Against Principalities and Powers

As noted poet/philosopher Bob Dylan once observed, "The Times They Are A'Changing."  And I'm not talking about the news. I had an uncomfortable ride home from the food bank today with a 350 pound person of unidentifiable gender. I almost asked him/her/they/hir/your highness/o' "arbiter of all that's woke" what the person's pronouns were. The person of massive girth and unidentifiable gender was quick to let me know the person who did not share that person's pronouns with me lived with "my" partner.

I had to rush getting my food because the line of cars at the food bank line was so long today and my driver was early and impatient to get home. It gets crowded at the food bank right after prices at Walmart get bumped up. And I'm pretty sure they did this week, since I had to run by Walgreen's on the way over to get some laundry detergent and saw very quickly that the other Wal store's prices had taken a bit of a jump themselves with a 12 pack of sodas up in the teens now.

I made the mistake of saying something about inflation and this driver person quickly let me know it wasn't the Democrats fault and that inflation was mostly in my imagination. I said, "Well my grocery bill has doubled since 2020 and I don't have enough imaginary money to keep up with that level of spending. I'm not the US government after all, hence the food bank. Anyway," I added, "that was going to happen when the minimum wage for entry level jobs jumped to $15 to $20 an hour." 

I thought this gender unaffiliated person was about to have an attack of the vapors.

That had nothing to do with it according to my driver and the driver person quickly let me know he would never agree with me about that anyway. "Besides," he sneered. "I make $15 an hour and without me you wouldn't have a ride home." I wanted to get home so I didn't point out that without me, he'd be able to get behind the wheel of the van more easily. I also didn't bother telling him that's what drivers were making before the minimum went to $15 here. Experienced drivers didn't get a raise after minimum was bumped up because they were already making minimum. All that happened to my driver was he quite suddenly was reduced to a minimum wage worker with the stroke of our very blue governor's pen. Entry level staff were all of a sudden making more than they are worth and everybody's grocery bill doubled. Of course, my person of unisex attire again insisted it was all in my imagination. Silly me!

Having worked more than 4 decades setting up nonprofit organizations to address problems the central planners in Washington overlooked when designing their programs for the proletariat in my neck of the woods, I had a good deal to say about transportation and the massive embezzlement of taxpayer funds that goes into the pockets of bureaucrats in the business of government funded transit. I saw it first hand. I helped triple the budget of our regional rural transit provider due to the unfair distribution of funds in Texas for rural transit. The Republicans had just taken over the state legislature and I helped the Democrats working with us on our rural transit initiative learn how to speak Republican. We were about the only such initiative to get what we asked for that year to the benefit of our region. East Texas is the most densely area populated with seniors and disabled folk in Texas. One in five East Texans were driving challenged or didn't own cars at all at the time. That was 20 years ago. By now it's probably much worse.

East Texas is sort of the Old Texan's graveyard. In our senior years we Texans move there to fish and subsequently die. Lots of lakes and medical facilities in East Texas. All we lacked was transportation for folk living in the country around the lakes. We were the second largest rural transit district and were getting the smallest appropriation. The largest appropriations by 4 to 10 times were the areas around Houston and Austin. It's where we keep our Democrats and their lobbyists so we can keep an eye on them. 

When I helped get the East Texas Council of Government's rural transit budget tripled, I got a nasty letter from the president of the COG and he actively worked to get me off the Public Transportation Advisory Committee for the state of Texas. I was warned by a lawyer friend to check under my truck before I started up in the morning to look for any funny wires or boxes. The thing was that when the budget tripled, it triggered an audit and apparently someone at the COG didn't want to do THAT paperwork on the transportation program. 

At any rate, my driver, of course, was secure in his knowledge that the Democrats and particularly their genius leaders like Kamala and Tim would take good care of him. He/she/it or whatever pronouns the driver is going by, conveniently keeps his brain oblivious to the blatantly obvious Marxist themes the Harris campaign is embracing, and echoing the same themes in speeches and banners and such by the US Communist party. 

Already the Democrat party's socialism lite has attracted wealthy elites drawn to the leftward political movement by the kind of power socialism always puts in the hands of a few powerful people. And who better to rule than powerful rich folks, corporate barons, and power brokers is the thinking. After all, like me and my driver, the masses can't be trusted to think correct thoughts nor take care of themselves. And my friendly neighborhood driver/person of indeterminate sex defends the future enslavement of the proletariat with eyes tight shut. "You're not going to convince me otherwise!" the young person of indeterminate gender assures me.

You'd think all this, the solidly leftist news spewing from the big media companies, the corporate/government collusion, not to mention our leader's taking bribes and colluding with China, Russia, Ukraine and whoever else will slip a few million bucks under the table would discourage me. It doesn't. The more it looks like the seriously evil left appears to be about to seize power totally, the more certain I am that Christ's return is imminent and we'll be going home soon. The devil's been getting panicky and he's become a lot less subtle these days. He's in a lot more hurry to secure his position as Prince of this world because he knows his time is short. Besides being left behind isn't going to be fun for anyone even if they get a seat on the politburo. They don't make asbestos long john's anymore, so I'd rather not be in their bootsies or around after the good guys have gone off to heaven with Jesus. Nukes tend to warm things up pretty good.and now that we humans have the means to annihilate ourselves, I suspect we're gonna finally collect the wages of sin much of mankind has been earning over all these millennia.

