Tag Archives: government

And German Governance

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The following is excerpted from Spiegel Online:

SPIEGEL: Facebook is only eight years old, has annual revenues of $3.7 billion and, following its stock market debut, could be worth $100 billion. Is that normal?

[Co-founder of German business software giant SAP, Hasso] Plattner: Oh God, normal!? That’s just what America is like. They’re unbeatable when it comes to advertising. Don’t ask me if I think it’s a good thing …

SPIEGEL: Well, do you think it’s a good thing?

Plattner: You’re bombarded with advertising all day long there. But that’s just how it works. You really have to take your hat off to the Americans — the way they reinvent themselves again and again, especially in the high-tech sector.

SPIEGEL: But that could also be possible in Germany.

Plattner: A lot of the framework conditions are not right here. For instance, it’s much more difficult to obtain venture capital. But you need that so your company can quickly achieve a critical size. And anyone who follows all the daily debates in Germany that are critical of capitalism and growth could come to the conclusion that we Germans don’t want to be successful anymore.

…

Plattner: …it’s really only in Germany that I’m asked time and again such strange things like: Why growth? Or: Why does the database have to be so much faster? That just creates stress … And that, even though for the past 40 years IT has been almost exclusively about the question of speed. Americans are much more open and bolder in this respect. Their attitude has also long since been adopted by the Indians and the Chinese, which makes the competition even more difficult for us.

We, the people, have to take care, also, or we’re no better at governance than a top-down governance in China.  At least, though, we can correct our own mistakes.

Chinese Governance

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The rumors of a coup in the People’s Republic of China serve to illustrate the PRC’s concept of governance.

Its economic success over the last generation and a half, or so (roughly 30 years), seems apparent.  It has accumulated the world’s largest stash of foreign currency reserves (some $3.2 trillion), and it has grown into the world’s second largest economy, albeit with the world’s largest population across which to amortize that economy.  Some even argue that this success demonstrates the superiority of the Chinese method of centrally managing an economy.  After all, those folks say, the Chinese government doesn’t waste time debating; they simply decide, and promptly.  Moreover, specific leadership candidates are selected carefully and only after a proven performance record.

But at what cost has come this success?  That’s what the coup rumors highlight.  The power struggle underway (whether it’s really a coup in progress or not is unimportant to this post) is purely a Party struggle; the people of China are not at all involved other than being stuck with living with the outcome.

The current showdown—of whatever form—threatens the carefully planned change in the party and national leadership, including seven of the nine positions on the Politburo Standing Committee.  The thrust of the argument seems to be whether China should go back to a more “revolutionary”—i.e., more directed from above—form of government or reforms should be instituted that lead toward a more constitutional state.

But even at best, whose constitution?  Notice where this argument is occurring: internally, at the top levels of PRC’s Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army government—not among the people.  In fact, the people may also be discussing this, but since they have no say in their own government, their discussions “are unimportant, and [government] does not hear them.”

The coup rumors illustrate another aspect of governance PRC-style.  The rumors began appearing about two weeks ago via Sina Weibo (“China microwave” or “China microblog”), the Chinese version of Twitter.  The government promptly deleted those messages.  Now, searches for key words like “gunfire” or “Changan Avenue” (where much of the Chinese leadership lives and where gunfire allegedly was heard during the “coup”) are answered with this message:

These terms are not being displayed in accordance with the applicable laws, regulations and political guidelines.

Here is Chinese free speech.

The PRC is a one-party dictatorship: there are no checks or balances, as from an independent judiciary or legislature.  The people are unrepresented by individuals of their own choosing in an elected government.   In sum, the people are not Sovereign in their own country—the government that has placed itself above them is.

And that economic success?  Yawning cracks in it have appeared.  The vast migration over the last several years from the hinterland to the coastal cities, where the jobs are, have led to severe housing shortages in those cities, shortages exacerbated by those cities’ governmental requirements that the people must be registered with the city government in order to get city services like utilities, housing, and so on.  The migrants are denied registration, though: they’re not residents of the city.

Additionally, those who do find jobs, including the original residents, are demanding higher wages, which hurts production, which hurts job availability.  On top of that, the lack of jobs for that massive influx of migrants leaves people without money to buy goods and services other than those basic city-provided services (which the migrants can’t get anyway).  This also hurts production, and job availability.  And on top of this, those migrants generally are their families’ bread-winners and were intending to send money back home to family members who didn’t make the move.  This lack deepens the impoverishment of the hinterlands.

All of these changes are easily handled by a flexible, free market, but a centrally managed one, even managed by carefully selected government leaders, simply cannot keep up with the dynamicisms of the country’s (any country’s) real-world economic evolutions.  It’s an edifice poised for a major retrenchment, drawdown of those reserves, or hard collapse.  Or all three.

