More Convincing Proofs

"I have lived, Sir, a long time; and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this Truth, that God governs in the Affairs of Men. And if a Sparrow cannot fall to the Ground without his Notice, is it probable that an Empire can rise without his Aid?"

--Benjamin Franklin, Motion for Prayers in the Constitutional Convention, 1787

Who's Afraid of The Big Black Bat?

Time to rock. U2, "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me."

Hardly A New Problem

You may have noted, during the summer, the revelations of grossly overpaid politicos and civil servants of Bell, California.

There was also a study released this year showing that the average government job now pays substantially more than the average private sector job - and that is before benefits are factored in.

Well, to add further fuel to that fire, consider this from National Review, released today:

The objective of the bureaucracy is not, pace the conspiratorialists, ideological advance. Nor, more surprisingly, is it power. (The savvier bureaucrats escape even the appearance of power, for power carries with it the first deadly inferences of responsibility.) No, the objective of the garden-variety bureaucrats is, not to put too fine a point on it, money.

Consider the speed with which the bureaucrat is achieving his objective. A local magazine, National Journal, recently ran a story about a group of two-income federal couples. The kicker in the story, from the local viewpoint, was that these bureaucratic marriages had achieved new status: taxpayer-supported incomes in excess of $100,000 per year. It was an upbeat story, sort of a hometown-kids-make-good story. To the bureaucratically untrained eye, however, the story yielded a different insight. Not a single one of the ten people identified was a top government official; indeed, I would bet that the average American has never heard of any one of them. (Quick. Who’s Jane Frank? James Woolsey? Ed Norton?) But here we have a cluster of six-figure households — all of them engaged in the ritual sacrifice of public service — without a national leader in the bunch.

All right, exceptions to the rule, you say. Not really. The fact is that hundreds of bureaucratic families are in the $80,000 to $100,000 bracket, which is to say that they are among the top half of the top 1 per cent of all American families. And virtually all of them, to repeat the point, have reached this level with no record of leadership accomplishment.

Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of an unmistakable pattern now in formation. A new across-the-board bureaucratic raise — currently pegged at 7.5 per cent — has just gone into effect, with promises of more to come as compensation for the “lean years” of Nixon freezes.

Wait...Nixon? Yep; this was written in 1977.

NR just pulled this article by Neal B. Freeman out of its archives and added it to its website today.

And Now, A Word From Mongol 482

I recently discovered - thanks to, among others, a reference by Jonah Goldberg - a 1958 essay by Leonard E. Reed, "I, Pencil."

The essay details the wonderous cooperative effort that is required to make something so simple as a pencil - and then notes how remarkable it is that all this happens without a single mastermind running the show:

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The essay then turns, not to a defense of, but rather a testimony of, free market economics:

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

Please, read the whole thing. It is well worth your time.