Hiding Behind States' Rights

People tend to hide a multitude of sins under the banner of "states rights".

There actually are states' rights issues involving property and taxes and other mundane things but nobody knows about those so they could hardly get upset if they lost them. No, it's only issues involving basic civil rights where people really cling to their states rights.

Occasionally a state may invoke states rights because they're ahead of the curve on some issue, but usually, it's a matter of a state or a collection of states desperately holding on to something the rest of the nation moved away from a long time ago.

The problem with this is that the most basic model of this country is the premise that all people are created equal, therefore they all have equal civil rights and you can't say we all have equal rights if they fluctuate from state to state. You can't have "equal protection under the law", if a person has a civil right in Wyoming but doesn't have it in Mississippi.

The first of these issues we had to deal with was slavery. Resolving it took the most bitter and brutal of all courses in a horrible war. You can tell yourself all sorts of bed-time stories about how the Civil War wasn't over slavery, but it doesn't change history.

The next two issues over the right of women to vote and the right of all people to drink were settled the most civilly of all, by voting on amendments to the constitution. This is how the founding fathers designed for us to handle these issues.

The next big issues was the dismantling of the Jim Crow laws in the South. Those were fought in the supreme court and settled by executive order. That may have been the best way to handle those issues because they weren't actually new rights, but reinterpretation of existing rights. It was still far more painful than it needed to be though.

Currently there are three issues on this field: abortion, the separation of church and state and gay rights. There is at least one side with each of these issues trying to make them an issue of states rights. That's simply not going to work with any of these issues.

You can't allow abortion in one state, but not its neighbor. Likewise, we can't have gay marriages recognized in some states but not in others and we can't have different standards for separating church and states across the nation.

Using the civil rights movement as a model, people have been trying to resolve these issues in the court. With the possible exception of separation of church and state, that model is inadequate in these circumstances.

For one thing, it has lead to a fight to manipulate the composition of the Supreme Court one way or another to try and make their decisions come out whichever way partisan groups want.

We need to face up to our responsibility with these issues and settle them, not in the courts, but with amendments.

Amendments can be difficult. Sometimes to get the necessary votes, compromises must be made, but, it is the way our government was designed and it's the most logical and peaceful path we have available to us.

Fixing the Economy--Efficiency Vs Security

So, what the heck went wrong with our economy?

In business school you're taught that the purpose of a business is to increase shareholder wealth by maximizing efficiency. Efficiency here is defined as the difference between your income and your costs. In other words: profit.

The flaw of this definition is that your costs are also your neighbors income, so the short-term benefit you get by cutting costs may come around to bite you in the end when you're able to sell less to your neighbor.

Henry Ford showed a remarkable understanding of this reciprocal nature of business when he decided to raise his employees pay to the point where they could afford to buy a car. His peers cursed him because they had to raise wages as well, but Ford's decision remains as a real watershed moment in the history of American Business--and he sold a heck of a lot more cars.

The second point to consider is that any engineer will tell you, the most efficient structure can also be the least secure and often the only way to increase security is to increase redundancy. In this way, a bridge made of six regular steel beams is more secure and more easily repaired than a bridge made of two mega steel beams.

American business has been on a thirty year efficiency binge. Down-sizing and mergers and out-sourcing became the rule of thumb. Profits rose for a while, but now we find ourselves in a heck of a lot of trouble.

Nowhere is this lack of security more evident than in the financial sector. Ronald Reagan assumed that interest rates would go down if banks became more efficient and more competitive, but what good is low interest rates if banks are so unstable nobody can get a loan?

With a new president and a new understanding of our economic problems my advice is to think small and think local. If we work to foster and promote and protect more smaller, local businesses then we introduce redundancy into the system. This will decrease profits for a while, but it will also increase security.

With many banks having to reduce their scope in the wake of the credit/mortgage crisis, this may be the perfect opportunity to rebuild the concept of local banks. There will always be room for interstate and regional banks, but local banks have to be the backbone of the system if we're ever to regain the stability we once had.

Should an era of financial instability hit again, it's a heck of a lot easier to deal with if you have more smaller banks than fewer giant banks.

I'm not saying we should abandon the idea of efficiency all together, but for us to prosper in the long run, we must find a balance between efficiency and security. For thirty years we pushed and pushed and pushed for efficiency, now, unless you want to lose everything, we have to push and push and push for security until we find ourselves back in balance.

Meanwhile: Back on the Island

Just in case you forgot. There's a whole new season of LOST on the way. Not a whole lot of information from this official trailer but it does wheat the appetite.

What happened to the Republican Revolution?

They called it "the Republican Revolution", but revolutions sometimes eat their children.

They promised a new focus on the middle class, yet, adjusted for inflation, the middle class was earning less when Ronald Reagan left office than when he was elected. Today, the middle class earns less in real dollars than they did in 1970, yet the earnings of the top one percent have increased over six hundred percent.

They promised balanced budgets, yet no republican president since world war II ever balanced the national budget. They called the Democrats "Tax and Spend", yet the Republicans had another plan, spend the same or more, but don't raise taxes: not a recipe for success.

George Bush waged two, very expensive wars, but would not relent on his pre-war tax cuts. Math was never his best subject.

Instead of delivering on the things Americans wanted from them, they brought in an agenda nobody asked for. Like making abortion and death penalty laws even more divisive than they already were.

They sought to break down the barrier of church and state that had been so successful for us with prayer in school and revisiting the Scopes Monkey Trial and they maximized the mistakes of an already woefully unsuccessful drug policy that benefited no one but organized crime.

The Republican Revolution came in with great hope and great promise, but we were never able to take delivery of that promise.

It's not like we didn't give them a chance to follow through with their plan. Twenty-Eight of the last forty years saw a Republican President.

For the next two years, the Republicans are completely out of power in two of the three branches of government. Let us hope they use this time for self reflection on how and why they could never deliver on their promises and come back with a new focus on the things that are really important to the American people.

If they can't do that, then let them stay out of power until they do.