Hennessy's View

The debtor is a slave to his lender.  

Americans hold hundreds of billions of dollars in credit card debt alone.  To this add automobiles, student loans, mortgages, medical, and myriad personal loans and you arrive at the staggering figure of $2.55 trillion with a ‘t’.  

This massive debt–encouraged and backed by the US Government–makes us miserable.  Seriously.  Are you happy?  

If the debtor is slave to his lender, then the US Government is slave to China and Japan.  Want to know why we ignored Tienenmen?  Because our master told us to. 

The US Government is on the hook for another $10 trillion, and that number is increasing at a rate of $1 trillion per month.  Unless someone stops the madness, we’ll be, as a nation, $22 trillion in debt by this time next year–more if the ecnomy worsens.

Good Government Doesn’t Run on Debt

I am not a balanced budget purist.  I understand that wars and other emergencies sometimes require deficit spending. But the current wars don’t cost $22 trillion.  Not even $1 trillion, unless you use New York Times math.  So what’s the excuse?

Americans Are Spoiled Brats

We want what we want, and we want it now.  We’ve borrowed our way into slavery.  When we hit our credit limits, swindler politicians offer to extend even more credit.  So we become slaves to Congress, to the Department of Health and Human Services, to the EPA, and to every other government department and agency.  

It’s humiliating, disgusting, and embarrassing.  

What’s the Answer?

Stop borrowing.  That means you, me, the government, your husband or wife, kids, everyone.  Let the big banks fail; they are our pushers, our needle providers, our crack houses.  But they only offered the easy credit with painless terms.  They only offered a free t-shirt in exchange for our servitude.  They only held out the pen.  We took it into our eager little hands and signed over our lives.  

Knock it OFF!  

Every time you vote for a politician who “brings home the bacon,” you’re selling yourself to yet another master.  Last fall, the masters got together and decided to yank on the chains that bind you to them.  It hurt, didn’t it.  It hurts still.  And it will hurt worse over the coming years. 

The government has absolutely no plan to pay off its loans.  Have you noticed?  It has no intention of paying off.  Know why?  Because there’s no difference between goverment debt and personal debt.  You will pay the $22 trillion AND the $2.55 trillion because YOU SIGNED FOR THE LOAN!

Three Simple Steps

1.  Don’t borrow another dime.  Not for a car, not for college, not for a house, not for a television, gasoline, groceries, clothes, vacations.  Stop borrowing.  If you need help, read Dave Ramsey’s books
The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness
or
Financial Peace Revisited

2.  Have at least $1,000 in savings for true emergencies

3.  Pay off all of your debts as fast as you can, one at a time, beginning with the smallest balance and ending with the largest balance.

3.b.  Elect politicians who will put up 100 percent of their personal assets (house, cars, savings) if they ever vote for a deficit budget outside of war.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Kent Beck, the genius who discovered eXtreme Programming, from whence sprang all so-called Agile methodologies, can lead us to good government. 

Beck, a senior consultant in the 1990s, noticed that all big software development programs began and ended the same way in the days of waterfall. 

Massive Requirements:  Every project began with lots of highly paid people sitting in endless series of meetings aiming to document everything that a system must and should do and how.  The system didn’t exist yet, but this did not stop the binder builders.  The requirements were usually very wrong.  The stuff they “required” had no market, wouldn’t work, or contained self-contradicting statements, like “all numbers shall be represented with letters.” 

Massive Design:  Since the requirement rarely made any sense,  a most senior programmer who worked for the software vendor would attempt to draw pictures of what he thought the requirements meant.  Since the people who did the requiring had no idea what the engineer’s symbolism stood for, the engineers could convince the customers that their drawing were right.  This guaranteed a system the customer didn’t want, but it bought a lot of time.

Massive Hidden Development:  Development always began late because the first two steps always took twice as long as anyone thought they would.  But that’s okay—development will take twice as long as predicted, too. During this period, the customer might forget that the project was launched since the programmers and their work remained carefully hidden from view for months–sometimes years.

Massive Testing:  This is everyone’s favorite part.  After eight months of programming pictures that don’t mean anything to anyone into software system, the people who drew the pictures convince testers—who are usually very green programmers or wannabe programmers—that the software works exactly the way the customer wanted it to.  The testers then stare at their computers for four months, report bugs for everything they don’t personally like, and, finally, put their stamp of quality on the product.

