Year: 2020

I have railed against government bureaucracies for forty years.  On a visceral level, it is because they make me do things I do not want to do and they take my money and spend much of it foolishly. So, are my gripes entirely idiosyncratic -- a function of my being a cheap, ornery cuss with a pronounced anti-authoritarian bent -- or is there something more generic about bureaucracies that actually make them prone to failure?   What I believe notwithstanding, I think the government bureaucracies have certain characteristics which are generally universal and usually debilitating to their mission, regardless of what…

I've done my fair share of real estate investing over the years.  Occasionally a person of the younger persuasion asks me for advice.  My usual response is to do what I did:  buy your first house in 1970.  Though something of a wise-ass answer, it does dramatize the problem.  I was still a couple years south of thirty that year and had an middle-level professional job which paid $15,500 a year.  I bought a house in a changing blue-collar neighborhood where the newcomers’ collars were more likely to be metaphorically white.  The house had about 900 square feet and cost…

I have an extensive collection of quotes I have gleaned over the years from many sources. There is is usually one which is appropriate to whatever issue is at hand. From H. L. Mencken, we get... for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong. The following is an example. Willie Brown is a long-time and very astute California politician.  He was the Democratic Speaker of the State Assembly for many years, during which time he went toe-to-toe with Ronald Reagan for the latter’s two terms in office.   An annual poll of the press in…

Some governments allow their employees to affiliate as unions.  When this is the case, the government agrees to negotiate with the collective concerning the terms and conditions of employment.  Other governments do not permit unions or will not deal with them.   While the employees may have an unquestioned right to affiliate, no government entity has any legal obligation to recognize them unless a superior level of government mandates such recognition.  It is almost universally the option of the government whether or not to deal with its employees in a collectivist form.  When the push for unionization for government employees came…

Neighborhoods change.  They change ethnically and they change physically.  They change for the better and they change for the worse.  The process isn’t always pretty.  Some people benefit and some suffer.  A letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle presents the writer's grievances stirred by gentrification.  The writer’s points are dramatically presented but she does make her case.   Tax Big Tech and IPOsMore taxes on Big Tech and IPOs is a good idea.  And if taxes drive them out of town, better yet.  Taxes will never mitigate the miseries brought by the recent invasion of San Francisco.  The…