Thus, their American design limited and defined when and how democracy, in the sense of citizen voting, was to be appropriately used; they did this by making it subservient to a republican system.

All this to say that it was the epistemic process by which a new method of thinking about how to constitute a government was developed that was the source of American Democracy, not theology nor even the history of conflict and separation of religion from the state. These are certainly events and even important or necessary phenomena but they are only the fodder for the epistemic processes of history. They are not the cause any more than previous experimental evidence caused Galileo and Newton to reformulate and reconstruct the whole of physics. Only when the problems were posed properly, itself a mark of an advance in thought, and a proper seat be established for the processes of abstraction and reflection could their be a fundamental reconstruction and advancement be made in physics, in governance, and indeed, in any are of human affairs.

The two features of the emergence of American form of Democracy—the clarity by which the problems of governance were posed by the Founding Fathers’ careful abstraction and articulation, and the reconstruction and formalization of the new, integrated framework in a written constitution out of many historic preliminaries, and in addition because these same processes find their parallel all scientific advances—these facts compel us to avoid reductionism in the study political theology by placing it in the perspective of a developmental epistemology. Human progress cannot be reduced to mere history or religious sources. It is due to the epistemic processes whereby order arises out of its sources in human activity and particularly in the activity of human thought.

What Is Your Candidate's Theory of Government

It seems possible to sort politicians' thinking into levels of analysis according to how deeply they undertand an issue. The easiest and first form of thought is a focus on a simple outcome. The second level of analysis is more advanced since it sets the outcomes and other features into a conceptual description involving the relationships among the descriptions. The third level of analysis subordinates the issue with other issues into am explanation of what system organizes and produces the outcomes, that is, the general ideas surrounding the means of production which in politics is usually government versus the free market.

Issues become tools for analyzing politicians' theories of government. The issue of student diet in public schools gives a clear example of the difference between a level1/2 analysis and a level 3 analysis.

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and the chairman of the Agriculture Committee, has twice introduced bills to deal with foods other than the standard school lunch, which is regulated by Department of Agriculture. Several lawmakers and advocates for changes in school food believe that an amendment to the $286 billion farm bill is the best chance to get control of the mountain of high-calorie snacks and sodas available to schoolchildren. For this issue, the desirable outcome is a better diet for kids. An outcome is a "what". Now look at the "how".

Looking at how the outcome is produced requires an analysis comparing government controls versus protecting the free choices of students. If no thought is given to how and why we create a system of government to fulfill certain functions, then the outcome, the good intentions of making sure kids eat good diets is all there is to the politicians thinking. But regardless of whether the goal is desirable, a deeper analysis also considers how we want our government to work. We need a theory of government since it organizes our analysis of this school lunch diet issue and all others.

So we can take this diet issue and ask how well politicians produce the deeper third level analysis that serves as their theory of governmnt. How does Senator Harken explain why and how federal government should be used to take over control of what kids eat in school. Harken doesn't explain. Another politician does touch on a third level analysis. Fred Thompson says he wants the government to keep its hands off your dinner plate.

”I’m telling you, I don’t think that it’s the primary responsibility of the federal government to tell you what to eat,” Thompson said to applause when asked if his health care plan included any details on preventative care, a priority for Democratic candidates. “The fact of the matter is we got an awful lot of knowledge,” said the former Tennesse senator. “Sometimes we don’t have a whole lot of will power, and I don’t know of any government program that’s going to instill that.”

So, looking at candidates level 3 analysis in which they explain their theories of government, Thompson at least explains enough to let us know he is a fan of small government by saying that healthy living should be the responsibilities of families first. It's not a complete theory of government but gives us some clues. By contrast, Senator Harken describes the school lunch diets as an "issue" and therefore implies that it is a problem that federal government must solve. But that is all he says so we don't have an explanation from him as to why or how this is should be a function of the federal government.

Reason for Choosing Among Candidates—Their Theory of Government

Here’s a common sentiment:

This country needs to be inspired--and my dad is very impressed by Obama. He believes that Obama has the grasp of the history of this country that is absolutely necessary in order to lead us out of the MANY messes we're in. It really doesn't matter to me how right a plan is for health care, ending the war in Iraq, whatever. If our Pres is divisive and threatening to almost half of this nation and much of the rest of the world, we will not even begin to solve the problems facing us. I am looking for a unifier.

I have five observations:

1. Democracy Is Necessarily Divisive

Since it is about limiting choices of people, democracy always excludes the choices of the minorities by imposing the majority's opinion on everyone. If government is involved, the democratic choice that results is imposed by force on everyone. To be honest, the idea of democratic decision making is to vote on an issue so that we can force everyone accept one choice. We protect free and open debate so that supposedly we can allow the best solution to emerge. So political debate always exposes irreconcilable differences among people. The more issues there are that are important, the more "divisiveness" there will be. To blame a leader for being divisive is really to expose the problem of too much democracy and government power.

2. Principles Unite

Our unifiers are not people but those deeper principles that we almost all agree upon—freedom and justice—equal rights under the law; freedom of religion; freedom of speech; republican, constitutional government with separation of powers; and at one time, agreement to keep government out of our affairs by limiting it to only those powers expressly given it, namely the powers (police, courts, armed forces, etc.) necessary to protect citizens. Principles unite us but political issues divide us because they are about limiting our choices. Political issues are proposed government actions and therefore make the climate divisive because they involve government. Leaving things up to the free choices of citizens without government involvement keeps things from becoming divisive. So, for example, public education is divisive at every level since it is controlled by democratic processes that impose single choices on everyone—but in religion we have relative harmony since people can chose freely among many choices. When we try to restrict people's choices by using democracy, we create divisiveness in deciding whose choice is to prevail.

3. If Democracy Is To Work, It Must Be Constitutionally Limited

No candidate today could probably be elected on such principles of government because people mistakenly believe we need "strong leadership" and "creative" government solutions for "our problems." But strong government and leadership—the thinking that turns things into problems and then public issues for government and leaders to solve—is what leads us into difficulties both foreign and domestic. Previous government actions, e.g. in health care, are what create problems which political leaders use to justify more government solutions. Since we have unlimited government, the political process promotes politicians who pander to voters and misconceptions about government and economics. The solution is to limit government action, not to promote more government solutions.

