No comments on Presty the DJ for July 18
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Two Beatles anniversaries of note today: The movie “Yellow Submarine” premiered in London …
… six years before John Lennon was ordered to leave the U.S. within 60 days. (He didn’t.)
Birthdays today start with pianist Vince Guaraldi. Who? The creator of the Charlie Brown theme (correct name: “Linus and Lucy”):
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This is a slow day in rock music, save for one particular birthday and one death.
It’s not Tony Jackson of the Searchers …
… or Tom Boggs, drummer for the Box Tops …
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This is not about the underappreciated Mel Brooks TV series “When Things Were Rotten,” which was to the 1970s what “Police Squad!” was to the 1980s.
Kevin D. Williamson writes about a year worse than this year:
While race riots and snipers do bring to mind the worst of the 1960s, it isn’t 1968, much less 1860. We’ve had a few years of economic weakness, but there is broadly shared prosperity. We have corrupt and often ineffective public institutions, but government remains responsive enough to ensure general consent, and, beyond its provision of basic physical security, it is less and less relevant to our immediate happiness and well-being. Even as our political discourse becomes more theatrical and hysterical, we are, as a people, remarkably complacent. When Sean Hannity sat down to do a “town hall” show with Donald Trump, he attracted an unusually large audience — but 28 times as many people tuned in to watch reruns of The Big Bang Theory, the Coriolanus of broad, laugh-tracked sitcoms. You’d think a country on the verge of
You’d think a country on the verge of political meltdown would pay a little more attention to the news. Despite what you may have heard from Donald Trump, National Review is the largest magazine of its kind, and our readership is about 4 percent of US Weekly’s. Golf Digest, Glamour, and Martha Stewart Living all have readerships that the New York Times management would sell Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.’s soul for, if anybody were buying.
But telling people that we’re on the verge of civil war is a good business model. Michael Savage has made a lot more money peddling Armageddon than he ever did peddling herbal nostrums as Michael Weiner. His colleague, the Reverend Al Sharpton, has grown rich trying to give him that civil war — it’s a little like the symbiotic relationship between police and terrorists described in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Conrad knew all about living in consequential times: His father had been a famous revolutionary and exile. Like any sane man of his age, he became a British subject as quickly as he could, changing the dramatic rule of the czar for the sedate reign of Queen Victoria. Boring, stable societies are best appreciated by those who have known the other kind.
It is worth considering the possibility that we do not live in especially consequential times, politically speaking, and that much of the drama of our current politics is just that: drama, a performance we stage for ourselves as an entertainment.
Conservatives insist, sometimes quaveringly, that Barack Obama is the worst president in American history, that he is a catastrophe from which we may never recover; Democrats were saying the same thing about George W. Bush a few years back. (I am at a libertarian conference this week, among more than a few people who think that both of those positions were correct.)
Obama is probably more of an Al Smith. Smith was an interesting guy, in many ways, an efficiency-obsessed Taylorist and anti-Prohibitionist whose father, a child of immigrants, had with characteristic American directness replaced his Italian surname, Ferraro, with its English equivalent. All anybody really remembers about Al Smith is that he was the first Catholic nominated for the presidency by a major political party. A century from now, people will remember Barack Obama as the first black American president, and probably not much else.
Forty years ago, our great existential threat was the Soviet Union, the implacable heirs to Conrad’s vicious czars. They promised: “We will bury you!” And they had a great quantity of nuclear weapons to back that up. With all due respect to the brave men and women who fight them and to the millions who have suffered under them, the Islamic jihadists aren’t the USSR. Like our politicians and radio ranters, they’re mainly in the theater business, staging dramatic atrocities in lieu of a more substantial political project. They can do a great deal of damage, but they are not going to march on Washington and hang their banner on the Capitol. They aren’t world-conquering global supervillains, but half-organized desert savages.
I wonder how people in Nice, France, feel about Williamson’s claim. To be fair, though, Williamson wrote that before Thursday’s apparent terrorist attack in Nice.
Donald Trump rages that crime is out of control when it is in fact at a historical low and has been declining, dramatically, for decades. (This is one of the great successes of American public life, one that is poorly understood; naturally, the people in Washington have set about trying to undo it, but, happily, they don’t seem to know how it was done or how to get it undone.) In the 1980s, the Trumpkin types were sure that the Japanese were going to eat our national lunch; today it is the Chinese. Japan is now a nation in decline, and Beijing, far from achieving economic hegemony abroad, is desperately trying to forestall an economic crisis at home.
