Running the country is very different from running for president, but how can we explain his rapid fall to earth? I think it is Obama’s uncanny ability to come out against average American sensibilities. He stepped in it with the Cambridge police, with the Arizona law, with the mosque controversy. It is not that he is on the wrong side. Most people probably agree or at least accept his logic, but he expresses it poorly. He is just out of touch with ordinary Americans.

He is no Ronald Reagan

Obama lacks the generosity, the big spirit of a Ronald Reagan. Reagan laughed with us. Obama is laughing at us. You always get the feeling that he is judging you and you are not measuring up, that you are tolerated but not appreciated. I watched him yesterday talking about Iraq. He was announcing a success, but he sounded like a funeral director. No enthusiasm. He was talking down to ordinary Americans. He does that a lot.

Obama's policies are unpopular, but that doesn't explain the fall. Most Americans disagreed with many Reagan policies when he was president. Yet Reagan always gave the impression that he was one of us. When he said “we” you always knew he was talking about America and that he was proud of us – Americans, proud to be one of us - Americans. Nobody can doubt Obama’s of love of country (to paraphrase how he described GW Bush), but somehow he gives the impression that he is not in the same boat as the rest of us. His boat floats just a bit higher than ours does. He feels the need to apologize for us, for our lack of the sophistication he has so carefully cultivated. He hid this from us during the campaign, or maybe we just weren't looking very hard. We were dazzled by the golden brilliance, but it is turning out just to be brass. As Americans get to know more about Barack Obama, he seems less attractive. Despite the experience, we still don't want to give up on the hope, but it isn't looking as good anymore.

I went down to the State of Parana last year to look at some Brazilian forestry operations. I was massively impressed. They were taking timber in a sustainable manner and were heavily into improving silvaculture. The Amazon, BTW, is up north and the deforestation is not related to the developments I am talking about. That is a serious problem, but a different one. In fact, good silvaculture and agriculture in the south and central west takes the pressure off the rain forests.

They used to joke that Brazil was the country of the future and always would be. Looks like the future might be now. I have to admit that I was not optimistic twenty-five years ago, but all that I read and see has changed my mind. It gives me lots of hope for turning around what is so far the world’s biggest failure – Africa. Maybe in twenty-five years we will be talking about the African miracle.

Let me excerpt from the story from the briefing from the “Economist” and we can talk about it. You can read the whole thing at the link above.

"In less than 30 years Brazil has turned itself from a food importer into one of the world’s great breadbaskets. Between 1996 and 2006 the total value of the country’s crops rose from 23 billion reais to 108 billion reais, or 365%.

"No less astonishingly, Brazil has done all this without much government subsidy. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), state support accounted for 5.7% of total farm income in Brazil during 2005-07. That compares with 12% in America, 26% for the OECD average and 29% in the European Union.

"Since the biggest single agricultural failure in the world during past decades has been tropical Africa, and anything that might help Africans grow more food would be especially valuable. In other words, you would describe Brazil.

"Since 1996 Brazilian farmers have increased the amount of land under cultivation by a third, mostly in the cerrado. And it has increased production by ten times that amount. But the availability of farmland is in fact only a secondary reason for the extraordinary growth in Brazilian agriculture. If you want the primary reason in three words, they are Embrapa, Embrapa, Embrapa.

"Embrapa is short for Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, or the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. It is a public company set up in 1973, in an unusual fit of farsightedness by the country’s then ruling generals. At the time the quadrupling of oil prices was making Brazil’s high levels of agricultural subsidy unaffordable.

"Embrapa received enough money to turn itself into the world’s leading tropical-research institution.

"When Embrapa started, the cerrado was regarded as unfit for farming. Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist often called the father of the Green Revolution, told the New York Times that “nobody thought these soils were ever going to be productive.” They seemed too acidic and too poor in nutrients. Embrapa did four things to change that.
First, it poured industrial quantities of lime (pulverised limestone or chalk) onto the soil to reduce levels of acidity. Embrapa scientists also bred varieties of rhizobium, a bacterium that helps fix nitrogen in legumes and which works especially well in the soil of the cerrado, reducing the need for fertilisers.

"Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture, making possible the enormous expansion of Brazil’s beef herd.

"Embrapa has recently begun experiments with genetically modifying brachiaria to produce a larger-leafed variety called braquiarão which promises even bigger increases in forage.