4. Limiting Government in Foreign Affairs

Our government should be just as limited in foreign affairs as it is in domestic. It should be limited to protecting our country, not trying to create democracies. Some, not all, see a moral logic that generates a response to evil. Iraq should trigger thought about what to do about evil in the world, and secondarily, how constitutional limitations should work in controlling government actions.

5. A Solution for Citizen Voting

We might find a long term solution if we think more deeply about how choose among candidates based on their theory of government. If Democracy is to work successfully in the long run, it must be limited to electing people who understand what functions are proper for government and how government restricts or promotes the constructive solutions of free activity. Turning something into a political "issue" so that it becomes a "problem" government must solve may well appeal to many voters and get policiticans elected but it is also what creates divisive politics and more problems which then need to be "solved" by "strong leadership."

If we are to be responsible citizens, we must not choose politicans on how well they try to sell their leadership, their personal qualitiesor their government programs.
We must choose politicians on the basis of their understanding of government in particular, the American form of republican government, and how and why it limits government power.
The fundamental principle is that it is the constructive power of free human activity that builds a society, not government engineering.

No Change in Test Scores—Why?

I'm not much interested in performance indicators of public schooling. They vary a little but don't change much over time. So we get mixed results. This report from the National Center for Education Statistics in the Institute of Education Sciences summarizes the performance of U.S. fourth-grade students on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006 assessment, comparing their scores with their peers internationally:

PIRLS is led by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and has been administered twice, in 2001 and 2006. The United States participated in both years. In 2006, 45 education systems participated, including 38 countries, 5 Canadian provinces, and the separate English- and French-speaking education systems in Belgium.

The average score for U.S. students was:

* higher than the average score in 22 education systems

* lower than 10 education systems and

* not significantly different from 12 education systems.

In 2001, the U.S. scored higher than 23 education systems, lower than 3 education systems, and not significantly different from 8 education systems.

Testing is a 2nd order descriptive analysis of schooling output. Even doing it much better won’t change the fact that it remains a descriptive fact about the system, not causal explanation of change. Judging from the constant movement toward testing, I'd guess that value added testing is the coming thing.

This Houston effort spurred by the Gates Foundation will surely generate a lot of talk but so what?

Teachers, students, and parents in the Houston Independent School District will soon benefit from a new data system that will monitor individual student progress, inform classroom instruction, and help teachers to provide more targeted support. HISD will receive $4.5 million over three years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support the ASPIRE—Accelerating Student Progress, Increasing Results & Expectations—data system.
By tracking student results, teachers will be better able to identify individual strengths and weaknesses and target their support where it is needed most, helping all students to meet the high academic standards set by HISD and the state. The ASPIRE Initiative reflects HISD's continuing commitment to improve teaching and learning so that all young people can get the high-quality education they deserve.
Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra welcomed the support for Houston's groundbreaking project. "For the first time we are charting the individual academic growth of every child, and we're going to use that value-added data to design specific ways to help every child continue to improve," Dr. Saavedra said.

Testing doesn't cause anything anymore than sticking a thermometer into someone does. How exactly is knowing more about a student's test results and now how those results change over time to have any effect on teaching methods? Meanwhile, the overall test scores of the U.S. tend to remain flat over time. The system is in a general equilibrium condition regarding its output, and more money simply provides it with more economic energy to do more of the same.
Like the Post Office (you can't even buy stamps after 5 p.m. at the Sandy PO), consumer needs or values have little relevance in how the system operates since it relies on government design for its operations, and government people simply don’t have the omniscience required to design the thing. They don’t even allow more than one design. In particular those who are elected and impose the rules of the public school game lack any deep understanding of the kinds of human growth schools should try to promote. Instead, they impose demands for trivial activities and trivial results.

The Liberal's Problem of Using Force

Coercion Versus Voluntary Means

Underlying debates among political philosophies and political economics is the distinction between coercive and voluntary actions. Daniel Klein defines the distinction between coerced and voluntary.

“You are coerced when someone brings physical aggression or threat thereof to your property. Your property is your stuff, including your person, and ownership implies a claim to your property good against the world. A claim, a benchmark, not an absolute or inviolable right.

Voluntary interaction is our consenting, in the absence of coercion, to alter our property arrangements and to form agreements such as contracts. As for who owns what, there are rather universal norms, beginning with the soul’s ownership of its person, extending to property acquired within the family and in trade, production, and gift relations.[5] Liberty is freedom from others messing with your stuff. Restrictions on voluntary interaction are diminutions of liberty.

Sure, there are holes and gray areas, and forms vary with social norms. But the basic ideas of tangible property, ownership, and consent are cogent and apply so widely that we may think of the exceptions as exceptions.”

Is It Important?

Some writers (for example, George Stigler and Gary Becker) hold the position that the distinction is either not important or not particularly useful given the complexities of our society, our wealth, concerns for efficiency, or utilitarian values of government action. But, of course, these arguments border on ignoring serious implications that arise from using some desirable end to justify a coercive means.

Given a political issue with desirable ends such as health care, the coercive/voluntary distinction operates at a deeper level within an ideology that apparently governs how people view facts, intentions, government actions, and results of various proposals.

The Problem of Force Posed

If modern day pro-government advocates are to justify government action in any political issue, they will have to tackle the implications of the distinction between coercive and voluntary action.

Here is how we might pose the liberal’s problem in making the moral case for coercion:
1. Is it moral to make one person a gainer at the expense of another person?
2. If in some circumstance we think it desirable to make one person a gainer at the expense of another person, is it then morally sound to use force to so do?
3. If rather than individuals, groups are involved—one group made a gainer at another’s expense—does using groups make using force more or less justified?
4. Does using government force make it more or less morally justified?

How Do Human Societies Construct Themselves?

While it may appear to some to be an esoteric, or perhaps useless philosophic point in discussions of “real” problems such as health care, the distinction between coercive and voluntary action goes to the heart of understanding how society constructs itself. How do we explain the development of society? What exactly is the source of social and psychological construction, the free activity of people or the activity of people controlled by some central plan, government, or god that subordinates activity to some higher ideal or common good?

