Ideas in Progress

There is a showdown coming up between several states and the federal government about state ID standards. The Dept. of Homeland Security warns that if the states do not adopt Real ID standards, that their driver's licenses will no longer be considered valid ID for people passing through airport security. I suspect that this statement is being promulgated by federal bureaucrats who are hoping that worried citizens will pressure their state governments into adopting Real ID standards for their states' licenses. While true, this statement is a half-truth. The full truth is that airline passengers need not worry about being denied the ability to fly on a commercial airline regardless of what state they are from or what their state's driver's license standards are. Airline passengers do not need to show ANY identification to fly, as most anyone who has had their wallet lost or stolen on a trip can attest. In fact, a member of the Department of Homeland Security's privacy advisory committee flew on a commercial flight out of San Francisco International Airport a couple of years ago without any ID as a public demonstration of this policy and discovered that he actually got through security screening faster than if he had brought some identification.

For the record, I am not against improving the security of state driver's licenses, but I am against federal bureaucrats distributing half-truths to frighten citizens and manipulate state politics.

Tags: real+id

I checked out this article at Wired News (hat tip:Galactic Interactions) about the Real ID act. Over at Galactic Interactions, Dr. Knop seems to think that the Federal government mandating standards for state driver's licenses (which the states have until the year 2010 to comply with) is a sure sign "that the US is rapidly degenerating into an authoritarian police state." It looks to me like this is not an intrusion by the Federal Gov't on Individual Liberty. It looks to me like it is an intrusion by the Federal Gov't on State's Rights. The trampling of state's rights is hardly a conservative or right-wing position, but I must admit that if I recall my history correctly it was one of the founding principles of the Republican Party.

This move by the federal executive branch is sort of the "straw that breaks the camels back" and has motivated me to describe one of my biggest complaints about President Bush's management of the federal government. I've been meaning to post on it for a long time, and now is as good a time as any.

It seems to me that President Bush believes it is his job as a leader to be a champion for his organization and see to it that his team has everything they need to succeed. I'm sure they taught him crap like that in Harvard. So it seems to me like 9-11 happened and he went to "his team" in the federal executive branch and asked them what they needed to fight WW4^H^H^H the War on Terror. And the federal bureaucrats and regulators and agencies wasted no time in putting together a wish list of every power and tax and meddling authority and gadget and new office space that they have wanted for a long time. And I think he "whittled that down" to get rid of the obvious fat (like forcing the ATF to make do with a $33,000 dollar conference table in their new HQ instead of the $65,000 one they wanted) and then "went to bat for his team." I'm sure the bureaucrats had some really convincing arguments and examples and heartwrenching stories and that President Bush really believes that he needs to get these wish list items for "his team" in the Federal Executive Branch so they can do their jobs.

My problem with that is President Bush is not managing the Texas Rangers baseball team anymore. He's now an elected official. I don't want my elected officials to think of the bureaucrats they oversee as "their team." I want them to think of the rest of the citizens as their team and the bureaucrats and regulators and agents that they oversee as their enemy. I don't want a politician to champion government organizations to me and the other citizens; I want him to be a champion of the citizen's rights and liberties to (or more accurately over) the government organizations. I don't want him to try and keep the government organizations and government employees happy and well-fed; I want him to keep them lean and under control.

I think President Bush means well and thinks that he's doing what a good manager should do. But in fighting to fulfill the wish-list of a power-hungry bureaucracy he is being a "champion" of the wrong team. I don't dispute that some of the things that he has done to help fight the War on Terror are needed. The FBI should be able to do the same kind of open source research as any citizen journalist. The intel and military did need more money and transformation. I just wish that he would be more skeptical of the wish list items government agencies ask for from him. I wish that he would have cleared out a lot of deadwood and statists, and yes appointees and hires by previous administrations. I think that he would have had a lot less problems with in-fighting and leaks and deliberate sabotage and inter-agency squabbles if he had done like MOST presidents do and followed Andrew Jackson's advice about periodically cleaning house and flushing the toilet on bureaucrats and government agencies.

