1000 Words From S. Marty Pantz

Governments have no bottom line to worry about.  They get their funds from taxes, not customers.  Taxes are levied by legislators who theoretically express the will of the voters.  Legislators do not run governments as businesses. Nevertheless, like people and business, governments have tangible assets. Being so disconnected from market economics, however, governments generally do not view their holdings as assets in the usual sense.  A park is a park, not a piece of real estate.  Or more accurately, a park is a valuable piece of urban real estate, but because it is a public park, this is irrelevant.  Or…

A society in which the citizens all have adequate security, justice, housing, food, education, transportation, health care, and a clean and safe environment is better than one where these things are inadequate.  True love, great sex, tropical vacations and warm clothing are good too. All these necessities and niceties of life are beneficial.  These measures of well-being are the concern of any society.  Yet how they are provided is not self-evident.  With whom does responsibility for their provision lie?   Who assures justice?  Who provides education?  How much education?   Is responsibility with the individual or does it belong to the state? …

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…