 © 2024 by Tom King

 

 

 

 

 

 

That's Not the Purpose..................Yet!

Beware the dreams of tyrants.

Recent movements by the Biden administration would move our economy from paper cash to all digital money. This would give government the ability to see every dollar we spent on anything at all. It would provide a means to track where we buy gas, where we buy food, what sort of entertainment we purchase, where we go on public transportation or even give the feds power to clean out our bank accounts altogether; in other words it would give government power over everyone's ability to buy and sell. That sounds eerily like something I read about in Revelation. But the kindly progressives, so concerned about our collective welfare, argue that the purpose of digitizing all money in the U.S. is not to control all these things...........at least not for now!

They claim it's not about restricting movement of Americans, for instance. At least not for now. But I can tell you from personal experience, I've sat in meetings in DC with progressives 20 years ago in which they fantasized about that very thing. The tracking technology that's possible with the digital ID does make that possible, whether they promise it won't or not. It's one of those deals where, "we have to pass the bill in order to find out what's in it."

The promoters of this level of government security, control and monitoring assure us that the whole idea is benign. You can trust us. We're the party of the people. Boy that ought to send a shiver up your spine. Just check out all the People's Republics in the world that are neither republics nor are for the benefit of the people. If you see the words People's, Democratic, or Republic in the name of a newly reorganized nation, count on that nation being a tyranny. Digital currency, digital ID and this sort of technology is a gateway to an all-powerful oppressive rule by a small group of tyrants. Bet on it.

Progressives two decades ago were dreaming about $10 a gallon gas (back when ten bucks was worth half what it is now). The idea was to "encourage" (here read "force") people to give up their cars and use public transportation by making it impossible for ordinary schlubs to own and operate a personal vehicle. They didn't have the capacity to create digital IDs back then, so they figured we'd all have to buy transit passes that could log our travel on some central computer every time we swiped one to get on and off trains or buses. One of the advantages they said was that law enforcement could more easily track "criminals". So what is the current definition of a "criminal". More to the point, what will that definition be tomorrow?

Back then, they dreamed of walled cities, not to keep people out, but to keep people inside; to keep them from spoiling "nature". The idea was you'd have to get permission from some government entity to visit nature outside the city walls. I was there at the symposium on transportation. I'm not making this up at all. It really creeped me out, especially seeing the gleam in the eyes of my progressive colleagues at the very idea of all that central monitoring. President Bush was in office at the time and one of the attendees suggested a motion to ban barbecue restaurants in Washington DC because so many had opened up since a Republican from Texas had come to occupy the White House. I'm not kidding. When they found out I was from Texas, conservative, and a male to boot, a bunch of angry feminists ganged up on me to tell me how awful I must be. The whole thing about forcing people to use public transportation exclusively was clearly driven by Marxist ideology. It is a control/monitoring tool they need to make old Karl's dream come true.

Digital technology is now capable of achieving that progressive pipe dream. Digital IDs and Digital currency gives the government the ability to strictly determine where you go, what you can buy, what you can sell and what you can do. That may not be the intent right now, but what about 10 years from now? Do we really want to create tools that provide government that sort of power? 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a technology Luddite. I love my computer and the Internet. They are tools that allow me to exercise a great deal of freedom. That is, until government creates digital controls over the whole thing and digitizing our money would do just that. 

It wouldn't be the first time a plowshare was fashioned into a sword.

• Frank Herbert, author of Dune, once wrote, "It's not so much that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It's that power attracts the corruptible."
  

Given the level of corruption in government these days, do we really want to hand them a stick to beat us into submission with, even if they promise not to use it............for now?

© 2023 by Tom King

The Left Continues to Ramp Up Its Frantic Attacks on Ride Share Companies

 

 

And the liberal left continues it's attacks on the Uber and Lyft ride-sharing services. It's amazing to watch how "progressives" defend the status quo, especially when it's their status quo. And wouldn't you know it would be the city of San Francisco leading the charge.

These new ride-sharing services having expanded rapidly, capturing a consumer market long ignored. It is a market transit has been trying to figure out for a long time. In some parts of the country, especially in rural areas with aging populations, up to 20% of citizens over the age of 16 cannot drive a car or do not have access to one.  It's too expensive to run buses around to pick them up. Most live too far from bus routes for that to be a viable option. What Uber and Lyft have done is create a clever way for regular folk to make a little money hauling their neighbors who cannot drive around on errands they cannot accomplish with fixed public transit systems.

I'm one of those customers Uber was designed for. Without them I'm left with unaffordable, often unpleasant choices for purchasing transportation services. So, of course the left wants to take Uber down. They are hoping to force people to move into town next to bus lines. You think I'm kidding? I've sat in on the meetings and that's precisely the goal. 

Politically, I can see why the left would want that. They keep losing elections to people living in small towns and rural America.  I guess they figure if they can force us to move into human hives, walled up in cities, we'll just naturally become liberals.  It seems to be working for the Democrat party certainly.

"So, why don't you just call a cab?" Uber detractors ask. Okay since you asked:

(1) Cleanliness - I've never ridden in a dirty Uber car. I've seldom ridden in a clean taxicab.