At least he should have done less "standing by his team" and giving them a chance to learn from their mistakes after 9-11, and done more house-cleaning and head-rolling. Has anyone, anywhere lost their job over allowing the 9-11 attacks to occur undetected or any other mistakes they have made? I think most citizens wanted some accounting of blame to be done and some firings and punishments meted out. I think that if the president had seen himself as a public champion instead of team captain of the Federal gov't, that we would have seen some firings and shake-ups in the intelligence and counter-intelligence services. I certainly don't think that a skeptical and frugal public servant should have given the Medal of Freedom to CIA director Tenet after 9-11 happened on his watch. What message does that send? I suspect that Bush thinks it sends the message that "he'll back the people who work for him if they try their best." I am afraid it really sends the message of "no matter how bad you screw up your job is secure." I know that if there was blame-storming done after 9-11 that some people would have been scapegoated unfairly. Being a fair and understanding boss, I guess that President Bush didn't want that to happen; he probably wanted to give people a chance to learn from their mistakes. You know what... Thosands of people died. Frankly, I don't care if a few dozen well-paid government employees get chewed out and fired unfairly as long as it instills a little fear among the remaining government employees that they could, maybe, just possibly be held accountable to the citizens of the country for their job performance.

I don't think this affliction of President Bush's is limited to the War on Terror. I think one of the reasons he has not behaved like a small-government, fiscal conservative is that he gets emotionally invested in the people in government and he becomes pre-disposed to believe what they tell him about the important work they are doing for the country and what they need to keep doing it… instead of being instinctively skeptical of how they are spending the public's money and what power they want to wield over the citizenry who elected him. This intrusion of the federal executive into the affairs of the state's executive branches is just another example of him letting the federal government get their wish list instead being a watchdog to keep them from overstepping the limits on their proper authority. Look, maybe it's a great idea and maybe the states really do need to update and standardize their ID cards… I admit that I don't know about that. But isn't that what our state legislatures and state executive branches are for? That and stuff like… I don't know… running the education system?

Unfortunately if there is anyone even more eager to be representatives of the Federal Government to the people instead of the people's oversight of the Federal Government, it would be the Democrats, so I don't look to the Democratic congress to rein in on President Bush's weak tendencies on this issue. Lest anyone think that I am just another victim of Bush Derangement Syndrome, I want to point out that I am not piling on President Bush for any political gain. I don't think he is stupid, or poorly educated. I don't think he is a war criminal or a fascist or a would-be-theocrat. I think that the mistakes he is making are very common in our culture for managers of all levels both in and out of government. And I think that as bad as he has suffered from this managerial deficiency, either Al Gore or John Kerry would have been worse. I just wish that he would, as they say in Texas, "ride herd" over the federal employees, agents, and organizations under his authority instead of being their friend. I'm glad I finally sat down and got that off my chest.

real+id, bush, states+rights

In one of his essays C.S. Lewis talked about how religion affects people’s perceptions of political issues. (BTW, I don’t have the reference because I loaned my C.S. Lewis collection out. If anyone can send me the citation I’d appreciate it. If wish sometimes that I had thought to buy two copies of all my books, or at least the ones by great authors like C.S. Lewis and Alan Moore, so that I could have one to loan and one jealously guard.) For atheists, like commies or watermelons, the length of a human life is short relative to the potentially centuries long existence of The State. It makes sense then that human life (as long as it is someone else) should be considered to be of small value compared to the value of a long-lived and continent-spanning State. So atheists have little problem sacrificing lots of people to build their dream government. Presumably you could say the same thing about pagans (real greens) and “Mother Earth.” They don’t mind if a few million brown people die sooner as long as Gaia isn’t desecrated by evil chemicals like DDT. Christians, on the other hand, view the human soul as potentially eternal and people as being not just smart animals but special creations of God made in His image. Compared to even one human soul, Earthly governments are short lived and inconsequential things. He thought that it made sense for Christians to value individual people in general (and their religious freedom especially*) over the value of a mere government program or agency, and that therefore Christians would prefer governments that would not intrude on the liberty of the individual citizen. Atheists would gravitate toward powerful and ‘impressive’ governments where their personal ideology might live for centuries even if they can’t. I apologize if I have butchered Lewis’s arguments, but as I mentioned I have to write this from memory alone.