"Third, and most important, Embrapa turned soyabeans into a tropical crop. Soyabeans are native to north-east Asia (Japan, the Korean peninsular and north-east China). They are a temperate-climate crop, sensitive to temperature changes and requiring four distinct seasons. Embrapa worked out how to make it also grow in a tropical climate, on the rolling plains of Mato Grosso state and in Goiás on the baking cerrado. More recently, Brazil has also been importing genetically modified soya seeds and is now the world’s second-largest user of GM after the United States. This year Embrapa won approval for its first GM seed.

"Such improvements are continuing. The variety of soya now being planted [in Brazil’s Northeast] did not exist five years ago.

"Lastly, Embrapa has pioneered and encouraged new operational farm techniques. Brazilian farmers pioneered “no-till” agriculture, in which the soil is not ploughed nor the crop harvested at ground level. Rather, it is cut high on the stalk and the remains of the plant are left to rot into a mat of organic material. Next year’s crop is then planted directly into the mat, retaining more nutrients in the soil. In 1990 Brazilian farmers used no-till farming for 2.6% of their grains; today it is over 50%.

"Embrapa’s latest trick is something called forest, agriculture and livestock integration: the fields are used alternately for crops and livestock but threads of trees are also planted in between the fields, where cattle can forage. This, it turns out, is the best means yet devised for rescuing degraded pasture lands.

"The fields of Mato Grosso are 2,000km from the main soyabean port at Paranaguá, which cannot take the largest, most modern ships. So Brazil transports a relatively low-value commodity using the most expensive means, lorries, which are then forced to wait for ages because the docks are clogged.

"Partly for that reason, Brazil is not the cheapest place in the world to grow soyabeans (Argentina is, followed by the American Midwest). But it is the cheapest place to plant the next acre.

Big is beautiful

"Like almost every large farming country, Brazil is divided between productive giant operations and inefficient hobby farms. According to Mauro and Ignez Lopes of the Fundacão Getulio Vargas, a university in Rio de Janeiro, half the country’s 5m farms earn less than 10,000 reais a year and produce just 7% of total farm output; 1.6m are large commercial operations which produce 76% of output. Not all family farms are a drain on the economy: much of the poultry production is concentrated among them and they mop up a lot of rural underemployment. But the large farms are vastly more productive.

"From the point of view of the rest of the world, however, these faults in Brazilian agriculture do not matter much. The bigger question for them is: can the miracle of the cerrado be exported, especially to Africa, where the good intentions of outsiders have so often shrivelled and died?

"There are several reasons to think it can. Brazilian land is like Africa’s: tropical and nutrient-poor. The big difference is that the cerrado gets a decent amount of rain and most of Africa’s savannah does not (the exception is the swathe of southern Africa between Angola and Mozambique).

"Brazil imported some of its raw material from other tropical countries in the first place. Brachiaria grass came from Africa. The zebu that formed the basis of Brazil’s nelore cattle herd came from India. In both cases Embrapa’s know-how improved them dramatically. Could they be taken back and improved again? Embrapa has started to do that, though it is early days and so far it is unclear whether the technology retransfer will work.

"A third reason for hope is that Embrapa has expertise which others in Africa simply do not have. It has research stations for cassava and sorghum, which are African staples. It also has experience not just in the cerrado but in more arid regions (called the sertão), in jungles and in the vast wetlands on the border with Paraguay and Bolivia. Africa also needs to make better use of similar lands.

"Still, a word of caution is in order. Brazil’s agricultural miracle did not happen through a simple technological fix. No magic bullet accounts for it—not even the tropical soyabean, which comes closest. Rather, Embrapa’s was a “system approach”, as its scientists call it: all the interventions worked together. Improving the soil and the new tropical soyabeans were both needed for farming the cerrado; the two together also made possible the changes in farm techniques which have boosted yields further.

"Systems are much harder to export than a simple fix. “We went to the US and brought back the whole package [of cutting-edge agriculture in the 1970s],” says Dr Crestana. “That didn’t work and it took us 30 years to create our own. Perhaps Africans will come to Brazil and take back the package from us. Africa is changing. Perhaps it won’t take them so long. We’ll see.” If we see anything like what happened in Brazil itself, feeding the world in 2050 will not look like the uphill struggle it appears to be now."

As I have repeated many times, I love government and think it is so precious that we should use it sparingly. It is also important to remember that governments are the creatures of the people, not their masters. A lot of things are none of government’s business. Most of our lives our private and should stay that way.