It is interesting to note that the people now shrieking in the streets (or on Twitter) that these are the worst of times, and possibly the end times, are the same ones who were doing it in the 1980s. Trump himself was a great Japanophobe in the 1980s, threatening to run for president in 1988 (he was really just hawking a book) and treating Oprah Winfrey to tirades against free trade. In 1964, they were in Barry Goldwater’s camp; in 1968, they were with George Wallace, whose policy views were radically opposed to Goldwater’s libertarianism (Wallace was, for instance, an opponent of right-to-work laws, the sort of politician who would have been a union-hall Democrat if he had been from somewhere other than Alabama). But Wallace pressed some of the same cultural buttons.
When he was trying to recruit former baseball commissioner Happy Chandler as his vice-presidential candidate, an aide argued: “We have all the nuts in the country. We could get some decent people, too — you working one side of the street and he working the other.”
One suspects that Chris Christie recently received an e-mail with approximately the same contents.
But they aren’t really nuts — not all of them, anyway. They are disproportionately male, in the South and the Rust Belt, not poor but economically anxious, and — conservatives should here take a note — not conservative. They’re “conservative” if you are the kind of illiterate who works at NBC and describes the pro-abortion, anti-gun Rudy Giuliani as “far right.” But if you aren’t a complete moron, you’ll see that they are anti–free market (especially markets that span borders), pro-welfare (just don’t call their entitlements “welfare”), blasé or worse on abortion and marriage, and they are as class-war driven as any smelly hippie Occupying wherever. The union men I spoke with at Bernie Sanders events would never think of openly supporting a Republican, but they have exactly the same views on immigration as Donald Trump. In another era, they’d have been Wallace voters; no doubt more than a few of them were.
Happy Chandler took a pass on Wallace, and a few months later Americans were hearing Curtis LeMay calmly explaining why we shouldn’t be a prisoner of “phobias” about using nuclear weapons in Vietnam and that stories about radioactive aquatic life around Bikini atoll were exaggerated.
Those were interesting times. I’m glad I missed them.
Well, I didn’t, although I remember almost none of 1968.
But 1968 is a high standard. We’ve had riots this year, and five assassinated police officers in Dallas, but no political assassinations … yet.
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Today in 1963, Paul McCartney was fined 17 pounds for speeding. I’d suggest that that may have been the inspiration for his Wings song “Hell on Wheels,” except that the correct title is actually “Helen Wheels,” supposedly a song about his Land Rover:
Today in 1984, John Lennon released “I’m Stepping Out.” The fact that Lennon stepped out of planet Earth at the hands of assassin Mark David Chapman 3½ years before this song was released was immaterial.
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The Trump campaign and the leadership of the Republican National Committee are working hard to pressure delegates to vote for Trump. The race is over, they say. The voters have rendered their judgment. Delegates do not have the right to nullify this verdict. Now is the time to rally around Trump and unify the party.
Trump and the RNC leadership are wrong. The delegates should feel free to vote their consciences, and the rules and history of the Republican National Convention support their right to do so. In a separate entry, I will focus on the rules and the history of the convention, while here I will examine the moral responsibilities of convention delegates.
The claims of the Trump boosters ultimately boil down to: Because this is a democracy, the people have spoken, and delegates are morally obliged to follow their instructions, regardless of what their consciences claim. This thinking is faulty. In truth, the people have not really spoken, and, even if they had, this is not actually a democracy. Let’s take each point in turn.
First, Trump did not win a majority of the vote. He claimed slightly less than 45 percent of the primary vote, which is less than any presumptive nominee in the modern era. People can have a legitimate debate about the moral demands attending a majority vote—but Trump scored a plurality victory, and an unimpressive one at that.
The truth is that there is not much of a moral sanction for a plurality victory. The winner of such a contest cannot be said to represent the people. If anything, the people as a whole rendered no verdict on the question presented to them. Granted, this first-past-the-post approach to elections is common in our country, but its use is not universal. First-past-the-post is employed not because it is moral, but merely because it is convenient. Declaring that a plurality winner is the victor does not require a costly second round of voting, and it typically favors the two major parties (which happen to write the election laws!).
There are other ways to organize the vote, and they are just as legitimate. Importantly, the constitutional system to elect the president is not first-past-the-post. A candidate must win an outright majority of electors, otherwise the House of Representatives makes the final determination.
What Trump really won is a majority of pledged delegates, so he is not asserting moral sanction but alegal sanction—and a specious one at that. Trump and the RNC are ultimately not relying upon the principle of majority rule, but the fact that the RNC laws call for a first-past-the-post system. But in fact, they do not. That will be the subject of my next essay.