In organizing our society, it would seem that how we explain how human activity can transcend itself to construct the new and better—whether that is social, economic, religious, psychological, technological, or even biological activity—would form a fundamental issue that underlies most of our problems in the world today, and it seems to begin with the distinction between whether some form of external control and therefore force is necessary or whether within human activity there exists some self-organizing and self-transcending factors at work and therefore free activity is necessary.

The Long-Term Consequences

Counter to this problem is the question of whether over the long run it is free activity or whether it is coercive methods that tend to produce destructive consequences and the direction each tends to move a society over the long term. However stated, the problem must not be ignored otherwise we will remain thoughtless in our political ideology and given to what is only intuitive or what merely feels good.

Health Care—What Matters Is the Direction We Push the System

Often public policy issues focus on, well, issues. Issues tend to be the states of affairs we would like to have, and there is nothing wrong with that. But a limited focus on issues is dangerously thoughtless in setting public policy, particularly when we thoughtless assume it should be a political issue reduced on to the question of how to design government to address the problem. Of course we have wants, goals, ends, outcomes for our societal good but in centering our attention exclusively on ends, we hide the more fundamental differences among the means to be used, the design if you will of a system that is implied in a position on an issue.

The means are more important since they are the operating rules of the system and they determine what can be produced; they are the dynamics of the method of production as opposed to the statics, the descriptions of the state of affairs we want as outcomes and goals or that are actually being produced by the current system. To ask how we get to a desired end raises difficult intellectual challenges since it requires us to pull out the structure of the system inherent in a design that we will think we could use to organize the production of the end. It is intellectually much more challenging that a limited focus on ends or states; it requires what psychologists call a “reflective abstraction” in which we pull out of our thinking the relationships that are implied in our thoughts.

Perhaps the lowest level of thoughtless public policy is to simply focus on the appealing aspect of ends and goals since it is done without the conceptually difficult work of figuring out and explaining how the desirable ends could actually be produced. Educated people seem particularly susceptible to expressing good intentions as if they are good political policy. “Everyone should have the right to affordable health care,” one psychology professor wrote in an opinion piece. That goal would be nice of course, but when we ask for details on exactly how such a “right” (more properly he is referring to an entitlement) is not obviously unrealistic.

Think of all the nice sound bites that express goals most of us want: control of rising costs, better access by poor people, affordable drugs for senior citizens, curbs on excess profits by drug companies, better availability of organs, lower infant mortality rate, and so on. More thoughtful people can agree with the desirability of the goals but reject the goals as unrealistic and unwise as a basis for policies because they know the ends cannot justify the means.

This thoughtless focus by a professor on goals happens in other areas of public policy, not just health care. Public education is always an issue and it too is dominated by this kind of thoughtless kind of advocacy and focus on ends. In education the ends focus mostly some form of high test scores with some reference to holding someone accountable but without a corresponding expression of any valid understanding of the means by which human intellectual growth is produced, testing and accountability can’t describe any methods for actually delivering the ends. They remain hopes, good intentions, desirable states of affairs we all can easily agree would be nice to have.

The difficult challenge in shifting the focus in health care discussions to the means is that it involves a new focus on relationships. Relationships shift the focus away from goals and outcomes; they are more complex, more abstract, and less observable as content of thought. To pull out the relationships involves requires an investigation and conceptuation of third party systems of government programs and intervention and compare these to the direct, two-way relationships of free systems of consumers directly pay and benefiting from producers. The content of this kind of thinking is that of the difference in the relationships of these two kinds of health care systems; it is no long about the concrete descriptions, facts, outcomes, goals, desired ends that are easily debated.

Since underlying our policy discussions is the policy choice between whether to move the health care system toward more government planning, control, and funding or toward more direct consumer/provide relationships, we cannot consider the wisdom or morality of such proposals merely by looking at how various government programs would work to produce some desired outcomes. We have to also understand and compare these government methods with methods of free systems of health care that are controlled by the self-regulation inherent in voluntary, mutually beneficial exchanges between consumers and providers. Until we understand both, we cannot thoughtfully reject one or the other.

All thoughtful public policy involves this kind of abstract thinking because at heart, all public policy involves the question of the direction we want to push a system. As to the means of any public policy, do we want to design the means that would put more of the human activities of our society under government control or do we want to design a policy that would promote the free constructive problem solving activities of citizens. It may be true, and it does some evident from survey data, that most citizens cannot think at such a level of abstraction. But if that is so, then that incapacity calls into question the very idea of democracy as the means for organizing our society. It would suggest that rather than democratically getting together to decide what to do about health care, we should instead examine why and how our design of government tends to make so many issues into political ones. If government is prevented from controlling, spending, and intervening in an area then we have no public policy issue since we would have society solving the problem and producing public benefits without government.

Opposite to the authoritarianism of dictators is not democracy, it is a free system. Control of citizens’ activities is as authoritarian when imposed by a majority of the ruling, voting group as it is by a dictator. Both produce oppressive government. The opposite this oppression by government either imposed democratically or by a dictator is a society that protects the free activity of citizens. To pretend the democracy of imposed government control is better than a society that protects the free activity of citizens from government requires an assumption that free activity doesn’t work or is somehow destructive of the public good, not its source.

The scope of history shows conclusively that free societies promote the societal good to an astonishing degree while government controlled societies impoverish citizens. Much of the public good is produced by society without government planning, controls, and spending. The solution to public policy issues is not more democracy. More democracy implies ‘governmentalzing’ a problem so that we have more government and the imposition of more restrictions on citizens’ activities. More democracy in this sense is a cause of problems since it is the inappropriate expansion and use of government power that creates even more problems and political issues such as it has done in health care.

The inescapable policy question underlying the health care issue is whether we want to increase the use of the force of government to mandate and control citizen activities or do we want to push the system toward solving problems with less centralized control. Already our health care system is fundamentally controlled and distorted by government funding and involvement. It is a matter of which direction to push the current reather dysfunctional and inefficient system—toward more government which caused most of the problem in the first place or towards more direct, voluntary choice and opportunities between consumers and providers. The wisdom of our choice always comes down to the third party problem. The benefits and costs are separated by third party government programs, and there is no known economic solution to the problems that causes. Such systems are inherently unstable and inherently tend to move toward increasing costs, restrictions of supply, and decreasing or fixed levels of quality.