(2) Cost - Taxi rides cost half again as much. I can give the extra to the driver as a tip and it's clear profit for him. Uber doesn't require or even encourage customers to tip, but I usually give 20-25% or more to my driver because the service is really really good. I give it to him in cash and since he doesn't have to report it to Uber, well, the IRS doesn't have to know either. I'm a big fan of the black market. Cab drivers meanwhile demand a tip for rides in unclean vehicles, that take too long and are overpriced.  So I have to tip drivers who often don't earn it AND the cab company and Uncle Sam take a piece of it from the drivers.

(3) Atmosphere - I have never had an unpleasant ride in an Uber. The last two consecutive cab rides we had with the taxi service, our driver yelled at someone on the phone in Farsi all the way to our home. My wife said it felt like being abducted by terrorists. I kept waiting for him to yell "Allahu Akbar!" and drive into a crowd of people. Honestly. It was an unpleasant trip.

(4) Drivers - I've never had a driver who didn't like his job with Uber. And I ask them how they like their jobs. Most are doing it as a second job or using it to make their car note. They choose their hours and pick their customers. Our cab drivers don't seem nearly as happy. Though some cabbies seem to be making the best of it, I don't detect a lot of joy like I do with the Uber guys.

(5) Satisfaction ratings - With Uber you get to rate your driver and the quality of the ride. I've yet to give anyone less than 5 stars with Uber. Also my driver rates me as a passenger. Since my wife and I are already nice people by nature, we seldom have any trouble getting a ride. I suspect I've got a five star rating too. The Uber drivers see that and are more comfortable picking me up than a customer who is nasty to drivers and gets a consistently low rating. With taxis, you take what you get, both driver and customer. That explains why the Uber experience is better I think.

(6) Availability - I've waited for hours for a cab to come and find me. I think with Uber my longest wait was 20 minutes on a busy late Friday afternoon. It's usually under ten minutes.

 

So the killjoys in San Francisco and other liberal cities want to take Uber down. They are under the mistaken impression that if Uber goes down, customers will accept less attractive transportation options - options that pay a piece of the action to the city. What they miss is that if customers don't have an easy affordable way to get around, they don't patronize shops and restaurants and other businesses in town that DO pay taxes to the city. Transportation done right can feed local business if you don't try to gouge people for a piece of the action. Liberal city leaders remind me a lot of a criminal syndicate in the way they operate. I can imagine the council meeting where they hired Arnold "One Ear" Giovanni to "....make 'em an offer Uber and Lyft can't refuse."  Except they can refuse and have already abandoned more than one unfriendly town, much to the dismay of merchants and consumers, between whom, business has since fallen off.

© 2017 by Tom King

Dear Austin: Smart Cities Are Only As Smart as Cities Act

I read an article today explaining that Austin, Texas, capital of my favorite state in the U.S. of A., shouldn't blame it's having driven out Uber and Lyft for it's failure to win the considerable federal funding represented by the "Smart Cities" Challenge grant. Once again, my friends on the left, bow down to a conventional wisdom about transportation that is dictated by the ideology of progressivism rather than to pragmatic problem-solving of a serious issue. Decisions made in deference to this hallowed political viewpoint must not ever be blamed for the failures of the system it has created. Therefore, Austin's failure to win all that progressive government money is not due to any fault of their ideology, at least according to the anti-Uber crowd.

Primarily the article was about deflecting the charge that Austin's onerous regulation of the two ride-share companies, Uber and Lyft, and their subsequent departure, had something to do with Austin's failure to win the DOT's Smart Cities Challenge - $50 million in federal and private funding pledges for smart city infrastructure investments. Apparently some progressive wags considered Austin something of a shoe-in for that cash, given the sheer "progressiveness" of the city. Such criticism is dismissed as coming from a technologically and economically advantaged elite who use Uber as a kind of upper class taxi service, ostensibly unavailable to the peon class if I read the sneering tone correctly.

Austin (and Houston and parts of the Rio Grande Valley) are where we keep our liberal Democrats, progressive socialists and communists in Texas. We like to keep them bunched up together where we can keep an eye on them. As they are drawn to cities anyway, Austin and Houston were natural corrals. Unfortunately, they've taken to invading Dallas lately and we may have to fence that off for them too. It's a little early to tell.

At any rate, what chapped me about the article was the attempt by the writer to characterize Uber and Lyft as elitist modes of transportation. What a load of balderdash!  The reporter describes Uber and Lyft as the other side of a supposed digital divide where those who can afford on-demand transportation options like Uber and Lyft.are supposedly some sort of privileged technology elite. Dude, I'm officially a member of the below-the-poverty line class and I couldn't get along without Uber. Thanks to Uber, we can manage on our limited budget without undue stress like walking 4 miles to the pharmacy and back on bad knees twice a month.

I'd like to challenge my liberal colleagues in the public transportation advocacy racket on that perception and ask them to reconsider the role of Uber and Lyft in an integrated strategy for public transit.  I can do this from a unique position being myself a transportation challenged person.