I was worried last year. We seemed to have gone off the deep end with this intervention and equal outcomes idea. Fortunately, we have come around right again to a large extent. Whether you support them or not, we can thank the tea parties for bringing us back to our senses.

BTW - if you have not clicked on the link up top, do it now. It is a very funny video.

You don't learn from experience unless you pay close attention. Failure focuses the mind. We ask what went wrong and identify improvements. As often, however, we don't fix the problem but try to fix the blame. This absolves everybody else and lets us all continue business as usual. We can find individuals who made poor decision, but the only way to systematically improve is to look at the whole system and analyze the interactions. If you have a dysfunctional system, changing the players doesn't help.

There is a currently popular saying that "doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity." This is simplistic. It is possible to flip a coin ten times in a row and get all heads, but still expect the probability of the next toss to be even, at least after checking the coin. A good system with good people may produce poor results. That is why you study the processes. If you can identify the factors the led to the result and they are not likely to recur wholesale changes are unjustified.

Success brings less soul searching than failure. We point to good results and are unenthusiastic about checking to see if they were deserved. But just as it is possible to fail for reasons beyond our control or factors unlikely to recur, we can succeed for the same bad reasons, so success should be as closely scrutinized as failure. There is no shortage of talk about failures in Iraq, although much of it is designed to fix the blame not the problem. As it becomes clearer that we are succeeding, we should learn from what went right and how it might be transferred elsewhere. I have a couple ideas from my own point of view. Keep in mind that I have personal knowledge only of events in Western Anbar and so I emphasize factors and people acting here. My list is not comprehensive.

Leadership

Had Abraham Lincoln had stuck with General George McClellan, or the American people elected "Little Mac president in 1864, we might well need a passport to cross the Potomac. Leadership changes the course of human events and a change in leadership was essential to the turn around in Iraq.

It does not follow, BTW, that previous leadership was incompetent (remember fix the problem, not the blame), just not appropriate. McClellan was a superb general. In a defensive posture, he was great. He just didn’t grasp what he had to do to win and didn’t have the temperament to do implement it. That task eventually fell to Ulysses S. Grant. Lincoln found his general in a man who had been unsuccessful in his earlier endeavors but had the appropriate skills, talents and temperament to handle this job.

General David Petraeus was the right man for the new strategy in Iraq in 2007. He wrote the book on counter insurgency and recruited a first class-team to help him with the changes. He also had the support the new Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, to make the needed adjustments. BTW - the COIN (Counter insurgency) Manual is itself a great example of the flexible strategy it advocates. It is a living document, almost a wiki. As new experience is analyzed and digested, it changes and evolves. The right leadership with the right strategy was essential to success, but causality is never so uncomplicated.

Marines

The USMC was employing the "new paradigm" in Al Anbar before it became part of a new strategy. Marine commanders were well familiar with the theory and practice of counter insurgency, but as importantly the Marines in Al Anbar constituted a learning organization. As experience about what worked and what didn't passed through the organization, Marines adapted and improved their responses. The Marines have a long history with counter insurgency and working with indigenous forces going back at least to Presley O'Bannon on the shores of Tripoli, where they earned the Mameluke sword Marine officers still carry. And they have been a learning organization all that time.

Another advantage is the Marine's rotation system. Marines tend to come back to places near their last deployment bringing with them their experience enhanced by the perspective of their time away. Beyond that, when Marines go back they share their experience with their colleagues coming out, both formally and informally. It is hard to envision a better system for learning and adapting.

Many of the Marines in Anbar today were in Fallujah or Hadithah during the bad times a couple years ago. More than others, they see the progress and understand what still needs to be done. Those who are here for the first time have heard and internalized the stories.

Beyond that, Marines in Anbar did what they do well: eliminating bad guys & breaking their stuff; making friends in that unique Marine Corps way; adapting & overcoming. When the surge came, the Marines were ready with a receptive environment they helped create.