To thoughtfully choose such a system would necessarily mean to have developed and demonstrated some new design. The new design would have to show that it avoids the problems of third party programs that are caused in systems imposed and protected by government force. Since it has never been done and appears economically to be undoable, without this clear demonstration of how a new, workable design solves the third party problems of government control, such systems must be assumed to be defective. If it cannot be shown how it will solve the problems, then it must be considered to be harmful to society. The benefits and justification of free systems need no longer be proven; the imposition of government systems must be. With history, experimental results, and theory clearly established, we no longer have to prove that free markets work. However, if we are to push society toward more government that imposes third party programs by force, we do have to somehow come up with a theory of government that demonstrates these government designs can work. It has not yet been done. Without this clear showing of benefit in promoting the public good, it must be considered immoral to use government force to impose controls on citizens’ activities against their will and their choices.

Universal Health Care—Is It Wise?

All Universal Health Care proposals are variations of a system of third party funding that are centrally planned and imposed by the government. Third party funding is a system of non-reciprocal relationships among a consumer and a producer, two parties, in which the producer is paid by a third party, not the consumer. Removing the connection between the value received and the value paid by one party, the consumer, the reciprocal relationship, destroys the voluntary, mutually beneficial power of human reciprocal exchanges that makes free societies so constructive of the human good.

Design Problems of Government Programs of Third Party Funding

To make the destructive effects of third party funding clear, suppose Arleon buys dinner for all of us on one of our family outings. Now, except for the time and energy involved, the cost for each person, except for Arleon, is zero. Whatever I order from the menu is free to me so I can order whatever I’d like regardless of the price. In contrast, if I was buying my own dinner, I might not order an expensive entrée or order wine or dessert; I might not eat out at all. But in this case of Arleon’s generosity, it is free; there is no value and no benefit to me for considering costs so I participate but in this face-to-face situation I don’t want to appear to be taking advantage of Arleon. So in this intimate, limited, private situation, the arrangement works well for its purpose.

But the situation makes the problems worse if Arleon stays home but told us he would pay for our evening meal. Then he sees the total bill but he doesn’t know who ordered what, who might have wasted food, who ordered more expensive dishes, or even what our level of enjoyment and appreciation was. We have the case of third party funding in which someone, Arleon, is paying for something we receive free from the restaurant but now this set of relationships among three parties doesn’t work quite as well with Arleon absent as it did in face-to-face interactions. The situation deteriorates still more if Arleon repeats the generosity on a regular basis. Now suppose that some members of the group think everyone needs basic food care so we vote to make meals an entitlement. Of course we can’t make Arleon foot the bill but we can make government pay for the entitlement.

Now instead of a person and a private, voluntary arrangement of private good, we have created an impersonal, government program, and we have done so by force, the force of law. Besides removing private good from society, the government meal care requires some central planning with enforced mandates determining how citizens must obtain food, the kind of food they can receive, the costs that will be allowed, how the program will be funded, and who can deliver the food. Food care must in some way be standardized to be fair but because citizens are so diverse, some will be better served than others. To get what they need and want, the vegetarians must fight political battles with the meatatarians. The food providers must do battle to get more funding. Now reform of meal care becomes a perennial business since shortages, poor quality, the “funding crisis,” the standards, the corruption and influence peddling, all kinds of problems require constant attention. Politicians now can easily make grave announcements about problems that they will solve if elected. But with so many people and food providers invested in the system, no one dares suggest that it was the attempt to create a government program to solve the “food care crisis”, that is, third party government funding, that is the fundamental problem.

As to design problems, these conclusions follow:

First of all, that programs of third party government funding can only operate if mandated by force of law;

Second, they destroy the private good by substituting the destructive effects of third party government funding for the constructive power of mutually beneficial exchanges between parties and the generation of private good;

And third, they create permanent problems of increasing costs, the tendency to extend and grow, the reduction of quality and service, the limitation of services, shortages, and constant political conflict.

My personal philosophy is this: Since government programs of third party funding always substitute destructive incentives for constructive incentives, they do not define nor serve the common good, and government programs are a priori immoral. But where government is properly used to prevent force and fraud in any human exchange in society—including its own use of force or fraud—it protects the common good that arises and can only arise from voluntary actions of citizens as they incrementally create more and more cooperative relationships from their constructive activities of creation and exchange. By definition if we use government to take away these constructive powers of free human activity, that government action is immoral.

In the case of having Congress devise a system of Universal Health Care, we cannot escape creating all the fundamental design issues and political problems (and probably corruption) that always arise in any attempt to use government force to impose a system of third party funding on all citizens. And underlying the design problems are issues of equity that we can uncover when we ask, who benefits? But besides these fundamental design problems, the question is also one of fact as to the results of the various designs. The facts are also fraught with difficulty.


Using Research to Determine What Works

Trying to answer the question of the whether Universal Health Care might be wise by using empirical research fails unless we understand the nature of the research problem. We don’t have controlled experiments—a free market health care system in one country which could be compared to a Universal Health Care system in another—so we don’t have clear data that are meaningful in answering the question of free market health care versus government controls. Added to this are the difficult problems of how things in the political arena tend to get distorted by ideologic feeror, and it means we should be humble about our beliefs of fact founded as they mayt be many on misconceptions or misperceptions.

First, and perhaps most important, to pose the political issue as limited to one between our existing system and Universal Health Care is a classic example of a false dichotomy. The design of the U.S. health care system is not one of a free market system since it is already largely under government controls which in fact are causing most of its problems. For example, in the HMO Act of 1973 the government created HMOs (which we all seem to hate); they are not the result of the activities of a free-market. That HMO law required all but the smallest employers to offer their employees HMO coverage.

The government also changed the tax code during the war years to allow businesses but not individuals to deduct the cost of health insurance premiums; it effectively tied insurance to employment. The government also created Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs; now the government accounts for almost two-thirds of health care spending and most of the costs of paperwork and bureaucracy necessary for administering health care services.

Most recently, the Bush administration pushed through the largest single entitlement program in the history of the U.S., the prescription drug entitlement for retirees. Government involvement created the problems due to entitlement programs and coupling employment to health insurance and which have particularly hurt the unemployed. We must blame Congress for the unintended consequences of the government failing to deliver on its promises. Since we don’t have a free market in health care, we cannot blame the free market incentives for causing the health care “crisis.”

