Monthly Archives: July 2014

A Thought on Government and Enterprise

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This is from The Washington Times.

[T]he Obama administration first received clear notice more than five years ago about the need for an overhaul to reduce patient wait times.

“Excessive wait times are addressed by moving to a resource-based management system,” Veterans Affairs technology officials told the Obama-Biden transition team in a briefing report that included mention of VA’s “schedule replacement” project.

And this [emphasis added]:

“VA has been trying—and failing—to replace its outpatient scheduling system since 2000, wasting nearly $130 million in the process,” Rep. Jeff Miller, Florida Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, told The Times when asked about the delays.

“Because VA acquisition officials have proven time and again they are simply too inept to guide the development of a new proprietary appointment-scheduling system in an expedient and cost-effective manner, department leaders need to look at adopting commercial technologies that are being used in the private sector….”

It’s easy enough to knock President Barack Obama and his administration over this, and President George Bush’s administration had a hand in this, too. It’s also easy to hammer the Veterans Affairs Department. However, the problem isn’t about any particular President’s failure to deal with a problem, nor is it about the broad failure of the VA to perform.

No, this is an illustration of the general inability of government to do as well as private enterprise anything that private enterprise can do in a competitive market: if private enterprise can do a thing at all, it can within very broad limits do it better than government (national defense and foreign policy come to mind as things better left to the Federal government, but not much else). The Federal government cannot compete with private enterprise on efficiency at all.

In sum, such things should be left to the private sector of our economy, and the government should just stay out. In the particular case, this means that the VA should be disbanded and the VA’s annual budget sent to our veterans as vouchers with which they can find their own doctors, their own medical facilities, their own health plans.

Another Failure in Foreign Policy

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The United Nations Security Council called for an immediate halt to fighting in the Gaza Strip at an emergency session Sunday evening….

And

A press statement issued by the Security Council expressed “serious concern at the escalation of violence,” called for the protection of civilians under international humanitarian law, and said it was troubled by the growing number of casualties.

This is disgusting, and it’s…sad…that the Obama administration approved this—recall that the US could have vetoed this travesty.

There can be no useful cease fire with terrorists—the PA will simply use the time to regroup, rearm, and resume raining rockets on Israeli civilians and children. The PA will simply use the time to replace its combat casualties, retrain them, and do a better job of tunneling and then infiltrating under the Israeli border to wreck mayhem in Israeli kibbutzim and towns and cities. The PA will simply use the time to better target their rockets to resume their efforts at nuclear terrorism.

Furthermore, the crocodile tears over the Gazan civilian casualties wholly ignore the fact that the Israelis are at pains to avoid civilian casualties, using a three-step process to attack a target where civilians may be at risk. First, the IDF makes phone calls to the civilians in the target building, and it drops leaflets in the area, warning of the impending attack. The second step is to fire a small explosive onto the roof of the target building—a roof knock—to warn that the attack has become imminent. Only then is the building targeted with operational rounds. Further, the IDF waves off missiles in flight when civilians are discovered to be in the area after launch.

All of this, of course, allows terrorists to escape among those civilians in order to try again. Those crocodile tears also ignore the fact that the PA actively use their Gazan civilians as shields to protect their terrorists and their weaponry, concealing rockets in homes and mosques, preventing the civilians from leaving the area when warned, and so on.

The UN resolution also ignores UN complicity in the PA’s terrorism: 20 PA rockets were found secreted in an “unused” UNRWA school.

But President Barack Obama approved that UN resolution.

College Isn’t for Everyone, Revisited

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I touched on this a while ago. Here’s another look.

Dakota Blazier had made a big decision. Friendly and fresh-faced, from a small town north of Indianapolis, he’d made up his mind: he wasn’t going to college.

“I discovered a long time ago,” he explained, “I’m not book smart. I don’t like sitting still, and I learn better when the problem is practical.” But he didn’t feel this limited his options—to the contrary. And he was executing a plan as purposeful as that of any of his high-school peers.

The questions that keep him up at night aren’t about inequality: how rich am I, or, how rich is my neighbor? What he worries about is the kinds of opportunities open to him. Can he get an education that equips him for a job he wants? Can he find that job and build on it to make a career? His concern is economic mobility.

Indeed, there are lots of opportunities—good opportunities. Tamar Jacoby, in the WSJ article linked above, outlined three requirements for these opportunities actually to be opportunities, and paths like Blazier’s meet those requirements [emphasis added].

The first requirement of any upward path is entry ramps at the ground level. The Craft Training Center of the Coastal Bend, in Corpus Christi, Texas [for instance], teaches welding to 200 high-school students, mostly at-risk youth.

The second requirement of any good upward path is for training to lead to a job. [Anthony, 19 years old] Solis’s big break came last August, when he and 20 other Coastal Bend students auditioned for JV Industrial, which does high-risk, high-paying maintenance work in oil refineries. JV had never recruited at the Corpus Christi center, and Mr Solis was so nervous that he was almost ill on the day of the hands-on test. Still, he made the grade and headed off to Houston for more free training—with the possibility of a big job if he finished.

A third requirement of a good career path is that it must be aligned with economic needs. This is where employers like JV can make all the difference.

Indeed. RTWT, as they say.

As Predicted

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I predicted this at the end of last week.

Iran agreed to new steps to contain its nuclear work in exchange for additional sanctions relief from the US as the two sides extended negotiations for four more months to reach a comprehensive deal.

Under Friday’s deal, the US will give Tehran access over the next four months to an additional $2.8 billion in oil export revenues frozen abroad by American sanctions, Secretary of State John Kerry said.

In return for this additional money, this speaking fee for the Iranian negotiators,

Iran agreed Friday to take further measures to curtail the most advanced parts of its nuclear program.

Iran also agreed to dilute its stock of up to 2% enriched uranium into natural uranium, Western officials said, which could slightly lengthen the time it would take to spin that into highly enriched fuel for a nuclear weapon.

And we believe them. Certainly the guy who currently sits in the Secretary of State’s chair believes them. John Kerry said, in announcing this latest American concession,

Let me be clear, Iran will not get any more money during these four months than it did during the last six months.

In other words and as noted above, Iran is going to get more money: the $8 billion to which it got access “the last six months” is only an upper bound to that additional money; the released $2.8 billion may not be the last of it.

One last thing: here’s what President Barack Obama said last January in his State of the Union address when he described the just-expired 6 months of talks that were, then, just getting started:

If Iran’s leaders do not seize this opportunity, then I will be the first to call for more sanctions, and stand ready to exercise all options to make sure Iran does not build a nuclear weapon.

The opportunity is passed. It expired Friday. But, then, that was just a deadline.

The MH17 Shootdown

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That this was done by the Ukrainian “separatists” (in quotes because, as some commentators are beginning to recognize, these…people…aren’t interested in separation from Ukraine so much as they are interested in uniting with Russia) with Russian SAM systems and personnel assistance is by now quite clear.

Yet, as The Wall Street Journal put it over the weekend,

The greatest foreign-policy failing of this Presidency is that he refuses to see that the world has bad actors. He can explain the consequences of aggression as he did on Friday, but he refuses to admit or explain that certain countries are responsible for those consequences and must be opposed.

Ronald Reagan didn’t flinch this way, and neither does Mr Obama’s own UN Ambassador.

Barack Obama, though, is no Ronald Reagan.