A Time for Peace

"To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven ... a time for war and a time for peace." (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8). Early in the conflict, proud and martial Anbaris allied with Al Qaeda and other insurgent forces to fight against the American invaders. It was an understandable, if mistaken response, but by the close of 2006, they were tired of war; they had come to understand the folly of working with retrogrades such as Al Qaeda and their sense of honor was satisfied and slaked by the casualties they had suffered and those they had inflicted. Al Qaeda told them that the Americans would cut and run. Marines don't. Anbaris learned to respect CF forces. As importantly, they came to understand that CF forces had come to respect them and it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Persistence

You cannot achieve success if you do not stick around long enough to achieve it. Difficult and unexpected circumstances in Iraq provided many excuses to give up. Leading experts, pundits and even members of the U.S. Congress told it straight-out that the U.S. was defeated. They were wrong, but they could have been right if we had acted on their advice. In other words, a lack of resolve on our part would have made their prophecies self-fulfilling. In the event, the U.S. stayed for the turn around.

Luck

Risk can be controlled but never eliminated and pure uncertainty lurks beyond all the risks we can calculate. Even the most exquisite plans must run the gauntlet of random chance that can devastate a perfect plan or vindicate a dreadful one, which is why we have to analyze the process and not judge strictly by results, as I said above.

Early in the conflict, many things turned out worse than we reasonably anticipated. Now things have changed. Our enemies turned out to be poorly organized. Often incompetently led and ideologically myopic, they made stupid mistakes that turned local populations against them. Fighting an insurgent enemy can be like playing whack-a-mole. It is a frustrating game, but it is easier if the moles are not very clever. I don't want to take this too far. Many of our opponents are committed, deadly and dangerous and even in small numbers a ruthless adversary can inflict severe suffering, especially if their goal is to attack civilian populations. But these very tactics erode their support.

The big piece of good luck is the flip side of some very bad luck for the rest of the world - soaring oil prices. Iraq recovered its previous ability to produce oil almost at exactly the time world oil prices spiked. During Saddam's time, Iraq earned oil revenues of around $20 billion a year. Experts anticipated revenues at this time of around $35 billion. Last time I heard, they were looking at $80 billion and the number keeps on growing. Oil money lubricates and more and more often Iraqi funds can pay for the needed infrastructure upgrades and improvements in Iraq.

PRTs, ePRTs and the Holistic Approach

You cannot win a modern war by military means alone. COIN Manual says that some of the best weapons do not shoot. Military units have long had Civil Affairs (CA) teams and Commanders' Emergency Response Funds CERP. These improved conditions for Iraqis and certainly saved many lives. Building on this success and experience in Afghanistan, in November 2005, Secretary of State Rice established Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Iraq. In January 2007, President Bush announced the establishment of embedded PRTs, who work directly with military units such as Regimental Combat Teams.

These were civil-military teams of experts who engaged provincial and local Iraqi officials as well as ordinary Iraqi citizens. Some of their work was old fashioned diplomacy, meeting people, talking to them and listening to concerns. But unlike diplomats in many other contexts, PRT members have access to concrete resources. This development aspect, helping rebuild or in many cases just build for the first time is not entirely new, but putting it together with the interagency team of experts that made up a PRT is breaking some new ground.

PRTs are led by a senior State Foreign Service Officer with a deputy from USAID or a military colonel often as an executive officer. Included on the team are experts on budgeting, industry, law and agriculture, among others.

In rebuilding Iraq, damage from the 2003 invasion is often the least of our problems. Iraq has been in a state of war and/or sanctions for nearly thirty years. Many things decayed during that time and other things that could have been done never were. The Saddam Hussein regime did minimal or no maintenance on the plant & equipment. The whole country suffered the kind of socialist mismanagement seen in former communist regimes, but with an additional layer of sanctions and war. It might have been better if some of the facilities had been destroyed by CF bombs and could be rebuilt from scratch.

The physical damage can be repaired more easily than the damage to human capital. The late despotism actively destroyed most aspects of civil society, anything that might insulate the people from the dictates of the state. In former communist Europe, it was possible to find functioning civil organizations, as the fiercest aspects of Stalinism were generations in the past. In Iraq, the destruction was more recent and in some ways more though going. Ironically, sanctions and isolation helped finish the demolition Saddam started. The only viable non-governmental structure left were family/tribes and religion.

Iraq has a significant, if now distant, tradition of reasonably competent officials. PRT experts work to revive this and build on it. Iraqis are responding very quickly, considering the conditions.

The most popular expert in Western Al Anbar is our agricultural advisor. Iraq was once a bread basket and still has wonderful soils, available water and a skilled population. Unfortunately, some of the best agricultural lands has been abused for thousands of years. Saddam's mismanagement exacerbated it, but I digress.