Second however, even in comparing the U.S. Health care system to other systems, perhaps most people would accept four generalization that can be derived from the research:

1. As to efficacy, international comparisons of longevity are distorted by things like homicide rates and low-birth-weight infants.

2. As to universality of coverage, the number of uninsured is boosted by illegal immigrants, people eligible for Medicaid who have not signed up, and people earning over $50 K per year.

3. As to costs, the recent rapid increase in health care spending in the U.S. the last 30 years has been in procedures involving specialists and high-tech medical equipment.

4. As to fairness, comparisons among groups receiving different levels of these types of high-techn services surprisingly do not show significant difference in outcomes.
We can use these generalizations to evaluate political positions that advocate Universal Health Care. They should not try to use incomplete or misrepresented facts to create an improper justification nor should they make comparisons between the results of the U.S. system and other nations’ systems as if that is the only choices we face.

For example, these are true but misleading statements about health care that politicians and advocates use in support of Universal Health Care:

1. The United States has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than Canada, which has national health insurance. A true statement but none of the difference can be shown to be due to the differences in the designs of health care systems. Other factors—differences in violent deaths, immigration.

2. Some 47 million Americans do not have health insurance. True according to census data but those data do not take account of Medicaid, illegal immigrants, richer people who could but choose not to be insured, or those who decline employer offered insurance. The percentage who need insurance but can’t afford it is only a few percentage point of the total population.

3 and 4. Health costs are eating up an ever increasing share of American incomes. True but not due to differences in health care design. Spending on public and private health care in the U.S. rose from about 5 percent of United States national income in the 1950s to about 16 percent. This increasing cost isn’t due to waste, abuse, or fraud but is due to advances in medical technology and the rising wealth of Americans. Just as Americans have much larger homes, more cars, more technology, more leisure activities and travel, more of everything so also do they buy more health services. That increase in spending is s sign of progress of our wealth producing capacity.

The important conclusions is that the U.S. system is now largely a design of third party funding and as a result, it tends toward over treatment and increasing costs with decreasing benefits. In order to decide between free market and designs for Universal Health Care, and then choose Universal Health Care, we must have clear data that show there are health care systems of third party funding imposed by government do not reproduce the problems always associated with any systems of third party government funding. A more extensive approach would be to compare the results in general of free markets versus centrally planned systems of government involvement. Those comparison can be made and have been done. Their results are unequivocal. Free systems always produce increases in quality, efficiency, choice, and availability whereas government systems at their best present a stasis in a system (perhaps the U.S. Postal Service would be an example) but more often they produce decreases in quality, efficiency, choice, and/or availability (and in the case of government schooling, in equity as well we might add).

Summary—My Position

Politically, health care is now defined to be in a “crisis,” and we must understand that politicians must so define the situation whether it is or not if they are to use health care as a viable political issue for their election. They can define health care as a problem by the improper use of research. There are, of course, problems with our current system but the almost universal approach to the problems of previous government intervention in health care is to advocate more government intervention even to the extent of Universal Health Care imposed on all citizens by government force. But few politicians (I can think of only one presidential candidate) urge the removal of the perverse incentives established by government design. It is government intervention in health care that has created most of the current problems and it is more government intervention that is proposed as a solution. But before accepting that solution, we need to more deeply understand what happens when we turn things over to government. We need to discuss and understand the proper role of government, how constructive human activity advances society’s well-being, and how government helps or hinders the constructive power inherent in humans’ free activities. And rather than a grand plan affecting everyone, for those problems concerning the poor or disenfranchised, we need to consider exactly how they could be precisely targeted and better served.

We don’t necessarily have to turn to Universal Health Care as the only alternative to our current system; we can consider how a free market system would work, how it could better serve to advance society’s health, and how even the poor can be well served in free systems. However, if we are to make a wise and moral choice, we must understand the fundamental differences we face between moving our society toward free markets versus moving it towards more government involvement. The fundamental debate as always comes done freedom versus government.

Public Schools and Lack of Technology Use

Ted Kolderie points to the symptom of the stasis that grips public schooling—the unimaginative and under use of technology. His article, Growing advances in digital electronics reports on the tremendous advances in amount and lowered costs of digital technology. These statistics come from the report of the ITIF (Information Technology and Innovation Foundation):

• Moore's Law continues to hold. The computing power of a chip has doubled every 18 months for 40 years.
• The price of processing power has fallen steadily:

— $480 per MIP (million instructions per second) for the Intel 086 in 1978
— $ 50 per MIP for the Intel 386 in 1985
— $ 4 per MIP for the Pentium Pro in 1995
— $ 2 per MIP for the Itanium 2 in 2003

• The real price of servers fell about 30 per cent per year between 1996 and 2001.
• Hard drive storage capacity has doubled every 19 months and the cost of a stored megabyte of data has fallen 50 per cent per year. So the cost of storing one megabyte of information fell:

- $5,257 in 1975
- 17 cents in 1999
- half a cent in 2002
- 1/10th of a cent in 2007

• There are today about 100 million websites, adding content and becoming increasingly user-friendly.
• All this permits Hewlett-Packard to sell its Media Vault, storing 300 gigabytes (150 movies) for $380 and for Google to provide 2.7 gigabytes of storage for a user of its Gmail service…free.

How much of public school student's learning today is no longer classroom-bound or tied to teacher control and assignment? How many teachers, courses, schools, maintain dynamic websites providing resources of the current topics of study? How many schools/districts warehouse data and make it freely available? How many maintain discussion forums, or use daily individualized interactions with parents, or provide daily learning schedules and objectives to families? How many use networks for efficient virtual management systems? How much of the learning program even appears anywhere on anyone's school computer?

An Essential for Changing Thinking

In politics, when our mission is educational, that is, to change people's minds, or perhaps better stated, to help minds grow and develop, it is important to understand the difference between what we can do that helps students be more become efficient in learning and what it is that we can do to promote fundamental change and development in thinking.

The former, helping students become more efficient in their learning, seems more straightforward than promoting the development of understanding. As to the latter, mental development of new understandings, the research shows there is something quite different going on with development than with learning. Development is not simply the end product of lots of learning. It is an internal organization and re-organization of mental activity that must occur, and teachers have quite a different problem when trying to promote development of the sucessively new forms of understanding out of the old.