Second, it is true that in a democracy, the people rule—but our system is not a democracy. It is a representative republic. Of course, the people play an important role in our system—as the Declaration of Independence argues, all political power flows ultimately from the people. But the Founding Fathers rejected the notion of vox populi, vox dei. The people were prone to make mistakes and could often form self-interested factions that were dangerous to the welfare of the whole community.
Our system of government employs a vast array of checks and balances to channel the demands of the people into public policy that works for the benefit of all. Crucially, the first line of constitutional defense is the principle of representation. As James Madison writes in Federalist 10, one advantage of a representative republic over direct democracy is that representation may
refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.
This is an important point. The duty of a representative is not simply to reflect public opinion, but to find a way to “refine and enlarge” it, by aggregating the often selfish and ill-informed views of the people into a final judgment that serves their true interests. Trump supporters will denounce this as “elitism,” but they are arguing against the Constitution they claim to revere. This is a bedrock principle of our republic.
Edmund Burke expands on this idea in the Address to the Electors of Bristol, where he rejects the notion that voters may instruct him on how to vote in Parliament:
Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Burke’s situation is remarkably similar to that faced by anti-Trump delegates in Cleveland. They have been instructed by voters back home to support Trump, but they think this a bad idea. Burke’s answer is: you are obliged to do what you know in your heart is right. Each person’s conscience is a gift from God, and obedience to it is the only true way to serve the people. Nobody should want a representative willing to sacrifice his judgment on the altar of public opinion.
Political philosophers have since labeled this theory the delegate theory of representation. How felicitous!Ultimately, delegates to the Republican National Convention should follow the lead of Madison and Burke. If they think Trump is the right choice, that is fine. But if they do not, they should not feel morally bound to vote for him. Their responsibility above all else is to the wellbeing of the Republican party—not just in 2016, but beyond. If their consciences are telling them that Trump is detrimental to the GOP, they have a duty to follow that instinct.
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Erick Erickson has an interesting suggestion should the Republican Party do the right thing and jettison The Donald:
Assuming there is enough support for the delegates to free themselves from the suicide pact that is a Trump nomination, they need a back up ticket. The chief concern I get from delegates is that if they free themselves, what do they do. I think the most obvious choice would be a Scott Walker – Ted Cruz ticket.
Let me explain why.
First, it goes without saying that many of the major players in the party already know that Donald Trump is heading the party to electoral defeat and a certain loss of the Senate. But these same people would rather strap themselves onto deck chairs on the Titanic than have Ted Cruz get the nomination. Cruz at the top of the ticket means they lose power and they will not let that happen.
At this point, it is far better for us to ditch Trump and beat Hillary than have the Mitch McConnells of the world and Washington lobbyists surrender for job protection.
Second, Cruz has the delegate clout to make this happen that no one else does. He also has a perception among even a lot of right-of-center pundits that he is in this for himself and is actually without principle. Those of us who know Ted know this is not true, but a lot of opinion leaders on the right will never be moved from their hatred of Ted.
In Ted’s favor is being the statesman these guys do not think he is capable of being. If Ted Cruz comes out, admits we need to avoid the suicide that a Trump nomination would be, and recognizes he cannot be at the top of the ticket, he can be the king maker and statesman, both saving the party from Trump and setting the party on a course toward beating Hillary. It also, frankly, puts him in a good position for 2020 and proves all the pundits who hate him to be wrong.
Ted deserves to be on the ticket. But I think it is a bridge too far for him to be the Presidential nominee at this point. That’s just the reality of the situation.
Third, we need someone who has shown leadership, can beat the left in states Obama won, and will win back college educated whites while holding on to blue collar voters. I think a Walker-Cruz ticket has the best chance of doing that.
Scott Walker is loved by the donors. In fact, many of the donors sitting on the sidelines now were backers of Walker early on. Walker showed real leadership by bowing out of the campaign early foreseeing that if the field did not consolidate, Trump would win. He gave up his ambitions for the good of the party. He also can win in Wisconsin.
Walker’s major mistake headed into his race was to put all his good people in his Super PAC then hire wildcards to run his campaign. He then could not communicate with the very people who had helped him win so many elections. It was a mistake not reversible once made and I don’t think he should be penalized.
A Walker-Cruz ticket could beat Hillary Clinton. It could be competitive in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and North Carolina, which would give us the Electoral College win that Trump will not get. That ticket would take Arizona, Missouri, and Georgia off the table for the Democrats and settle the unrest in Utah. It could win Wisconsin and get 283 Electoral College votes.