My wife is fully disabled and cannot be left unattended while I run off to a traditional out-of-the home job. So I am forced to work from home (as a writer as it turns out). It's early in my career and not particularly lucrative yet. I live in Western Washington State thanks to a brilliant series of stupid decisions I was more or less forced to make in the interests of survival.  We live in South Hill, a suburb south of Seattle and east of Tacoma. When I came here I was told the Seattle-Tacoma area had perhaps the finest public transportation system in the world. I tried to use it. I really did. I spent hours walking between my home and wherever the bus decided to drop me instead of working at my home office. Shopping for the simplest thing or picking up medications became a daylong affair. We found a low cost garage apartment in a safe neighborhood and with rent and utilities and regular visits to the food bank, we are muddling along. Unfortunately, it is 3 miles from the nearest bus stop. This was the only decent place we could find or afford on our limited income. We are ineligible for paratransit pickup here because of our distance from the bus line, though we were approved based on income (or lack thereof). The lady at the bus company suggested we walk 4 miles to the public library to meet the paratransit bus. Did I mention we are 3 miles from a bus stop? So that "option" was nearly worthless given my wife's condition and my damaged knee.

We had been doing our monthly shopping trip all on one day for a while. I'd ride my bike to the bus stop or walk and take the bus to Walmart, buy our groceries and take a cab ride home at a cost of $20 to $30 one way. The wait for a taxi was anywhere from 1 to 3 hours. The drivers tended to be from central and east African countries and difficult to understand, English not being their primary language. The last two time we took a taxi, the driver shouted at some woman on his cell phone in Farsi all the way home. My wife nearly had a panic attack. She said it felt like being abducted by terrorists.

So, for the cost of just one cab ride, I invested in a smart phone with a prepaid cell phone company and downloaded Uber. We are not among the technologically advanced elites of the city. We are an older couple, facing disability and on a thoroughly fixed income. We cannot afford a car, insurance and fuel on our very limited budget. I'm saving up for an electric bicycle as a way to handle small errands without having a heart attack on the very steep hills I have to ride on, but even that is a long way off at the rate I'm going.

I was wonderfully surprised by my experience with Uber. The cars were clean and the drivers friendly to a fault. I've never waited longer than 17 minutes for an Uber car. They give you a choice of sizes of vehicles even. You can get a small car, a mid-sized or a van or limo. With the cab company you got whatever they sent and sometimes they sent the drivers to the wrong cities. I once walked 4 miles to the pharmacy in order to get there before it closed because my taxi took two hours to respond and finally cancelled my trip. I couldn't wait anymore, so I walked.

And my Uber ride costs, in most cases, significantly less than a taxi ride and I give them a substantial tip every time because they are such lovely people. And no, they aren't all white or born in the United States, so before you draw the race card, don't! Uber drivers are, however, very nice people. I've never met an unpleasant Uber driver. Of course, passengers rate their drivers on a star system whenever they finish their rides, so that probably makes a difference. I've never given less than 5 stars. The drivers tend to be seniors making a little extra money, students using the job to pay for their cars and housewives picking up some money while their kids are at school. I have never had a bad ride with Uber. The cab company was 50/50 so far as the quality of the experience goes.

As a source of both transportation and employment for people in the lower middle class/upper lower class income brackets, Uber is a godsend. I haven't ever ridden Lyft, but I hear good things about them too. A lot of young people, a group that will spend it's food money for a smart phone, don't buy cars anymore because Uber is affordable and reliable and safe. Young people are high-income folk by and large and for them Uber and Lyft aren't a luxury. They are a part of their strategy for getting around town.

When I was doing transportation advocacy full tilt, I always thought the idea was to get people affordable rides to where they needed to go as economically as possible. I didn't know it also had to fit a certain transit ideology. It didn't take long for me to discover that, for many of my colleagues, expanding public transportation was part of a larger political strategy. In that strategy, free market solutions like Uber and Lyft are not welcome apparently.

The thing is though, that Uber and Lyft meet a critical public transportation need that buses, trains and taxis do not. Yeah, I know it's hard on the cab companies to compete with an innovative alternative to a slow, inefficient, but well-armored transportation dinosaur like the taxicab. In protecting their turf, it turns out, the cab companies kind of sewed the seeds of their own demise. Uber's system, with which I have direct experience, is ingenious. It's fast. It uses technology brilliantly. It maximizes driver profits, customer convenience and isn't limited as to service area or range unless short-sighted cities like Austin drive them away. Feedback is two-way between customer and driver. The Uber/Lyft system answers problems in the areas of both transportation and employment for people living on the ragged edge between middle class and poverty, a much-ignored group when leftist ideology considers how to redistribute wealth.

Having an affordable way to get to town is the difference for many of us on fixed incomes between being able to muddle along on our own and being dependent on government welfare. If you work, thanks to Uber you can still get along without a car even if you aren't on a bus line. You can set up a regular ride to work arrangement that gets you to work on time and with remarkable consistency. Every driver is an entrepreneur and works whatever hours he or she wishes and wherever they choose to work.

And yes, drivers may avoid certain neighborhoods that are high risk. They do so of their own choosing. Even those brave souls that choose to work more dangerous neighborhoods have the added safety factor that the company has all the contact information and the debit/credit card number of whoever they pick up. My driver sees my picture when I post for a ride and I see his picture, his car's picture and license plate number show up on my phone before she gets there. It's a wonderful system. If my driver gets lost, she calls me. I always give them a nice tip, and even with the extra tip, the trip cost with my Uber driver is a little more than half what I'd pay a taxi cab for slower, less pleasant service.  I know several local drivers personally now and they grab my pickup request quickly. They get a reliable tip and I get a nice pleasant ride with someone I know and trust.