How then does a teacher get students to reconsider their way of understanding and perhaps to re-organize it so as to produce a new method of understanding? Does the teacher give students more learning experiences? More facts? Demonstrations? Verbal interactions? Explanatory materials? Perhaps wait for some brain maturation to take place? No. They have another method derived from the research into the process of cognitive development, and that is to pose certain kind of problem that challenges the structure of students' ideas. A good example in politics of how to powerfully pose problems for politicians was George Will's Sept 30 column.

The reason why the teacher shifts to problem-posing is because the research into cognitive development shows that if the intelligence is confronted with certain types of problems of understanding (and not simple problems of learning), it finds itself blocked in completing its thought, and it is fundamentally that kind of problem that triggers an internal process. This process consists not in taking in more information by learning but by a process of reflective abstraction into one’s own thinking and the re-organization of thought. This process produces the incremental development of a new and better form of understanding out of the old and it tends to re-establishes a fit with external reality posed by the problem. A good problems help provide a focus and to motivate mental activity, and if successful, it prompts thought to overcome the challenge the problem posed. These are not problems of learning or of fact but problems of method or form of understanding.

To take an example, when some Libertarians state that taxes are theft, it does seem provocative but only because it puts a strange label on taxes. It can be dismissed as a little kooky. Now let’s try to create a conceptual challenge to thinking regarding takings: If a neighbor kid takes another kid's wagon, is that theft? If two kids or a whole gang takes the kid's wagon is that theft. How large does the group have to be before it is no longer to be considered as theft? How does democratic action by the group make it less of a theft.

Now instead of an assertion that simply seems to be a strange circumlocution in how someone else expresses an idea, the challenge becomes a problem to be figured out, a problem of "how" or "why", not a "what" or the name of something. Those how and why kinds of questions make the generalization of theft to other situations such as government takings an unfinished topic to be tackled by facing the naïve student with an intellectual challenge, a situation that asks them to think about their thinking, not whether to re-label taxes with another name. It suggests the learner has a responsibility that extends beyond the current conversation so that in the longer term a better understanding can be developed to replace a felt inadequacy. It is not a short term conversation that can be wrapped up tidily and conveniently using existing notions since the problem does not give closure. A short term problem that might be solved by simply accepting some external authority's assertion ends the inquiry. Assertions tend to present closure but good problems tend to open the process. They give students “something to chew on.”

Given this, for there to be development of understanding something, it is rather essential that the teacher identify some series of fundamental problems that have to be overcome for the construction of the advanced understanding to occur. Theses key problems are the essential tools of the teacher when motivating people to take on the challenge of understanding a bigger, deeper, more complex understanding.

Good Public Policy Blogs

Regarding public policy blogs, a good blog should help us think through things, not try to tell us what to think. Most public policy blogs, those not intended as personal forums, tend to be oriented toward advocacy of a point of view. They begin with this point of view, and they do not seriously consider any other points of view. They begin with their position and then make assertions they are right and others are wrong. There is more to it. I want to know what the various points of view are and how to sort them out. The points of view, say regarding the environment or health care, seem to be positions on a policy but they are embedded in a rich, complex system of thought, an ideology if you will. We need to understand this deeper kind of thinking that seems to control the policy positions people take.

So, a blog that seems to (lovingly and helpfully) want to correct public myths and fallacies without denigration of others’ views is most valuable. And most useful can be a blog that is also timely and responsive to current reporting in the media or legislature, how to sort through the various positions on a particular issue, how to analyze candidates, etc. These kind of blogs also demonstrate quality writing, research, economic understanding of the nature of the economic myths and fallacies when thoughtlessly used by media and politicians. It is not that an assertion simply needs to be corrected. A good blog tries to help us understand why and how an ideological system of thought produces the misconceptions and assertions it does.
A good analysis also seems to want to get as close to the data as possible. It demonstrates some sense of effort in attempting to document its analysis with actual examples of the various ways of understanding. Some people attempt to be opinion leaders but for whatever reason seem intent on perpetrating myths, perhaps out of ignorance or perhaps out of a too eager desire to advance a cause. A good blog in its analysis should help readers know that the point of view is properly and sympathetically understood even if it is thought to be wrong.

Considering these criteria for public policy blogs, a blog could be considered successful if it comes off as informative, interesting, unbiased, timely, and enlightening. Perhaps another indicator of success would come from looking at who reads the blog as shown in the blog’s comments. A blog would be successful if its readers post comments that seem directed to wanting to better think through and understand public policy and the different ways people differ in thinking about an issue. A blog can even go a bit further to suggest some ways as to how to evaluate how well an issue is understood and how to apply these ideas to some examples. All conceptions of economics or a theory of government underlying an issue are not equal; there are better and worse ways to understand the economic and political basis of an issue. Policy is not simply a choice among equals, and a blog doesn’t have to refuse to take a position. But again, it is important that the position comes out of an investigation, that it is developed and therefore an outcome of a thoughtful method of analysis. If it starts out with a pre-conceived position and then seeks to prove why that position is best, it sends a message to those who don’t agree with that position that the blog will not consider their point of view and is not for them.

Perhaps these standards seem too analytical, too abstract. Do we really need such deep analysis? We shouldn’t but I think we do. We wouldn’t need such intellectual effort in politics except that the reach of politics and government now includes so many important issue areas and that implies that citizens do have to develop a deep understanding of the issues so as to make the fundamental choices they are facing. Citizens now have the responsibility to keep government from unwisely acting, The decision of whether to take over and control a fundamental area of human activity—health care, the use of environmental resources and land, trade, wages—is hugely significant in its impact on the development of our society. For example, in health care, citizens need a deep understanding of the dramatic change in the incentives, consumer provider relationships, future development, discriminatory effects, and unintended and unforeseen consequences if they are to make a decision as to whether we are going to have government to take over health care for all citizens. Certainly on its surface it looks like it would be great if we had universal health care for everyone but such superficial perception and wants cannot be the basis for wise policy positions.