COIN talks about the need to clear, hold & build. CA, CERT & PRTs have helped build physical infrastructure as well as relations. The Iraqi people increasingly have a commitment to their own future and freedom. They will not easily give it up when terrorists come calling.

What They Said Can’t be Done

The U.S., CF and Iraqi accomplishment is astonishing, especially when you consider the near-death experiences of 2006. The Middle East is more secure w/o the murderous Saddam Hussein in power and it is immensely better off than it would have been had we failed in 2006. I believe this will be seen by future historians as a paradigm shifting event. For awhile many people feared that the initiative had passed to the bad guys or at least to the forces of chaos. The apparent disintegration of our position in 2005/6 seemed to confirm that impression. It was never as bad as it seemed or as bad as it was portrayed in the media, but the trend was unmistakable.

Today we have come out of the darkness into a new morning. It is still a little too dark to see clearly all the features and it is still full of challenge and fraught with dangers but also full of opportunities. For the last generation and arguably since the end of World War I or the Sykes-Picot accord, this region has been unstable and dangerous. Maybe we can help make the future better than the past.

Our Iraqi friends deserve it.

Posted on June 21, 2008 08:49 AM

Every living thing is “genetically modified.” That is how evolution works and that is why you are not a worm or a bumblebee. Most of the living things around us have been genetically modified by humans. Do you really think that ugly little Chihuahua dog, like the one that says "¡Yo quiero Taco Bell!" could have developed through natural selection? (That may be a bad example, since that is an obvious human error) The “natural” varieties of crops like corn, wheat or apples are unappetizing (just about every apple you have ever eaten comes from a clone) and the ancestral horses, sheep or cows are almost unrecognizable.

As science developed, humans got better at creating hybrids and new varieties. In the past, we depended on taking advantage of naturally occurring mutations and “defects” in the genes. A more modern method has been to bombard plant tissuesbombard plant tissues with things like gamma rays (you know the ones that produced “the Hulk”) in order to produce mutations, some of which may be useful in improving the genetics of the crops. This can work, but it is very wasteful and inefficient. You also are unsure of what you will get and you will get lots of things you don't want coming along with those you do.

Genetic engineering offers a safer and more effective approach. Scientists can alter only the part of the organism that they want, making it more resistant to bugs, for example, faster growing or less water consuming. GM crops, as they are called, have become common in much of the world. They have increased yields and allowed for significant reductions the use of agricultural chemicals and fertilizers, which have brought environmental benefits. GM crops will be increasingly important to feed a growing population and will be essential to survival if we are to adapt to the changing world predicted by global warming scenarios.

But as with any improvement, there are opponents, like those machete wielding thugs in the Italian cornfield, who are willing to use violence, protests and intimidation to prevent change. On the right, they hunker down behind religion. On the left, they often shield beneath the pseudo-scientific “precautionary principle,” a type of “non-god religion” which essentially states that since we cannot predict the future 100% we should do pretty much nothing innovative. Under the precautionary principle, we could never have developed electricity, which remains very dangerous and, unproven w/o a shadow of a doubt, to this day. Thousands of people are killed every year. We obviously have not worked out all the bugs. Of course it is almost impossible to work out the bugs w/o deploying, so you never get to do anything, which is what many “activists” (interesting name for people trying to stop things) want.

African governments, spurred on by activists, actually allowed their people to starve to death rather than accept GM food. I don’t know how much worse off you could be than dead, but activists and politicians evidently feared this outcome more. This is probably the most acute case of death by activism, but each year millions of gallons of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers are needlessly used on the world’s crops because of resistance to GMOs. Most of the resistance come from (literally) fat cats in rich countries. Most of the suffering is done in poor ones.

We really have to be less superstitious or at least control those superstitious people so that they cannot do so much harm. The good thing about science is that it is empirical. You don’t just decide in advance what SHOULD happen. Instead you test and try it out. If it doesn’t work, and MOST experiments fail in the sense of not working exactly as predicted, you modify your ideas and try something else. If you think you can lay out and predict all the steps in advance, i.e. before you or anybody else has tried it, you are not using science. If you don’t understand that, you are not a scientist. That is okay. Most people are not. But it is not okay to stop those who do understand. If you do that … well … you are a sh*thead – a very scientific term, BTW. Its synonyms include “antiglobalization activist”.