With the radical advances in medicine and biology going on right now and the tremendous amount of resources (both their own and whatever they can steal from anyone else) that the self-absorbed “me generation” will no doubt pour into life extension research to postpone their inevitable demise we may be on the verge of seeing a huge increase in the average lifespan. There are serious efforts underway to understand and “cure” the causes of aging, and if we can ever get to the point where we extend the human lifespan at least one more year every year then we will have achieved practical near-immortality (though accidents would still kill people). Once the human lifespan becomes measured in centuries, then the life expectancy of governments and empires** will not only seem short relative to our immortal soul but also relative to our physical bodies. No longer would one have to believe in an afterlife to think that governments lived and died in the blink of an eye compared with human beings. Any atheist could look at the marvel of future medicine and realize that he could easily live longer than the 5 centuries allotted to the Roman Republic. It would not be an unreasonable assumption therefore that he might also outlive our own Republic (which is already over 2 centuries old) and perhaps even whatever comes after. Does this mean that radical life extension would lead to less statist philosophies in the developed world and renewed emphasis on each individual's liberties? Maybe. I hope so.

Or perhaps the pendulum of political philosophy will swing the other way. It is not unreasonable to assume that these life extending medical technologies will be developed in the United States where the private medical businesses could make a lot of money selling them to the aforementioned terrified aging baby-boomers. It is also reasonable to expect that initial life extension technology will be expensive. Market forces could make it cheaper (though that would require market forces to be operating effectively, which would assume that they are elective procedures like plastic or vision correction surgery) but for old people who are afraid of death that may seem too long of a wait. There would be a great temptation to use socialism to make the life extending treatments available to all politically powerful groups (like retirees) regardless of the cost to anyone else. Trotsky supposedly said of communism that:

"In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle: Who does not work does not eat, has been replaced by a new one: Who does not obey shall not eat."

In a state with both socialized medicine and potentially unlimited life-extension medical technology that principle could change to “Who obeys shall live forever.” The politically powerful in all nations would want this technology for themselves; intellectually property rights be damned, we’re talking virtual immortality here. No doubt they would use the promise of near eternal life here on Earth as a tremendous incentive to ensure loyalty in their subjects. Once disease and old age are conquered, accidents and crime would become the main fears and even a historically democratic society could be strongly tempted to give up liberties if they think that a more regulated society would also be safer. And who would risk losing their Earthly medical immortality by angering the government that runs the hospitals? In the past people might have the courage to rebel against their government since their life was probably going to be difficult and short anyway, but if you could live a few thousand years as long as you did not anger the government then there would be a very, very strong temptation to respond to injustices by just keeping quiet and hoping that they will go away in a century or two. Who could bring themselves to rebel against tyranny or injustice if it meant throwing away millennia of Earthly pleasures and luxury? Devout Christians, Muslims, and Jews… that’s who. What do they care that the government can deny them perhaps thousands of years of physical life if they believe both that their soul will live eternally anyway in a much better place than even the most decadent Las Vegas junket and that doing the right thing (id est that which pleases God) is infinitely more important than doing what merely pleases a government agency or politician.

Perhaps the trend for future societies will also be for freedom to be most likely in countries with largely devout*** populations. As a result of the threat to both tyrants and meddlesome bureaucrats of people who take their religion seriously there would, of course, be a considerable campaign by “reasonable people” to try to dilute, moderate, or emasculate any religious groups that considered principles of right and wrong to be more important than safety, security, and “getting along”… not unlike we are already trying to do to “domesticate” the radical Islam meme and leftists have been doing to modernist or progressive Christian denominations for decades.

* C.S. Lewis wasn’t much for the idea of using gov’t to compel people to not sin, since taking away people’s ability to choose also takes away the virtue of voluntarily turning your back on sin.
** Of course some governments are already too short lived to compare with even current Earthly human lifespans. Surely there were some long-lived people who were born before the Soviet Empire and lived to see its downfall. What is France on their 5th or 6th republic now?
*** Which is not to say that all devout populations would be free, since not all believers share the philosophy that when good acts are compulsory they cease to be moral. One only has to look at much of the Islamic world to see a ready counter-example. Some religious groups might also prefer to retreat from worldly concerns so much that Earthly injustices are viewed as being at least as inconsequential as Earthly mortality.

Update: Yes, I realize I misspelled "religious" in the title, but if I change the spelling now then it will break the permalink.
Update 2: Welcome Carnival goers. I encourage everyone to look around the blog at other posts. Some that you might find especially interesting are "The Future of Candy", "Educational Films...", and "The Japanese/French Son of Concorde...".