Increasingly as politicians, perhaps in an attempt to play on voters fears or voters desires in order to get elected, want government to take over and control more areas of our lives, our political involvement now becomes far more important and consequential; therefore it requires and much greater depth of understanding by citizens. I doubt this is possible but it seems this is the situation facing us. So those who can understand the deeper implications of things should step forward to help us think things through, and that important role to a significant extent could be served by blogs.

Types of Reasons for Choosing a Candidate

Types of reasons for deciding which candidate to support:

1. Political Chances—Candidate who has a good chance of winning: middle of the road, etc.

2. Favored Demographic Category—Candidate is/is not from some category: men, whites, inexperienced, gay, a certain religion, young, old, etc.

3. Personality—Candidate is qualified, enthusiastic, wonderful, well-respected.

4. Verbal Presentation— Verbally presents well: public debate, speeches, tv appearances, ads, website.

5. Issue Based—Candidate is an advocate: children, women, underprivileged, or candidate supports/opposes a political action: Iraq, universal health, Kyoto Treaty, etc.

6. Principles—Candidate’s principles and theory of government.

Are these all the general types? Now, which of these would seem to be of the most importance in shaping the kind of leadership we need for a healthy, constructive society?

The Long Tail Problem In Public Education

An important “Long Tail” feature of markets is that, besides the dominant products serving the bulk of the market, diverse products also develop that serve increasingly specialized markets. A few dominant products serve a significant share of the consumers but there may be many, many more providers offering specialized forms of the product that appeal only to a very few consumers, specialty niches. So if the various products are ordered along a scale according to the number of consumers each serves, the “main” products appear to serve far more consumers than do providers down the line in popularity. The first place provider serves a large chunk of consumers, the second place provider also serves a large number of providers, but as we move down the list, the number of consumers that providers serve appear to decrease to almost miniscule volume in comparison to the first few providers.

Markets as Complex Ecologies of Human Exchange

What is interesting and important is that the products in the Long Tail serving very small niche markets are not necessarily of poorer quality nor are they necessarily financially less successful. They often are of high quality and well established in serving their particular specialized niche in the market. A simple notion of markets is that it is a competition among providers in which a few providers with good products chosen by consumers are rewarded and others are put out of business, the idea of economic survival of the fittest. But this idea of markets as competition is misleading. A more objective way of understanding markets is to see it as an ecology in which various producers find and adapt to their specialized niches. There are some dominant species but there are many, many more very successful but smaller species. The diversity of species arises as species cooperate by finding available niches. They tend to avoid direct competition. For example, Michael Rothschild showed how various bee species, rather than directly competing, cooperate with each other by specializing in certain times of the day and certain kinds of flowers that do not compete with other bees. The idea of ruthless competition to sort out the weak and unfit is a horrible misconception of the market. It is true providers try to protect their market share but a far more remarkable feature of the market is the extensive elaboration of cooperative relationships that constantly develop and grow. Providers cooperate with each other to buy materials and ideas to develop their products they exchange with things of value from other providers or from consumers. Relationships among providers cooperating in supply chains often remain quite stable over time. They help producers increase their efficiency and quality but buying things they can’t produce as well themselves. The market is actually a huge network of inter-related producers, an ecology of organizations that also, as a whole sell, products to end users. This huge, complex network of producers buying and selling among themselves to develop end products is matched in the most intricate and precise manner to a correspondingly complex and diverse environment of consumers. The remarkable fit between the producers products and the consumers needs is only achieved by a staggering number of individual choices governed by each individual’s values and available comparisons whether acting as either a consumer or producer.

The Mono-Culture of Centrally Planned Systems

The immense complexity that arises in a healthy market of voluntary and mutually beneficial exchanges is far beyond the capabilities of any system of central planning. Neither product development nor consumer choices can be made by some central authority since the amount of information that would be required is staggering. And when these intricate needs are subordinated to some centrally imposed plan, it blocks the huge possibilities of human productive activity. A central plan forces activities to serve a single end sometimes using a single means, and this subordination of human activity to a central plan can do no more than block the limitless initiatives and creative acts by free individuals acting as producers and consumers. This restriction results from the inability by design of central planning to create opportunities for creation of new products and it limits complex needs by consumers to being served by a single product. In short central planning guts the system of research and development that creates specialized products that can serve more diverse consumer needs. But when the human exchanges are free, a rich market creates a vast system of discovery that central planning can only inhibit to the degree it attempts to impose its dictates. The more central planning that is imposed, the more it inhibits and represses the creation of alternatives. Since it cannot solve problems by allowing diverse initiatives of research and development of new products and choices by consumers, central planning tends to respond to problems by increasing control, not freeing up the system. The more problems there are, the more the response is to generate more centrally planned details of how to do things, and the more central planning prevents and subverts the natural free activity of the creation, construction, and exchange of value among people. A mono-culture is artificial, and by design it is an attempt to stamp out diversity. It sprays the weeds and bugs just as bureaucratic regulations and alwas kill the diverse educational delivery methods that might arise in the public schooling mono-culture. Central planning works to limit human potential; the more it tries, the more it suppresses human development. Central planning is not growth producing as are the free exchanges of humans. This difference between free systems and centrally planned ones is stunning when the amazing developments produced by societies with free markets and free thought are compared to centrally planned and controlled societies.

Incremental Adjustments of Individual Activity

We can never fully predict the outcomes of our actions until we act. We constantly adjust and improve our plans if we can operate freely. The market is a huge opportunity to create, to act, and to try out our actions. It is an environment that offers us a rich ecology in which to create things of value to others. It is an environment for discovery. Contrary to some notions of market “competition”, we are not restricted to a single action with life or death consequences in the ruthless pursuit of survival. We can try many actions, create many incremental improvements and make constant adjustments to gradually improve our success in fitting into the ecology of values of the marketplace. Individual intelligence is a problem solving mechanism that constantly adjusts and regulates individual behavior. Humans are not designed to be obedient instruments of the directives and control of a planners. They do not need nor naturally want an external authority controlling their behaviors. Intelligence is a complex process of self-regulation and adjustment to the environment. A big central plan imposed on the many runs the almost sure risk of big failure but big plans envisioned by free individuals and organizations begin small to then grow and develop as constant improvements due to intelligence at work make them more successful. People and organizations almost never go out of business through a single act in a single stroke. Things are incremental as is success or failure; each is composed of many tiny steps moving in directions which allow humans to respond and change if they are free and not under central control.