Some “Tea Partiers” and Budgets

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The White House objects to Congressman Paul Ryan’s (R, WI) latest budget proposal as the end of the welfare state.  I certainly hope it is.

As to the rest of The Wall Street Journal‘s op-ed, what they said.

Some—by no means all, but every grouping has its extremists—who aver themselves to be tea partiers need to withdraw their heads from rectal storage and pay attention.  In DC, in politics, in any endeavor, we need to not hold out for everything all at once, or we’ll get nothing at all, and at once.  Take what we can get today, and come back tomorrow to work for more.

This working, bit by bit, toward the goal is how the Progressives have gotten us into our present strait over these last 80 years, and it’s the only way out of our present strait to fiscal sanity and its associated economic growth and prosperity.  It’s the only path away from government dependency and back to personal responsibility and individual freedom.

Take the budget and vote it up.  Make the spending, taxing, and “entitlement” corrections today that are possible today, rather than failing to get any of it by being greedy for more.  Come back tomorrow, and work then for the next increment.  And by the way, tomorrow’s effort will be informed (for those willing to listen) by the empirical data flowing from today’s reforms, and so tomorrow’s continued reforms can be more efficiently structured and thus produce its results more quickly.  Sort of a dynamic political scoring.

Some Thoughts on a Missile Shield

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Having gotten us to accede, back in 2009, to Russian demands that we not defend ourselves or our European allies against nuclear missile attacks from rogue states like Iran, the Russians are pushing the Obama administration around again.

Russian outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev is saying that any improvement to our—or to NATO’s—missile defense capability will be taken as breaking the existing nuclear parity with Russia, and they “will be forced” to retaliate.  Medvedev insists

No one has explained to me why we should believe that the new missile defense system in Europe isn’t directed against us.

He also has instructed his defense establishment that

By 2017-2018 we must be fully prepared, fully armed.

And he repeated an earlier threat to aim missiles at the U.S.-led NATO missile shield.  Left unspoken was his generals’ earlier explicit threat to immolate Poland with nuclear war if we were to put missile shield components there.  Never mind that the US has never been a threat to Russia or to Russian allies, while Russia has actively invaded and partitioned ours—Georgia being only the latest example, with Russian interference with Ukrainian elections their latest non-military interference.  And don’t forget the cyberwar they inflicted on Estonia in 2007.

President Obama’s response?  He hasn’t made one of substance.  “I don’t bluff,” he said in a different venue.  But what does that mean, if he has to protest that he doesn’t?

It’s clear to me that the Russian threats are a prime reason for going ahead with the deployment of a missile shield at our fastest pace.  And for updating and upgrading our military establishment generally, including our nuclear and cyber forces.

A Thought on Regulations

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The Heritage Foundation has an interesting article about the costs of President Obama’s regulations.  I want to talk briefly about one aspect of that article, and to disagree a bit with the Foundation.

One of the outcomes of the Obama explosion of regulations is a concomitant explosion in red tape, and the Foundation suggests a solution to this.  The article at the above link cites an article by  James Gattuso and Diane Katz as containing the proper response: additional congressional oversight, claiming that such a thing is necessary to protect us and our economy from overregulation.  Moreover, Congress should require congressional approval of “new major rules promulgated by agencies, establish a congressional office of regulatory analysis, and establish a sunset date for federal regulations in order to ensure that substantive review of existing regulations continually occurs.”

Gattuso and Katz have it partially right.  There is no need for additional bureaucracy, Congressional or otherwise, to “oversee” us or our government.  That’s how we got Obamacare and Dodd-Frank and how we got the EPA foisted onto us.  The oversight is our duty as citizens, and we’ve been derelict in carrying out that duty.  It’s on us finally to get off our duffs and do our job.

There’s also no need for a “congressional office of regulatory analysis.”  That’s just more red tape waiting to happen.  If we want to know what a proposed regulation might cost, we already have an Office of Management and Budget in the Executive branch and a Congressional Budget Office in the Legislative branch to give us (perhaps conflicting) estimates.  These estimates then can help inform Congressional debate—see below.

The other two ideas are quite sound.  Every new rule proposed should be subject—individually, not in groups—to Congressional debate and Congressional approval, or rejection.  Moreover, every rule approved should be sunsetted: it should automatically expire after five years (to minimize the impact of political cycles).  If renewal is desired, then see above for proposed rules.

Some will object that this will greatly slow down the pace of rule-making, or that it interferes with Executive branch powers.  As to the first, what’s the downside of that slower pace?  As to the second, there is no such Executive branch power.  Executive regulatory rule-making authority is nothing more than a Congressional delegation of a limited capacity to the Executive branch, and that delegation can be withdrawn quite easily.