Hypocrisy

Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online has an excellent editorial in today's Chicago Tribune on the intellectual hypocrisy of the folks currently in charge.

His idea of the intellectual hypocrisy of the government is based on a JP Morgan chart, which shows the private sector experience of the President's appointees.

As you can see from the chart, Obama's cabinet doesn't fall a little short of others in "real world" experience, but about 2/3 short of previous least experienced cabinet (Kennedy).

His cabinet isn't made up of folks who've run things, and done things that they had to worry about the cost of. It's made up of people who've never managed an actual enterprise.

Goldberg's point is that folks who've never run everything are proposing to run basically everything from your health care to auto emissions to banks and auto makers.

Their record, by the way, isn't so good so far. They took over banks with TARP, and set rules for how they can pay people, and now the banks can't find experienced bankers to run them under the new rules.

And, since the banks are finding ways to meet the TARP repayment requirements early, and get out from under the government, the Fed now wants to change to rules so it can take over healthy banks it thinks might be a threat to financial stability. That change is sure to make it easier to get folks to work in the industry.

They took over GM, fired the old CEO, ousted his replacement, and now worry about finding anyone else who wants to run Government Motors. My guess is they won't find a senior level executive with experience in that industry to take the job.

I'll refer our friends in D.C. back to a book I read some 20 years ago, that explained exactly why the government was bad at running things. Command of the Seas by John Lehman; Regan's Secretary of the Navy; who wanted to get the government out of the shipyard business because they did a poor job of running them. Government regulations on compensation made it impossible to get anyone above the mid-manager level in the civilian sector to take on the job of managing any of the Navy's shipyards. Lack of experience led regularly to decisions that caused huge cost overruns, poor performance, and a lack of competitiveness with the civilian sector on nearly every job the government managed yards performed.

Lehman found those problems not only at the yards, but in every part of the Department of the Navy that was run by career civil servants. He also found the one thing that could stop any government reform from working as designed; Congress. As hard as anyone would try to fix something, someone in one chamber or the other would find it a threat to a constituency and get a rider passed in a bill that undid the reform.

Anyone that thinks health care reform or cap and trade is going to work any different doesn't understand the culture of government, and the hypocrisy of their intellect.