Close Shaves and Progress

Special to FreeRepublic ^ | 7 June 2009 | John Armor (Congressman Billybob)

[Congressman Billybob]

I was shaving Friday morning in a small, unaccommodating, shared bathroom on when a stranger walked in. He said hello, I said hello, and I felt like Cary Grant, shaving in the bathroom of the train station in Chicago, in North by Northwest.

Well, he wasn’t a complete stranger. I knew he was a member of the Class of 1964 from Yale University, since we were up for our 45th Reunion (yes, we are older’n dirt). Anyway, he noticed my faceful of shaving cream and said, “Still doing it the old-fashioned way?” I replied, “It lets me see where I’m going.” He said, ‘It’s too early in the morning for philosophy.”

I thought about what he said and realized he was right. Not about it being too early in the morning, but about it being philosophy.

Shaving with a brush and a blade razor is a satisfying activity. At the beginning, you know clearly what you need to do. In the midst of the process, you always know where you stand. And at the end, you know when you are finished. Those three qualities make it the similar to assembling a piece of furniture that comes with instructions, putting a child through college and graduate school, and thermonuclear war.

Now, let’s consider some human activities which do not offer such clarity in the beginning, middle and end. Try teaching morals to an adolescent male. It can be done before the adolescent gets to that point. There are many instances of adolescents learning morals the hard way, after they become adolescents. But by and large the learning curve shuts down during adolescence.

For the next example, I’ll just state the words and you can fill in the explanation why this activity is very hard to plan, and very hard to have its progress measured. Courtship and marriage.

It was a pleasure to see how many of my classmates were still with their “starter wives.” They had married well, weathered the storms, and now were living out Robert Burns’ couplet, “Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be.” In that enterprise, everyone knows what the end point is. Most of us even take vows to go there, in front of God and everybody. But we fail along the way.

But what does all of this, beginning with shaving the old-fashioned way, have to do with the usual subject of politics? I was getting to that.

The stimulus plans and the bailout plans passed by Congress, and others coming down the pike to be passed shortly, have three short-comings compared to shaving. First is the lack of clear, stated goals. Stimulating the economy is not a goal, but a wish. If the economy is to grow, specific segments of the economy which are capable of growing in this environment, must be stimulated. Stimulation directed at buggy whip factories, or a more recent idea, at newspapers, is going to fail and waste the money spent there, because the industry itself is dying.

Second, there are no measures of progress in these bills. This is not a new error on the part of Congress and Administrations. For almost a century, Congress has been passing bills whose titles said they would “reform” whatever. Not only do such bills lack measures of accomplishment for their alleged purposes, Congress has a distressing habit of rejecting such measures in bills, and of dismantling outside measures that might prove, or disprove, the effectiveness of the bill.

However, the new “reform” bills going through Congress are different from prior time- and money-wasting bills because the new ones are in the trillions. These involve a century’s worth of debt, not merely a few year’s worth of debt. National bankruptcy, not national belt-tightening, will be the consequence of failure. That makes it rather more important today to have actual measures of progress, or the lack of progress.

To talk about “jobs saved” is to deal in imaginary numbers. If we are down by ten million more unemployed people, a spokesman could argue that if we hadn’t “saved” five million jobs, we’d be down fifteen million. Why not claim ten million saved? It is still fictitious.

When will we know we have reached the end? When America has a healthy economy again, with about 95% of all who want a job, having one. The danger is that like badly made and badly tended marriages, we will all wind up in economic divorce court long before we see a glimpse of such success,

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About the Author: John Armor practiced law in the Supreme Court for 33 years. He now lives on the Eastern Continental Divide in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu

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[Congressman Billybob]

The bathroom musings of an elderly man. LOL.

John / Billybob

[ArmstedFragg]

Elderly? Now just a darn minute, there....

You be elderly. I’ll be ‘well seasoned’.

[knarf]

Alright you guys ... settle down ... we oldER gentlemen are merely oldER.

[BuckeyeTexan]

Congress might as well just title their “reform” bills “unknown and unintended consequences” bills because they don’t have a clue, don’t know where to find a clue, and couldn’t buy a clue even if they did find one.

[BIGLOOK]

Aloha John!

Bailing out sinking ships taxes labor but doesn't save the ship. (I doubt that the ships were sinking in the first place, foundering yes, sinking no.)

But what worries me most is the notice that Obama gave at the Press Dinner;

"My next 100 days will be so successful, I will complete them in 72 days. And on the 73rd day, I will rest."

Of course this was made in fun...right? But how does he measure success. It certainly isn't happening in foreign policy where he's a laughing stock by enemies and allies alike. It certainly doesn't come from closing franchises and businesses and the subsequent job losses closures entail. Most certainly not from the loss of revenue his sinister regulation and micromanagement deems a solution.

The only thing he can be jokingly referring to is the suppression of opposition, so weakened and threatened that they standby and do nothing.

Never liked politics but follow Paine's skeptical words.

[Sir_Ed]

Very nice, John.

Thanks.

Ed

[Earthdweller]

There you go again, trying to be logical in the face of pure madness.

A far left socialist Congress with a far left POTUS doesn't have to make any sense when it comes to the economy.

If their economic plan succeeds, they win more elections. If their "plans" fail, they add more bailouts with more heavy government control strings attached (bloodless commie revolution).

There is no loss for them either way they go.

[primatreat]

I am class of ‘64 NC state and I am not old.

[Jack Hammer]

Very mannered and literary way of saying that the Democrats are in the process of flushing the United States down the toilet.

[El Gato]

(bloodless commie revolution).

There is no loss for them either way they go.

You make an historically unwarranted assumption. And so do they.

[El Gato]

the Democrats are in the process of flushing the United States down the toilet.

Yes, and I for one am getting dizzy from the swirling.