For every Trump voter that ticket might lose, it would pick up both the Republicans Trump loses and the vast number of independents who are desperate for someone other than Hillary and Trump. The winning message writes itself: The GOP spared the nation Trump, but the Democrats won’t ditch Hillary.
Delegates at the convention need to free themselves. Then they need to back a Scott Walker–Ted Cruz ticket. We can beat Hillary. They can beat Hillary.. Donald Trump cannot.
One reason I wasn’t really a fan of Cruz as a presidential candidate is that governors, because they actually have to make decisions instead of making speeches and voting “present,” have to make decisions and manage. But it makes sense for someone who knows the Senate to be a vice presidential candidate. Neither Walker nor Cruz is very libertarian, but they are freedom-lovers in comparison to The Donald. (Among other things, to bring up an issue Walker has failed to bring up: Curtailing free trade would be an absolute disaster for Wisconsin’s agriculture industry, and would probably tank not just Wisconsin agriculture, but Wisconsin manufacturing as well. Wisconsin’s Trump supporters should think about that.)
I’m not a fan of everything Walker has done in Wisconsin. (Unlike some commentators on my side of the political spectrum, wherever that is.) I would, however, vote for Walker for any office as an alternative to hateful, hate-filled Hillary. Happily for Republicans not named Trump, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has their campaign plan, which unlike whatever pops in and out of Trump’s brain has some consistency to it.
I am skeptical that a Walker–Cruz ticket would beat Hillary. (It’s doubtful that ticket would win Wisconsin’s electoral votes, though Trump and anyone else is guaranteed to lose Wisconsin’s electoral votes since the last Republican presidential candidate to win in Wisconsin was Ronald Reagan.) It should be obvious, however, that a Walker–Cruz ticket would not alienate Republicans to the extent they stay home and deliver the Senate and maybe even the House of Representatives to Democrats. (For one thing, a smaller number of actual Republicans voted for Trump than Democrats who crossed over in open-primary states to try to torpedo the GOP by voting for Trump.) Walker–Cruz as electoral damage control might seem a weak strategy, but it’s better than watching Trump blow up the federal-level GOP.
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Fortune magazine interviewed Charles Koch of The Evil Koch Brothers fame:
Koch Industries, when Charles took over, had about $200 million in revenue. Today it has a $115 billion in revenue. We’re told the revenue doubles every six years or so. Could you have done that if you were a public company?
Well maybe somebody could. I couldn’t have because I would have been fired. Because I had these crazy ideas drawing from my interest in the philosophy of science, the scientific method, and my studies of how people can best live and work together.
And so I would say, okay, I’d like to take those ideas on what makes societies more innovative and progressive and productive than others. And let’s find out how to sue those inside an organization.
Why would that have gotten you fired?
Well, because most of the time it didn’t work. Because an organization’s different than a society, so you just can’t take private property; every employee owns their property and exchanges.
And you have internal markets. Well ,that doesn’t work. So you have to think through, and we did think through, what are the benefits. And then how do we duplicate the benefits? But we’ve got to use a different mechanism.
And I believe that most innovation comes from trial and error. And it’s not just trial and succeed; the error is there for a purpose. Like I say to our people, “If you think you’re experimenting and you never have any failures, you’re not really experimenting.” You’re not trying anything new. And so we went through quite a period where what I was doing was hurting the company. Because everybody was confused. And then we finally came up with an approach that really started to pay off.
Can you briefly describe the approach and how it works?
It’s based on the philosophy of science, and we learned to boil it down into a framework of five elements called, vision, virtue and talents, knowledge process, decision, rights and incentives.
And each one is a package of dozens of principles, elements, and practices. And we find when all those are working together in an integrated reinforcing way, you really get performance.
Can you give us one example of how that works in practice that’s dramatically different from the way most public companies work?
In the experience of people we hire and the companies we acquire, we find that most [companies] hire first on talent and then they hope that the values are compatible with their culture.
We hire first on values. And we have ten guiding principles. Many companies have principles but we found also in many companies that there are some they stick in the drawer. It’s a poster on the wall. These principles are who we are as a company. They guide everything we do including who we hire. That’s one.
Another is the division of labor by comparative advantage. And what I mean by that is that rather than you have a vision, you need certain roles filled and you try to get the best person for each one. We try to optimize every person’s role according to what they’re good at and have a passion for. And this is not easy, as you can tell. This takes a lot of work and intensive care.
But we find when we get all that right, the right people in the right roles with the right vision and the right values, then we really have great innovations.
So choosing, getting the right people. Choosing the team comes first.
That’s first.