To eliminate Uber and Lyft from Austin may not have cost them the Smart Cities grant, but it certainly revealed them for a not-so-smart city. Austin has a large tech-savvy population that, had Uber and Lyft been available to them, might just have either not bought cars or left them parked and as I remember, traffic was fast becoming a problem in Austin. The flexibility of Uber could easily have allowed Uber drivers to create regular group ride-share commutes, reduce dead-heading drives by single drivers and vastly reduce the number of drunk drivers on the roads by making ride homes and the next day's ride back to get your car more affordable and encouraged a few more folk to not take the chance.

Austin, which prides itself on being an open, free-wheeling sort of culture, has successfully eliminated the open, free-wheeling sort of transportation option from Austin's famous city limits. Too bad too, but what do you expect when you bunch up that many ideological liberals in one place.

Just sayin'

Tom King © 2016

Building Sidewalks

Sidewalks don't need to be this fancy or expensive
nor require a federal grant or expensive "program".
Just build the danged sidewalk!

Community "Issues" Aren't Always What the Community Organizers Tell You They Are

One forgets sometimes how insular is the life of many a pundit, reporter, editor and publisher that we rely on for information and opinion in our daily news consumption. I saw a case in point this morning in an email from Ruth McCambridge, editor of The Nonprofit Quarterly. She was announcing the addition of a new cadre of on-the-ground reporters to broaden the coverage of nonprofit activities in the Good Old U.S. of A. and explained a bit about what she saw as their role in the new and improved NPQ.

• We believe in the intelligence of those who are doing and negotiating the grounded work in communities. You are the ones who have to understand the patterns of your operating environments—what it will mean if this philanthropic leader leaves her post, or if that organization embarrasses itself, or if such and such city decides that the CDBG money is needed for sidewalk repair instead of housing. You watch all of these interconnected dynamics, and if you are worth your salt, sometimes you understand what that will mean for the work you do. 

Ruth has an excellent point. The only thing dangerous is in listening to only one of those on-the-ground voices. I suspect that, given the left lean of NPQ, that the editorial staff may jump on reporting by on-the-ground voices which echo their own sentiments before they accept opposing voices. They may not even hear opposing voices, I suspect, as many of those on-the-ground voices don't even read NPQ or know that they are looking to hear such voices.

To be fair, NPQ has attempted to report opposing viewpoints. They've even published articles by me (unpaid, of course), so they can claim to include views from both sides of the political spectrum – me being unabashedly conservative and all. Even then, there is a danger of getting things wrong. That's why reporters who really do want to get their facts straight and unbiased should probably, almost always, do a part 2 to any controversial article in which they do follow up investigation with reference to the criticism their first article received in the comments section. That's how I'd do it if I were the editor.

Case in point: McCambridge mentions an issue in which the city decides that Community Development Block Grant money is used for sidewalk repair instead of housing. CDBG is a federal block grant for cities. Cities have relatively broad latitude so far as what to do with CDBG funds. Housing is one of the areas CDBG goes for. Transportation is another. Infrastructure repair and upgrade is another. While a lot of community activists might get their hackles up if money were diverted to sidewalk building and repair instead of housing and let out a howl, it would be wise for any reporter tempted to wax critical of the city to stop and take a deep breath and TALK TO SOMEBODY ELSE.

I worked as a transportation activist in a small urban center where this issue came up. The city was originally laid out along old trails and cowpaths. Roads were narrow and, as it was Texas, house lots were large. As cars came along, roads were widened, but there was a limit to how far you could widen them. In the oldest part of town, there were sidewalks that connected the neighborhoods that surrounded the city center to the old Interurban trolley stops. Citizens who wanted to go anywhere, walked to the trolley stop on sidewalks that kept them up out of the horse manure and mud. Once the Interurbans were shut down and everyone began to drive cars, roads and new suburban neighborhoods went up. No one thought much about poverty and disability during the oil boom years because it wasn't much of an issue. No one needed sidewalks because they drove cars, so sidewalks were deemed an expensive luxury that nobody would use.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Jogging is popular. Twenty-five percent of the adult population cannot drive because they are elderly or disabled. More people live through accidents with disabilities thanks to modern medicine. They can get motorized chairs and scooters, city buses are accessible, but people with disabilities have to drive their scooters in the street to get to the bus stops because there are no sidewalks or curb cuts throughout most of the city. While all city buses are wheelchair accessible, the bus stops are miles away from many older neighborhoods and accessible bus service is expensive. In my town, housing was important and the housing advocates shouted down any idea of improving the sidewalks or worse building new ones.

It was hard to make people see that $2000 worth of asphalted trails or concrete sidewalks could, in time, save the city many more thousands of dollars annually by creating a safe path for elderly, low-income and disabled individuals to get to the bus routes without having to call for expensive para-transit buses. In addition, the sidewalk network would mean that instead of waiting for the city to build expensive accessible housing for seniors and people with disabilities, a majority of them could remain in their own homes and access goods and services they need by sidewalk and bus at very low cost to both the users and the city. I hope that NPQ and other news agencies who report on community issues and activities will take the time to think outside the usual liberal activist box. Sometimes there are other ways to do things than simply by squabbling over who gets what federal funds. Communities often come up with very powerful solutions all on their own without any advice at all from the graybeards in Washington DC.