It is probably a case of really poor leadership. Hugo Chavez, the charismatic but deranged leader of the country, spends most of his time posturing on the worlds stage, making extravagant gestures to countries run by other kooks, places like Iran or North Korea, and generally not taking care of his own country’s priorities. He has directed much of his domestic energy to oppression opponents and intimidating journalists. The police have little time for investigating things like murder, rape or kidnapping when they have to spend their time suppressing the news of murders, rapes and kidnappings.

It is sad. Some countries are poor by nature. They are crippled by factors such as thin soils, few resources, or unpleasant neighbors. Maybe they are beset by drug gangs, submerged in war or just have very uneducated populations. Venezuela is not like that, at least is was not like that. Venezuela is blessed with everything it needs to be a great place. But it is run very poorly. This kind of curse can go on for generations. Argentina was one of the world’s richest and resource blessed places. A little over a century ago, you might have estimated that it would become the most prosperous place in the Americas and one of the most prosperous in the world. But it fell under poor leadership and suffered an alternative future. It has suffered for more than 100 years from the serial mismanagement of leaders. Zimbabwe was never rich as that, but before Robert Mugabe took over it was a rich agricultural producer with vast diversity of products. Today it cannot even feed itself. Of course we cannot leave out Iraq, which in the early 1960s looked like it was about to take off. That was before Saddam. They say history is not made by great men, but it is amazing what a few individuals can do, for good and obviously for evil. And the evil these men do lives after them, even if a lot of the people don’t.

BTW - You can see from the chart nearby that the U.S. is now the world's leader in wind energy, with more than 1/3 of the total world production. You might not guess that from all the caterwauling you hear about the U.S. falling behind in these things. Any guesses about which state is the leader?

If you look at the nearby chart, you see that rail productivity exploded and prices came down after 1980. I would like to credit the great Ronald Reagan with this achievement, but the Staggers Act was one of the few sustained successes that came out of the otherwise malaise crossed Administration of Jimmy Carter.

The Staggers Act rationalized regulation and eliminated some of the pricing schemes that had previously crippled the railroads. It still working. Some people believed railroads were creatures of the past that couldn’t compete with trucks; they were wrong.

In fact, the fastest-growing part of rail freight is “intermodal” traffic: containers or truck trailers loaded on to flat railcars. The number of such shipments rose from 3 million in 1980 to 12.3 million in 2006. This is something that affects all of us who drive on the highways, since one freight train can carry as much as 280 trucks. Now maybe we all appreciate freight rail a little more.

Of course, success creates its own dangers. Bigger container cargoes and an expected doubling of the capacity of the Panama Canal by 2014 will create need for capital improvements. Government may pony up some of the cash, but government money comes with government management. It would be horrible if we returned to the bad old days before 1980.

(BTW – I (John) worked on railroad cars in the 1970s. I remember that each train had to have a “fireman”. What did the fireman do? Nothing. A generation before, the fireman’s job had been to shovel coal in the old steam engines. When diesel replaced steam, union rules and regulations protected this now redundant and phony baloney job. Some of the firemen would actually do a little useful work, but others would tell us, “I ain’t gotta help you f*ers and I ain’t gonna.” And they were right.They just had to be ready to shovel that coal.)

The other threat to freight rail is passenger rail. High speed passenger rail has its own tracks in a few places, but most of the time they share the tracks with freight. Passenger trains pay only a fraction of the costs, but they tend to get right of way over freight. Passengers complain a lot more than does a load of coal or timber, so when push comes to shove, freight is shoved aside. This saps efficiency and greatly adds to costs.

We have to be careful when we rush to copy Europe’s trains not to copy the downside with the good. Freight rail is the most efficient form of terrestrial transportation and there is a good reason it so rapidly replaced canals and wagons. It can continue to compete well in the age of trucks, as long as we don’t mess it up.

Or maybe you have to be doing something illegal to get the sympathy of the Obama folks.

Obama promised lots of things to lots of people and everybody lined up to get his/her payoff. Every bad decision would be bailed out. If you irresponsibly borrowed too much money, you could blame the banker for not understanding you were a deadbeat. You were the victim. The Dems identified the villains - and there were lots of crooks (many friends of Frank, Dodd, Rangel and Waters, but let’s pass on this for now) Unfortunately, this group of “villains” also included the people who created most of the jobs and did most of the work and all that castigation made them cautious about investing. And the uncertainty in taxes & regulations created by overactive Democratic legislators confused even the boldest among them.