User Acceptance Testing:  This is where the customer first sees the product—2 years after signing a contract.  During this phase, the client manager who agreed to let this particular company develop this particular system works closely with the vendor’s senior developers to craft a convincing argument.  This argument must demonstrate to executives in the client company that the manager didn’t throw away $2 million on a system that will never work.  That task is more daunging  because the software system was supposed to keep track of weather balloons everywhere in the world but it actually predicts the number of Powerball Lottery tickets that will sell given an estimated jackpot. 

Crunch Time:  After realizing that he’ll never convince his bosses that the vendor delivered is what the cliented wanted, the customer gathers two or three of his key people to “work out some issues” with the code.  These two or three people work along side four or five of the vendor’s best programmers and a tester.  This mixed team is co-located, and it works 18 hours a day for 2 months.  Instead of written requirements and esoteric drawings, the customer people tell the vendor people exactly what they want and how it should work.  The vendor people code it and demonstrate it as the customers look on. When it’s right, customer says, “Done.  Next.”  They work together on one or two things at a time until the system is sufficient for their needs.

Post-Mortem:  This is where Kent Beck (and everyone else who’s ever been part of a waterfall software development project) realize that 80 percent of the code that the customer accepted was written during the 2 month “crunch,” that 80 percent of the original requirements weren’t needed, and that 80 percent of the drawings were meaningless.  Smart people, like Beck, say, “You know what?  Next time we have 2 years to build software, lets skip right to the crunch time.”  Stupid people, like 90 percent of the organizations in the world, say, “Next time, we’ll spend more time gathering requirements and drawing pictures and testing so that we get it right.”

Lesson for Government

Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington, et al, discovered the United States of America’s government the same way Beck discovered intelligent software development:  they observed what worked and did that.  They threw out all the stuff that didn’t work.  They accepted the fact that the smartest men in the country couldn’t run the country as well as the people could run themselves.  They admitted that the people would tell the government when they needed it to act, and that absent such a signal, the government must do nothing.

When Henry Paulson and Barack Obama tell us what government must do, they are like the requirement gatherers telling the programmers what the system must do.  They are probably wrong.  And if they’re right, they’re still wrong.  The people are smarter than their leaders. 

Popularity: 1% [?]

Once upon a time, when blogging was fresh and new, conservative blogs dominated the top of Technorati’s most popular lists.  Michelle Malkin, Powerline, and InstaPundit routinely led Talking Points and Kos.  But we’ve fallen.   Big time.

Yesterday, Michelle was still the #1 conservative blog–at 39 overall.  Huffington Post is #1, Kos is #8.

Why?

Reason 1:  Focus

Or lack thereof.  The rising stars of the right aren’t necessarily political, but scientific.  Tom Nelson’s blog digests all of the day’s (even hour’s) top stories involving some idiotic global warming (aka "environmental," aka "sustainability," aka "climate change") news.  Anthony Watts is a seasoned meteorologist who provides deep dives into global warming news and science.

By focusing on a single issue, these blogs deliver one-stop shopping for conservatives in search of AGW news. Their blog rolls are similarly focused, allowing readers who want more to jump to another blog that emphasizes climate.

Most conservative blogs, by contrast, ramble.  I don’t mean that posts ramble, but the content is all over the map.  Take Hennessy’s View for example.  I’ll hit AGW, economics, and the 10th Amendment all in the same day.  When a reader visits Hennessy’s View, he has no idea what he’ll get.

Reason 2:  Proliferation

According to the Battleground Poll, 60 percent of voting-age Americans describe themselves as Somewhat or Very conservative.  That means we have a pool of up to 126 million people to win over as regular readers.  Of that 126 million, according to Forrester, 25 percent are inactives when it comes to the internets, leaving 94.5 million for us to fight over.

While the liberals have 4 or 5 top blogs and lots of micro blogs, conservatives have a similar number of top blogs but many, many blogs just below the top.  These high quality blogs cannibalize readership from the top 5.  In other words, there are (my calculations) almost twice as many conservative blog readers as liberal readers, but our focus is diffused across many sites while the liberals concentrate attention on a handful of blogs.