My friend Darrel, for instance, lived in a small East Texas town with lots of old people living around the area. Most were on fixed incomes. Many were fast losing the ability to drive. Darrel got busy, rounded up some old school buses and with the help of the local churches, began running a twice a month "trip to town" for retirees on the dates that social security and VA checks came out. They'd pick them up early in the morning. Walmart would host a bingo tournament in the McDonald's providing the game callers and even some prizes. The bank inside the Walmart had a bank location, a beauty salon, a pharmacy and Walmart's wide selection of grocery and retail goods. If the folk wanted to visit downtown or any other stores, the volunteer driver's were very flexible. They even rigged one of the buses to be wheelchair accessible. The thing ran until Darrel's death and I think may be running yet. They didn't get any federal money. Each church adopted and shared a bus. They didn’t charge a thing to passengers. Drivers were all volunteers. They did things that the "official" rural transit system refused to do or claimed was impossible.

Those are the "Little Engine That Could" kind of stories I'd like to see NPQ and other media report on. The only thing is that most of such organizations that do what Darrel (not his real name) did don't want the publicity lest some activist spot them and report them for not doing it the "right" way. What they usually mean by that is the way that brings in federal or state dollars that they can control. Forgive me for being a cynic, but 40 years in the nonprofit sector has taught me that.

As a member of the local disability issues review board in my town, I once suggested what I thought was a clever and economical solution to a disability issue we were discussing. The other members, more seasoned fellows than myself, told me it would never work.

 "Why?" I asked

 "Because," they answered, "It makes too much sense."

 Which is why I've changed my status from that of nonprofit professional to nonprofit amateur.

© 2014 by Tom King

On Oil, Trolleys, Windmills, Spacecraft and Buggy Whips

When the subject of government meddling in the growth and development of industry comes up, people tend to fall into one of two camps — the folk who thought giving almost a billion dollars to Solyndra was a good idea and those who didn't. The pro-government folk inevitably talk about protecting American industry and jobs. Somehow the government is supposed to protect workers when buggy whips go obsolete.

It's always buggy whips. The buggy whip argument doesn't work very well, however. The buggy whip industry didn't die until the automobile developed to a point that the technology was affordable for the majority of us. Buggies gradually disappeared from city streets and with them, buggy whips (although many parents kept the leftover ones in the woodshed for disciplinary activities). 

Along with the buggies disappearing, a lot of jobs went with them. The number of horses declined in cities and with them the guys that ran around town with these little trash cans on wheels scooping up horse poop. Those guys lost their jobs as did buggy builders, buggy whip makers and used horse dealers. It would have been stupid to try and preserve the buggy whip industry and all those other jobs that went along with it.
What happened was that industry adapted to what American's needed. Technology changes were adopted as they become affordable and the market was able to pay for the new technology. We didn't stimulate the auto industry to create jobs. The auto industry created jobs and workers moved from buggy whips to automobile plants gradually as the market for personal transportation shifted.

The government in the 30s famously tried to shift the public transportation industry from electric trolleys to rubber-tired, gas-fueled buses thanks to a deal between House Speaker Sam Rayburn (who wanted more markets for Texas oil) and FDR. We wound up overly reliant on fossil fuels and personal automobiles and systematically dismantled our cheap reliable public transportation system in the process. Look at all the political misery that's caused, not to mention wars. We're still trying to fix a public transit system that wasn't broken until FDR and Sam Rayburn with the help of GM, Goodyear and Standard Oil tried to "fix" it. The old Interurban rail tracks are long buried under layers of asphalt under downtown city streets.

What we're doing wrong now is creating an artificial panic over fossil fuel-based energy before the next technology is ready for prime-time. It will wreck the economy at the worst or at least make us dependent on a more expensive and less convenient energy source.

Politicians worry that without their wise guidance, we'll face a collapse some day when the oil wells all run dry.

What a load of self-important rubbish!

As oil becomes scarce, whenever that happens, capitalists (if there are any left) will find new energy sources and deploy them as they become profitable. By profitable here, I mean self-sustaining. People can always shift to new jobs. It's been done before as old industries die and new ones rise to take their place. New markets replace old ones. Companies shift to new products as old ones lose market share.

Where we get into trouble is when we decide a certain job or a certain type of product should be artificially propped up and preserved in situ as though our economy was some sort of museum for fossilized businesses.  Capitalism is a dynamic process - always shifting, changing and adapting as the realities of technology, consumer needs and tastes inevitably change. Capitalism's willingness to cast aside the old in favor of something better in the name of profit is why capitalism survives where more rigid, centrally planned economic systems keep collapsing under the dead weight of their own out-dated practices.

Where governments, industrial associations and trade unions get into trouble is when they try to anticipate future trends and force them to come early on an artificial timetable. It doesn't work. Change happens when change happens, no matter how much the comrades down at central-planning might wish to slap the process into some type of orderly progression.

Progress is not orderly. It's messy and rowdy and breath-taking. Anal retentive, obsessive control freaks really hate that and they think it's their duty to clean it all up and make it work properly — smoothly. Not a one of them have a clue how to do that. Economists are about as accurate at predicting how to meddle with the economy of a nation as weathermen are at predicting what the weather is going to be anything more than a week from now.