Now I’ve told you it’s my theory that the reason you after being so incredibly private for 49 years have started to talk more publicly is because in the competition for talent, you feel like you have to get a positive story out there or people aren’t going to want to work for Koch Industries.
That’s a good part of it. No question. As usual, you have great insight Alan.
Thank you. And is it working? You have this sort of notoriety that was created by the press, in part because of your political activities. I wonder by the way, did your political activities in that sense hurt Koch Industries?
It’s not measurable. We have a lot of boycotts against us. And then we have a lot of people who write and say, “we’re going to start using all your products.” So I don’t know what the balance is. But we can’t measure it. I would think overall it’s positive.
You never thought, we should just shut this down and focus on doing our business?
Shut it down? As I like to say, I’d rather die for something than live for nothing. So there’s no alternative for me. This is who I am.
So since we’re on this topic, talk a little bit about what you have spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars, probably more than that. You spent a fair amount of your fortune trying to change the political system.
Well, I mean we’ve spent a considerable amount, but we’ve raised a lot more.
You’ve raised other money as well. Talk about what you ere trying to achieve with that.
Well we see, or I should say I see that the country headed towards a two-tiered society. A society increasingly based on control, dependency, and cronyism. Which is pitting individuals and groups against each other.
And my dream would be to move us toward a society that maximizes peace, mutual respect, and well-being for everybody.
Now in the money you’ve invested in your business you’ve gotten incredible returns. And the money you’ve invested in politics, how do you feel about the return you’ve gotten?
Well, most of that is obviously not in politics because it’s hard to find politicians who are really working, trying to change the trajectory from where it’s going, to where I believe it could go. And so most of it has been on education, community programs, things of that sort.
But you’ve spent a fair amount in politics. You’re one of the largest givers.
We are?
Yes, you are.
Okay, well I’ll take your word for it.
How do you feel about the progress you’ve made in the political arena?
Well not so much in politics, but in policies. We’ve done some good over the years. Moving towards less regulation, less – well, let’s say productive rather than destructive regulation.
Generally that means less regulation.
Yeah, because there’s a lot of regulation that’s very destructive and anti-competition and anti-innovation.
I want to come back to the anti-innovation point but before we do, since we’re on politics can you talk about what you see in the current presidential election?
Yeah, I see two people that as of this point, we’re not supporting.
But the day may come where you have to make a choice, for one of them.
Why do I have to? Are you going to put a gun to my head?
No, but I can tell from talking to you that you’re a conscientious citizen who will want to cast a vote in November.
But if I had to vote for cancer or heart attack, why would I vote for either?
And can you tell us which is cancer and which is heart attack?
Oh, I get confused on that issue. I just don’t want them both at the same time.
But what about Donald Trump, what’s your problem with Donald Trump?
I’m sure he’s a fine fellow underneath, but when you look at our guiding principles, you see that his guiding principles are in many ways antithetical to them and a great many of his policies are antithetical.
For example, if we’re going to put on a 40% tariff, the Smoot Hawley was 60% increase in tariff. And it caused a reduction in world trade by 70% and lead to worldwide depression. So I think that’s a monstrosity.
So not a great way to go.
No. And there are a number of others. But we don’t have time to go through all those.
But I think in one television interview, you were asked well then would you vote for Hillary Clinton and you said something like, “Well I might.”
No. It’s like I rode up in the elevator with Charles Barkley at the Barcelona Olympics. And he was being attacked, and I said something and he said, “yeah, the media never lets the truth get in the way of a good story.” And that’s it.
I’m here to let you tell the true story.
Okay. So the deal is – what I said is, would you ever support her? I said it’s possible if she totally changed everything she stood for. And they spun that around to I might support Hillary.
Okay, I’ve got to be more careful of what I say. You can see why all those years I didn’t give interviews.
Let’s talk about innovation for a minute. Because this conference is really created around innovation. And we’ve already had a lot of conversation today about the perception that the speed of innovation is faster than it’s ever been.
Absolutely.
And yet you have concerns about what our culture is doing to squash innovation.
Right, and fortunately in information technology it hasn’t been as intrusive. But as you all know, there are a lot of forces out there trying to move that in the same direction it has on pharmaceuticals and agriculture and so many other areas.
And to me, this is frightening because I think if we had permissionless or open innovation, the growth rate in this country could be beyond what anybody believed. Because that’s the driver of improvement.
People think okay, it’s capital. If we just said more capital, go back to before we had automobiles and airplanes. We’d have more horse and buggies. Okay that would slightly make peoples’ lives better but what really made it better is innovation. Developing automobiles, and airplanes.