The result is that we got an anemic recovery and – worse – a recovery w/o many jobs. Who wants to hire new workers when you don’t know what it will cost you in taxes and benefits? Who wants to grow a business, when you know that a couple more employees will push you into the Obama folk’s regulatory crosshairs? Better lay low and play defense. Mort Zuckerman points out. “At this point after the onset of a recession, employment payrolls have typically exceeded 700,000 jobs above the previous peak. In this recession, we are still down roughly eight million jobs from the December 2007 peak. As for consumer confidence, the Conference Board survey shows an average a full 20 points below the average lows of previous recessions.” After two centuries of optimism, has Obama managed to turn America into a nation of pessimists?

This is the worst economic downturn since 1982, but it is not the end of the world. When Ronald Reagan faced that challenge, he didn’t lose his optimism and he had faith in the American people. To paraphrase RR, when your neighbor loses his job, we call it a recession. When you lose your job, we call it a depression and when the Democrats lose their jobs, we will call it a recovery.

What the people want is a plan that doesn’t require so much spending and borrowing. They want an acknowledgment of the greatness of America and the power of hard work. They don’t want to be called victims and be given the vague hope that government will save them from themselves. That is for others, less successful and less exceptional people than Americans. Americans are winners. Ronald Reagan knew how to talk to that America. If Obama learns the language, maybe he can get his approval ratings back out of the basement.

Politicians whose personal egos and probably dishonest desire to set up future jobs for themselves and their cronies may push through policies they know the people have specifically rejected. Policies they were too afraid to push during real time, they may now try to enact.

Voters should demand a truth in promises guarantee. They should ask candidates outright what policies they favor and demand that there be no switching after the election, no matter who wins. Politicians break promises, but if they break their words only weeks after the election, we could at least properly identify the true dirt bags.

Democrats have said that they will not do such a dishonest thing. Of course, we believe they are sincere. Certainly neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid would try to pass in the lame duck session those things they feared to do earlier. And of course, an honest man like President Barack Obama wouldn't allow it if they tried.

What happens in the real world is that by the time the political classes notice a problem, the conditions that created it have already changed and by the time they can get legislation passed, other solutions are probably already in place and by the time the bureaucracy can actually get the money spent the target will have moved. That is why government’s job is to create the conditions that allow the people to make choices that create prosperity, and why it is not government’s job to manage prosperity.

Let me add another wrinkle. People familiar with the government know that the fiscal year is almost over. Federal budgets in the bureaucracy work to the fiscal year. If part of the government has not spent its money, it has to give it back to the treasury and will probably get less money next year. It is very difficult to estimate exact needs. Imagine in your own household if you had to specify your exact expenses a year in advance. Can you guess that you will need an expensive root canal done in month seven or that your son will total the car in month nine? You have to budget for the unexpected, which are … unexpected. So right about now, government Departments have discovered that they have “extra” money that they have to use or lose by the end of September. Vendors and contractors know this very well and they are lined up to get a piece of this action. Much of this money will be well spent on things that are needed but were deferred to account for potential emergency spending. But haste will make waste.

This system is inherently wasteful. Smart people have been trying to make government less wasteful for centuries, literally. And the current American system is actually very good in relation to past or world standards. But friction is inherent in any government system because we must empower representatives to make rules; they must empower others to execute their/our priorities; those carrying out the work will need to develop delivery methods and everybody up and down the line will have to be audited and controlled to keep the system honest.

In other words, if you can decide to do something yourself, you can just do it. If you ask the government to do it for you, it has to go through the sausage making and digestive processes outlined in simple detail above. What comes out on the other end is not always what you think you asked for.

I have written before that I love government and love it so much that I know we should use it sparingly. When trying to solve problems, we can choose many tools. Sometimes the government is indeed the proper tool. But more often we should give it to private business, empower NGOs handle it or just let the people to take care of it themselves.

I met some religious fanatics near a cemetery last year. They were evidently from that cult that protests at the funerals of soldiers. They weren’t happy when I stopped to comment on their aggressive signs and they got positively apoplectic when I told them that their god was false. I recall that I used a particular Anglo-Saxon adjective to describe their monster god that really set them off. I challenged their demented deity to strike me down right then and there. He didn’t. The weirdos promised he would do it later, but so far it has slipped his mind. Or maybe it is because their god is not the God. And THE God doesn’t arrange his day around my schedule.