One government agency that is finally doing it sort of right is NASA. By contracting out its space-taxi business, it's stimulating an incredibly rapid new space race. Instead of racing the Russians, who are basically still operating with 70s era technology, we're racing ourselves - private companies innovating, introducing new technologies and taking risks for the prize. Ironically, they all may actually win, even those who don't get NASA contracts. The "losers" may actually wind up selling in other markets. It will be nice to start making things like spaceships in America to sell to other countries. It will certainly help balance our trade deficit if we do. And how many other industries will turn all that innovation into new products and services?  


I'd don't believe American excellence is dead yet by any means. The only thing in the way is a raft of dim-witted politicians who believe they are smarter than all the rest of us put together. Really, the best thing they could do for us all is to get out of the way and let Americans work. 


There's still time to save ourselves.


Just sayin'


© 2014 by Tom King

Resetting the American Dream - Another One Bites the Dust

And another one gone and another one gone.....

Chris Brogan's post this morning ponders whether it's time for a "housing reset" in America.  Is the American dream of home ownership - that little place in the country, Mr. Blanding's Dream House - is it obsolete?  Should we all be renting from big property companies or lobbying for more government housing.  In this "energy starved", increasingly mobile society, is home ownership a good investment. For that matter, do you really need a car.

Wow, two American icons slapped down in one shot!  The video is interesting.  Richard Florida, correspondent for The Atlantic, says it's time for a RESET in our thinking about home ownership if we're going to fuel future growth. He maintains we ought to think about giving up the "burden of home ownership".

This man is right in tune with the whole "sustainable" communities movement.  It's important to know where the sustainable communities folks come from.  Environmentalism and socialism are the mom and pop of the concept of the so-called sustainable community. The cultural RESET on home ownership is an idea straight from this movement.

Sustainable communities are highly planned, green communities.  Home ownership is not important to these folks and is actually considered, an out-of-date idea in the sustainable community.  The idea is to get rid of the suburbs, get everyone into piles of housing that uses the least amount of acreage for the greatest number of people possible.  Reminds me of a phrase in Habakkuk 2 where the prophet talks about the enemy of God's people would "heap up people". 

That pretty much describes it. It fits the goals of the environmentalists, the progressive socialists and the sustainable communities people -- more people in less space (also easier to control).  Home ownership becomes extinct. You don't even need a car anymore.  You get where you want to go on public transit. And don't worry, the more people forced to use public transit, the better it will become. So what if it's less convenient?  We all must sacrifice for the greater good of the planet.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm all for keeping the planet clean and green.  I just don't think piling up folks in apartment buildings and crammed together rent houses is the best way to do that, I don't care how many trees you plant around it.  Too many people in one place is just too many people in one place.

Seventy five or so years ago, there were two visions of the future.  One was what I call the "Happy Sardine" view in which great human hives with shining steel and glass structures that spiraled up into the sky. There would be communities within these great masses of apartments, entertainment, easy travel, work assignments for everyone, health care and a regular food allotment.  Happy folks living all squished together in automated, pampered socialist bliss was to be the world of the future.  Unfortunately, a couple of decades of watching the socialists idealogues march up and down Europe and Asia, rather tarnished the whole Happy Sardines of the future idea, despite a brief revival with the whole Star Trek series which assumed such an Earth society existed, but never quite explained how humanity had achieved bliss as a human hive on Earth.

Another vision put forward was of a human future where we spread out virtually anywhere we wanted to go. Some posited the virtual end of cities and assumed that as technology allowed us to become more interconnected and independent, we'd naturally gravitate toward quiet havens in the country, that we'd travel less, that roads would become obsolete in favor of personal helicopters or flying cars and that communications advances like visi-phones would mean we could work without ever leaving our homes.

It seems that we stand on the brink in this day and age. We aren't certain which way society should go. The youth in our culture seem to be rejecting the idea of ownership in favor of a use and discard worldview where you move fast, embrace change and newness and avoid getting tied down to land or goods. Why should you? You can always rent a new place or buy new things.  The career's the thing. Like the guys who last lived in the rent house I just moved into. They lived here 8 years, let the place get progressively nastier and filthier till they finally moved - three doors down the street where they will likely start over.  My landlord spent 6 weeks repairing and rebuilding the place.  After he saw what my wife, son and daughter-in-law did to the place when we moved in, he thinks he's died and gone to landlord heaven.  Two way of thinking about things.  Me, I know the place is not mine and I should be especially careful not to mess it up.  The last guys believed, "Hey, it's not mine, who cares if I mess it up?"  I think that dichotomy of philosophies about caring for your rent house, illustrates why I don't want to move to an all rented model of housing.  It only encourages the latter kind of thinking.

The generation that is busily dying out right now believes we ought to work hard, buy a home and a car and provide some stability for the next generations. They still think they should leave something behind when they go. They still buy into the old-fashioned American dream. I've been told recently that my generation needs to "get over it" and accept that our time is over.  Apparently, we're supposed to lie down and quietly expire so our kids can take our money and use it for rent and a trip or two to Cabo.

The question becomes, "Which way do we want our society to go?" Do we reduce the cities and spread out or do we make the cities bigger and bunch people up closer together so it's easier to control them?