And if we had the same precautionary principles on getting innovations like that improved. Particularly things that are unsafe as airplanes and automobiles, there’s no telling how long and how much money that would take.
So that’s what we’re worried about. But our whole company is based on innovation. And I like to think one of our most powerful innovations was coming up with our management philosophy. And maybe some of our people disagree with that, which is great.
But what we try to model our company around is what a philosopher scientist [Michael] Polanyi called “The Republic of Science.” And that is where all the people working on a problem share knowledge. You try to bring the best technology and ideas from around the world and you integrate them, and you challenge.
Nobody has the best answer. You challenge at every level. And so we have a number of mechanisms to do that. The first one is who we hire. We try to hire people who are open, who want challenge, who have humility. They don’t have all the ideas that none of us know very much. No matter how smart or knowledge we think we are.
And then to combine that with other people’s knowledge. So if we’re in a field, we try to constantly gather all the relevant information. Not only in our fields but other fields that could benefit us. And then we share knowledge internally.
And we have something called the Discovery Board. We meet once a month, and everybody, everyone of the participants, rotating, of course, brings up a problem or an opportunity, and the rest of us challenge it.
And I love it. I [say], “here’s an idea of something we ought to do and here’s how I think we ought to do it.” And the last one I got six different attacks. I don’t mean just, oh that is wrong.
They do that?
Oh yeah.
And you don’t fire them?
I love it. Are you kidding me? Because those people who don’t want criticism of their ideas because their ego’s too fragile? Well, how about if you implement it and you fail? Talk about a fragile ego at that point. Your career is ruined. So they can keep me from a disaster; I love it.
And then we have something called Innovation University where we put out materials to share innovations throughout the company. And the principles of innovation. For example, as I said on experimentation, that what we expect if somebody’s running an experiment to design it in a way that if it fails, you learn enough that you’re glad you did it.
It’s like Edison said on inventing the light bulb: It had 3,000 or more failures. And a friend said gosh, “I’m so sorry you had all those failures.” He said, “I haven’t had any failures. I’ve learned 3,000 things that don’t work.”
And so that’s our attitude. Now if you don’t design it properly, you don’t really learn. And you don’t attack the most critical problems first. If you kind of prove some marginal things, but the main potential problems you haven’t dealt with, then that’s waste.
You need to start with the toughest problem first, and then try to disprove what you’re doing. Because it’s like when we used to do oil exploration, what I used to hope for was a clean dry hole. If we weren’t going to have a gusher, the next best thing is to have a clean dry hole.
Why do I say that? Now we’ve got to test another reservoir. Maybe drill another well to prove there’s —
It’s fail fast.
Yeah, fail fast. Absolutely. Karl Popper wrote a wonderful essay on this called “Science as Falsification.” That none of us, none of our hypotheses are very good.
None of us know very much. So our obligation is to try to disprove it. And the author needs to try to disprove it and get challenges to make them think about what could go wrong. And then if you can overcome that, then you can have something you really can go with.
I compared Clinton and Trump to pre-World War II Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. But heart attacks and cancer works as a comparison too.
Koch then took questions from others:
John Vane: Thank you. My question is do you believe in anthropogenic climate change? And given the risks of being wrong, don’t you think it might make sense to err on the side of caution?
Oh, precautionary principle at work here. Good. No, that’s a great challenge. Yeah I believe it’s been warming and I believe that the evidence is there are such a thing as greenhouse gases, and they’re contributing to that.
But I don’t think anybody knows how much. I don’t think science is settled. I mean how could it be? The people who are projecting, or who have these models, okay, if we do this the other could be increased by one and a half degrees to four and a half or six.
The ocean could rise 20 feet or two feet. So it is not settled. As a matter of fact, science is never settled.
But you’ve been very outspoken about subsidies to renewable energy.
Oh, subsidies to everything. I think this is a big part of what’s hurting this country is cronyism and corporate welfare.
Some of which you get.
Oh yeah, so we make a lot of money off of it as any established company because it’s endemic in the economy. But what I object to is not studying – I think there ought to be more study. It is not the scientific method to criticize and try to silence those who are challenging it.
If we want to have more progress, we need to welcome just as we do in our company, welcome challenges to this rather than name calling and trying to shut them up.
Some people think your challenge has a little more clout than other peoples’ because you can put a lot of money behind it.
Well that would be good. I would hope so. I haven’t seen I have a lot of clout but I’m looking forward to that day. …
Jason Rapp:Hi sir, Jason Rapp from Science Inc. A follow up: if you were spending a lot of money to influence policy, if you were put in charge of climate change policy, how would you approach that? How should a government which is supposed to look at economic externalities, public will overall, how should government approach that issue?
