-By John Armor
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 face full 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.
____________
John Armor is a graduate of Yale, and Maryland Law School, and has 33 years practice at law in the US Supreme Court. Mr. Armor has authored seven books and over 750 articles. Armor happily lives on a mountaintop in the Blue Ridge. He can be reached at: John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
Fair Use: This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research, educational, or satirical purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site/blog for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.