Well, first the whole idea that heaps of people are easier to control is ridiculous.  I just moved into town from the lake.  I didn't even remember half the time to lock the doors out there.  In town, the first thing we did was install a security system. Ask the cops about which is more peaceful, suburban communities, rural villages or apartment dense neighborhoods. There's a reason the cops take 40 to an hour to get to my house in the country.  There are not that many of them and they have to drive a long way.  There isn't enough trouble out my way to justify heavy patrolling out there.

Here in town, the cops are never far away.  There's a reason for that!

Oh, there are advantages to living in town.  I can get tons of low-paying jobs here in town and with the reduction in my driving costs and time of commute, I can probably get along on less money and consume far fewer resources living here.  I'm in a "walkable" neighborhood.  So long as I don't go too far north where the gang territories are clearly marked, I'll be okay.  The noise never ends, but then you never feel lonely because you can always hear the sounds of people.  You can't see the stars at night, so you never have to have that feeling of insignificance you get when you look at the night sky.  My allergies to grass and trees isn't bothering me so much.  The carbon monoxide haze here in town isn't much fun, but hey, the movie theater is close.

I can ride public transit all over town between 6 am and 6pm so long as I walk in the street for 5 blocks to the nearest bus stop, successfully dodging cars (we don't have sidewalks here, but I've been told if we could force enough people to move back to town, the transit system would get better).   My sustainable communities buddies want fuel prices to skyrocket so people will have to move back to town and stop their wasteful commuting. Besides, if we can stop people from moving into the country, the wilderness will come back won't it?

Of course, the only problem with the "heaps of people" approach is that people are a lot like manure.  You spread them out over a large area, they can do a lot of good.  You heap them up in one place and pretty soon the heap begins to stink. Human hives are like compost heaps.  At the center they get hot and they rot.  Problems among people increase geometrically as you pile them up in one place.  Ask anyone who's ever lived in a housing project or apartment dense community. My son and his wife lived in a nice apartment complex on the southeast side of town.  They couldn't sit out on their 6 by 6 balcony for fear of witnessing a drug deal in the parking lot and becoming a target.  At night, they sometimes slept on the floor when gunfire erupted in the neighborhood, lest a stray shot pass through the walls as it did in a neighbor's apartment.

Makes you just want to run right out and rent something don't it? There are so many advantages.  You don't have to worry about what colors to paint your walls.  The landlord tells you!  He also tells you what you can plant in your yard (if you have one), when to mow your grass (if you have any or he doesn't mow it himself and charge you extra rent).   

But, hey, we're saving the planet aren't we.

Just one thing that troubles me, though.  Ever notice what happens when all these smart guys heap us all up into nice controllable piles so the central planners can plan our lives and how we live and work and dress and act. Within an incredibly short time, the central planners manage to achieve remarkable results in reducing the number of people they have to manage in those "heaps of people". Population reduction, by the way is the wet dream of environmentalists, so they should appreciate these numbers from the following rock stars of the "heaps o' people" movement.

• National Socialists achieved an overall population reduction of somewhere around 6 million superfluous persons and 84 million evil militarists and unneeded civilians among their allies.  Overall it is estimated that the National Socialists of Germany aided or inspired nations around the world to reduce their populations by nearly 2 billion people overall.
• Soviet Socialists achieved a population reduction on their own and without National Socialist aid of 20 to 50 million persons - an overall 20% reduction of their population.
• Chinese Communists nearly matched their Soviet mentors by lowering their own population by some 40 million while achieving a massive "cultural" revolution.  
• Other socialist states have also achieved remarkable results in reducing the Earth's overpopulation of humans. Folks like Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Kim Il Sung, and other progressive socialists in places like Nicaragua, Rwanda, Laos, Yugoslavia, Chad, the Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia.

The sustainable communities folks will, of course, call me a nut for comparing the sustainable green communities movement to all those nasty folks above. I think I have a valid reason for making the comparison and I don't think I'm too terribly hysterical for making it.  Lord Acton once said, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  There is a problem with the idea of forcing or even "encouraging" people to cluster in pre-planned cities by using social engineering techniques like jacking up fuel prices, heavily taxing suburban or rural dwellers or discouraging automobile ownership.

Once you get folks all heaped up, the problems inevitably start.  Because you have successfully eliminated any other option for a living space than the human hive, there is, then, no way to effectively valve off the discontented population. The police are forced to resort to increasingly draconian measures to maintain control. Then it occurs to some bright social planner that the way to valve off the problems caused by too many people in too small a space under too tight control is to actually reduce the number of people in that space. Laws ensue that conveniently include death as a consequence and the leaders begin to whittle down the population and at the same time, frighten the rest into quiet submission.

Can anyone name one single successful hive city?  Detroit was supposed to be the poster city for the triumph of urban planning.  Tons of federal money has been poured into Detroit since the 1960's than into virtually any other city in the country to help Detroit to create the perfect urban utopia. Since then, Detroit has been governed by an unbroken string of progressive mayors and city councils.  Today it is an impoverished, broken down disaster of a city.  But, hey, look what they did accomplish you gloomy Gus.  They successfully reduced their population by nearly 900,000 since beginning it's expensive federal renewal program in the 60's - better than 35%. 

Does anybody besides me find the folks who want to RESET our culture a little creepy?

Just one man's increasingly paranoid opinion.

Tom King