No, that’s a great question. Thank you. No, I’d get rid of all the corporate welfare. I would not have the government picking winners and lowers. Particularly un-economic solutions or products or systems that are making people’s lives worse rather than better.
They even under all the models; they will make very little difference in the future on what the temperature or the weather will be. And instead I would break back all the barriers to innovation and trying new things. New forms of energy, and let people be free. That’s what’s caused progress in the world is free people; liberated people are ingenious. Those people who are trying to silence, enslave, over-regulated or not, that’s our future.
And then that’s win-win. Because we’ll have better forms of energy that will deal with the problem. And what we have now are very inefficient systems that are making peoples’ lives worse.
But there is a market problem here, right? If you believe that carbon is contributing to the warming of the Earth, there is no cost on emitting carbon, so there’s no market incentive that takes that into account.
No, no, there is a market. There are a lot of people who believe in that, so you have pressure from your customers. I mean we in our business with Walmart, we are constantly working on how to save on transportation.
Because your customer wants it.
Because your customer.
Do you think that’s sufficient?
And we want too. And so we got into biofuels and making chemicals with biotechnology because we found that the basic biological, or biotechnology was at a point that we could combine pieces and make chemicals out of C02 and hydrogen cheaper than we could make them chemically.
So we’re doing that. No subsidies or anything. But we have a huge undertaking.
Based on pressure from customers?
Well no, this is based on what many people want. So we’re going to do it, if we can do it economically. But we’re not going to go seek subsidies or advocate subsidies for that because we think that’s counterproductive.
Michael Miller:Michael Miller, Ziff Brothers and PC Magazine. You talked about innovation. One of the things that’s been clear over the past little more than ten years is that productivity numbers in every market across the world have gone down from what they were 10, 11, 12 years ago. How much of that do you blame on regulation? And are there other factors that you think are important?
Well I think that’s the biggest one. And then that comes from my study of history. The slogan I like best of countries is Holland in the 17th century, and it was listen, even to the other side.
And so after they got freed from Spain, they reorganized the society to have absolute free trade, free speech, welcomed dissidents from all over the world. And they had an explosion, they became the wealthiest country in the world through their innovations.
And not only in economics, in art, in everything. And that’s my dream to move our country and every country that would toward that. And then this gets rid of the divide. The divide comes – if you control the political system, you do well and the people who don’t you punish.
And that’s where we’re headed. And we see that more and more. And that’s where the world is headed. So I’d like to see it go in the opposite direction. One of mutual benefit where we work together and have people feel liberated so they take chances and innovate. Which throughout history that’s what’s raised productivity.
Warren Buffett gets a lot of attention because he’s a Democratic billionaire. From what I see the Koch brothers, employers of 2,400 Wisconsinites, have done considerably more for this country than Buffett has, well beyond politics.
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The Hill explains the bizarre nature of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign:
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that he wasn’t committed to some of his most controversial policy positions.
Calling into “Fox & Friends,” Trump was asked by co-host Brian Kilmeade about saying his proposed ban on Muslims entering the country was “just a suggestion” earlier this week.
“Yeah. It was a suggestion,” Trump said. “Look, anything I say right now — I’m not the president — everything is a suggestion, no matter what you say, it’s a suggestion.”
“I feel strongly that we have to do something about — when you look at radical Islamic terrorism, we have a president, as you folks know very well, we have a president who won’t even use the term for the World Trade Center, he won’t use the term. And we have to do something, and you’re not going to do something until you know what the problem is.”
Trump on Wednesday subtly walked back his previous demand for a Muslim ban, which he initially made in the wake of terrorist attacks in December.
“It hasn’t been called for yet. Nobody’s done it,” Trump said Wednesday. “This is just a suggestion until we find out what’s going on.”
Political candidates generally and presidential candidates specifically overpromise. Trump may realize that, though it’s unusual, to say the least, to overpromise and then walk back the overpromise before the election. Which, of course, raises the usual trust issues with The Donald.
Walkbacks shouldn’t be a surprise, though, given The Donald’s history, as the Washington Post is chronicling in a book next month, Trump Revealed:
Trump criticized Ronald Reagan. He embraced Bill Clinton. He was “disgusted” by Bill Clinton and called Ronald Reagan his role model. He changed parties seven times between 1999 and 2012, including a stint to consider a run under the Reform Party.
That doesn’t suggest the existence of core values (other than himself), does it?