It is true that some actions such as opening a restaurant consume larger resources and entail greater risks of cost due to failure since it requires an initial leap toward capturing a sufficient customer base, but even the closing of a restaurant doesn’t mark the demise of the owner. The restaurant is not a static thing but from the point of view of free market exchanges another series of incremental steps the owner is taking to create and develop something of value; the owner will continue to adjust his actions, perhaps to quit the current business and offer his services in another way, as a baker or cook, or perhaps he may move the location of his restaurant or change its menu or type of service. But it is not a one-shot survival issue for the owner since things are incremental and merely one of how to successively respond to the results of previous actions in current situations. The owner has neither perfect information nor do his customers but they both are constantly seeking to improve their actions and situations. The essential idea is that the owner has certain value to others, value that he will attempt to improve by refining, developing, and marketing his product. The market does not decide the fate of the owner. The market is simply the ecology that the owner more or less chooses, explores, and attempts to fit into. It is owners who all possess the problem solving intelligence who make the important choices, not the market. And it is consumers who all also possess problem solving intelligence who make important choices, not the market. The “market” is simply the idea of the totality of all the individual choices that are governing free human interactions. The more advanced the market, the more diversity and opportunity it provides to people. Thus to allow a market to develop creates more opportunities, more diverse consumer needs, and more diverse products. The market, that is the development of free, mutually beneficial human interactions creates the Long Tail of increasing specialization and choices.

Healthy, Developing Systems Produce Long Tails

It is the development over time of these kinds of healthy economic ecologies among producers matched to consumers that account for the amazing economic growth of free nations compared to those with repressive governments. The economic health of people must be judged by the overall results the society has produced because those results mean that the underlying conditions exist that produce constructive, productive development. It means various areas of the market will exhibit the Long Tail phenomenon.

The Long Tail phenomenon has a pattern; it follows a distribution curve so we can recognize it in different fields. A Long Tail means a market has advanced in its development, in the complexity of its ecology, to create such a rich economic environment that highly specialized products can then exist successfully. In short, we might judge how well a field is currently responding to diverse needs of consumers by the length of its Long Tail. In a free market many fields appear to have diverse options of products offered to consumers but in some fields these distributions of products serving specialized niches are not sufficiently developed to produce a Long Tail distribution. There are only a few dominant providers’ products that are serving most of the consumers.

Public Education—No Tail

A relatively new field will have only a few—initially perhaps just one—products and a few—often only rich—consumers. Over time, producers “learn” to adjust, improve, and increase the efficiency in producing the product. The costs go down and the quality goes up. When many fields develop better products at cheaper costs, consumers can buy more. They can “indulge” in more speciality products serving their more unique needs. The field along with other fields develops a Long Tail of specialized products and diverse consumers.

But it is painfully evident that some fields, some very important fields, have existed for quite some time and have not developed a Long Tail. And in fact these fields often do not develop increasing efficiencies nor improved products; they may even have increasing costs and exhibit poor, archaic, or undifferentiated products that result in an inability to serve all consumers. These fields have factors operating that limit development. Public education is one such field. The factor at work in public education that is limiting its development is the repression of opportunity, change, and choice imposed by central planning. With the increasing importance of education, the increasing costs of public schooling, and the inability to serve all students, the need for reform pushes central planning to create more details and mandates. Whereas states traditionally have had little involvement in school operations, now states have increasingly taken over school operations through the imposition of reform plans. Not only have states transformed their lack of involvement into increasing micromanagement through funding, mandates, standards, and testing, the involvement of the federal government is now rapidly escalating in its intrusion into the management of schools. In the various governments’ attempt to deliver public education, the results of the central planning that has been imposed on educators in order to control education constantly appears to need fixing, reform, and more detailed centrally planned mandates. The system is increasingly gutted of choices and opportunities as the government attempt to impose one set of curriculum goals and control quality by increased testing while at the same time gutting the system of opportunities for educators to develop new and different programs. Even charter schools, a strategy designed to open up opportunities and choices, now are subordinated to state and federal mandates in what the teach and test if not in how they operate. Since the financial burden is much too heavy if they opt out of public schools, most people must “choose” government schools, yet still about 10% choose private schools of which there is a certain variety, and about 1% choose home schooling of even greater variety. Both of these relieve the state of costs yet neither receive support and in fact are largely opposed. Virtual schools are also a “threat” due to their lower costs. They too are opposed usually through limiting regulations. Charter schools, alternative schools, magnet schools arguably are no different from government schools since they all must provide the same product; they must conform to central standards and testing. Public education (that is, those K-12 education services that the public can choose) is by law monopolized so that all services in a geographical area are delivered by a single provider, “the district.” It is very similar to the old public utility model or perhaps to a cartel. The single provider, the district, is organized by central planning and control through regulations, standards, and testing and this central planning and control (by definition a bureaucracy), now is increasingly subsumed under larger governmental units—the state and now the feds.

Educational Bureaucracies Tend to Eliminate Tails

The result is that without free activity to create new products by educators and diverse choices by consumers who are the families, there cannot be educational development. There is stasis, a rigidity in the system, created by the one-provider model that seems to require constant additions of additional mandates and controls in order to reform it and force it to change but which only make it more rigid and “bureaucratic.” Except for the one great exception of the teachers, the primary professional knowledge of school officials is not learning theory but bureaucratic expertise. The field of education is not a healthy ecology but rather an almost sterile mono-culture in which the growth of the single product is stunted.

Destructive Effects on Human Development

The great experiments of history in attempting systems of central planning of human activities have provided such overwhelming evidence as to the bankrupt and total failure of such systems to promote human growth, it borders on astonishing and unbelievable that the education of humans—what could be the single, most effective institution for promoting the successful incorporation and participation of young people into our complex and dynamic society—is still attempted by central planning but in addition is essentially protected from any serious discussion of its devastating and immoral consequences and the choices we have in changing it. It is a system that has a single producer and single choice in place of what should and could be a Long Tail of diverse, rich, specialized educational products and choices. Instead we have a rigid, inefficient, single-provider single-product system that serves at best 20 to 25% of the consumers of education.