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Tufts University Prof. Daniel Drezner:
If Spoiler Alerts has had a theme for 2016, it’s been that Donald Trump is massively unfit to be president, and that his campaign has challenged all sorts of norms that have mattered in American politics for quite some time. In other words, Spoiler Alerts thinks that candidate Trump has made America worse again, and a President Trump would make America bankrupt again.
What’s beginning to concern me just as much as Trump, however, is how other figures of authority are responding to him.
For example, there’s been a growing trend of retired generals and admirals weighing in on American politics soon after giving up the uniform. This was an emergent phenomenon after the start of the Iraq War, but, egged on by pundits, it seems to have escalated since then. Over the weekend, we all got to see retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynnham-handedly audition for the role of Trump’s vice presidential pick. Nothing precludes retired generals from commenting about politics, but as retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly told Foreign Policy’s Molly O’Toole, it erodes an already weakened norm:
To Kelly and many other current and former military, the brass who are weighing in on the 2016 campaign with critiques or endorsements are breaking down a sacred wall between the military and civilian politics that helps maintain the “tell it like it is” integrity of one of the most trusted institutions in the United States.
“It adds to this mistrust issue … if suddenly a guy retires and says, ‘I think this administration is doing all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons,’” he said. The worst thing, Kelly added, would be for a president “to ever think for a second that he’s getting anything but the absolute best military advice, completely devoid of politics.”
This norm has eroded in the military, but it also applies to other elements of the federal government, like the judicial branch. Last week Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg completely obliterated that particular norm in a wide-ranging interview she gave to the New York Times’ Adam Liptak.
Unless they have a book to sell, Supreme Court justices rarely give interviews. Even then, they diligently avoid political topics. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg takes a different approach.
These days, she is making no secret of what she thinks of a certain presidential candidate.
“I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president,” she said. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”As my Post colleague Aaron Blake notes, this was not a stray comment by Ginsburg. She has made this point repeatedly this month:
For Ginsburg, it’s clear that this has become a calculated risk that she is going to take. The New York Times comments weren’t even the only time she has been critical of Trump. In an Associated Press interview published Friday, she also said a Trump presidency is basically unthinkable. …
That’s twice in two interviews — i.e. not a coincidence.
A fun “Notorious RBG” meme has burbled its way into political discourse about Ginsburg, and the promoters of that meme seem perfectly delighted with her Trump comments. And, goodness knows, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts agrees very strongly with the substance of what Ginsburg said.
But because Ginsburg believes in speaking plainly, then let us return the favor: This was a remarkably stupid and egregious comment for a sitting Supreme Court justice to make on the record. Say what you will about Justices Antonin Scalia, who died in February, or Clarence Thomas, but they never weighed in on presidential politics quite like this. The closest example I can find is that in January 2004, during an election year, Scalia went on a hunting trip with Vice President Dick Cheney. That action alone got legal ethicists into a lather.
What Ginsburg did was way worse, though. Indeed, I can find no modern instance of a Supreme Court justice being so explicit about an election — and for good reason. As the Chicago Tribune noted in an editorial:To say her public comments are unusual is like saying dancing cows are scarce. Supreme Court justices don’t — at least until now — take public stands on presidential or other elections. One reason is that they are barred from doing so by the federal code of judicial conduct, which states that as a general rule, judges shall not “publicly endorse or publicly oppose another candidate for public office.” They also aren’t allowed to make speeches on behalf of political organizations or give money to candidates. …
Nowhere is that impartiality more important than in the highest court in the land, which has the final word on a host of grave questions. For justices to descend into partisan election campaigns would undermine public faith in their willingness to assess each case strictly on its legal merits. It would also encourage justices to let their political biases affect, if not determine, their decisions.
Indeed. As my Post colleague and Volokh Conspiracy contributor Jonathan Adler writes, “For the record, I share many of her concerns about Trump, and will not support him for President under any circumstances, but these comments seem quite inappropriate for a sitting member of the federal judiciary.”
As I noted earlier this year, trust in the Supreme Court was bound to take a hit after the death of Scalia and the partisan deadlock over filling his seat. But if eroding trust was a slow-burning political fire, Ginsburg just poured gasoline on it. There are certain privileges that one sacrifices to be a sitting member of the federal judiciary and making explicitly partisan comments about presidential elections is one of those privileges.
I cannot see any possible defense of what Ginsburg did, given that she violated Canon 5 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges. Supreme Court Justices are not strictly bound by that code, but they nonetheless act as exemplars for the rest of the judiciary, and this canon seems pretty important. She should repair the damage and apologize for her remarks as soon as possible. Otherwise, she bears almost as much responsibility as Trump for the slow-motion crisis in American democracy.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 