Quantifying attitudes across 100 blogs is difficult.  Quantifying top 100 is easy.  So Technorati counts the top 100 which makes it look like liberal readership dwarfs conservative.

Should We Care?

Yes.  The combination of lower rankings and scattered focus hurts the impact and influence of conservative blogs.  "Most Read Blog in America" carries credibility with people we hope to influence.  If you don’t believe that, talk to a marketer.  Similarly, people who can afford to shop in specialty shops do so because these shops are precise.   A women’s lingerie shop carries . . . you guessed it.  No surprises or unfulfilled needs when a woman goes into Victoria’s Secret. 

How to Fix This

I don’t have a solution for the whole right side of the web.  But I will share a strategy I’m going to employ for the next 4 weeks.

1. Fewer Posts:  Instead of blogging every stupid idea that pops into my head, I’m going to focus on one quality entry per day.  I’ll start in the morning.  If I have time to write and revise, I will do it before leaving for work.  If not, like today, I’ll revise and publish when I get home.  This will allow me to post cleaner copy.
2. Limited Subjects:  I will leave my categories for historical posts, but I am going to pick no more than 3 topics going forward:  Global Warming, Limited Government, and Zen Conservatism. 
3. Emphasis will be Zen Conservatism, which will be a focus on the positives of conservatism and the essential tenets thereof:  life, liberty, the pursuit hapiness, and private property.

One additional idea for the conservative blogosphere in general:  narrow your focus.  It isn’t easy, but it’s necessary. 

Popularity: 1% [?]

For months I’ve been echoing the warnings of Peter Schiff and others:  when China stops buying American debt, we’re in deep, deep trouble.  The possibility for hyperflation, prices rise by double-digits on daily or weekly measures, becomes palpably high.

Even though this article from IHT failed to suprised me, I have a sick, frightened gnawing in my stomach:

China has bought more than $1 trillion in American debt, but as the global downturn has intensified, Beijing is starting to keep more of its money at home – a shift that could pose some challenges to the U.S. government in the near future but eventually may even produce salutary effects on the world economy.

Thanks to Hank Paulson’s Bailoutpalooza followed by Obama’s promises to pile on more bailouts and $1 trillion or more in stimuli, the US single-year deficit for 2009 will be between $1.2 trillion and $2.5 trillion.

There are three ways to finance that deficit: tax, print, or borrow.

A tax increase, as we have been told, could push us into a deep depression.  We don’t want that.

Printing $2.5 trillion in new cash would lead to hyperinflation.  Unless you want to buy bread for $3,000 a loaf, that’s not good.

Borrowing delays the reckoning.

One way or another, we will deal with depression, hyperinflation, or–like Germany in the 1930s–both.  At least in a depression with deflation, cash will save you.  In hyperinflation, it’s every man for himself.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Request:  If you read a blog post on Hennessy’s View that seems to be rooting for America to fail or suffer in order that Obama take the blame, please e-mail me (bill-at–hennessysview–dot–com) and comment.  I’m a hot-head, and I might not catch myself.

The United States and every country on earth is in a perilous position right now.  The world economy is on the brink of depression.  Bad business practices driven by even worse government policies and regulations have destroyed $ trillions in wealth and left us on a narrow, swampy peninsula between deflation and hyperinflation.

We have, for good or ill, elected a young and inexperienced president.  That man’s past rhetoric was clearly Marxist.  But his post-election appointments and words seem closer to those of George Bush than of Gus Hall.  We can work to win back Congress and the White House without destroying the country in the process.

Here’s a few recommendations:

• Praise Obama’s rightward tacks more than you attack his leftist moves
• Look for people or businesses in your area who need help and help them if you can
• State the positive results of conservative governance more often than you assail the consequences of liberal error
• Wave to drivers of cars with Obama stickers, even as you pass them to expose your McCain-Palin tags
• Write letters to the editor, blog comments, and blog posts complimenting Obama’s good judgment, but always identify yourself as a conservative Republican who work for his defeat in 2012

All of us are saying goodbye to co-workers let go because of the economy.  The way out of this mess is lower taxes, less government, and graceful ends for companies that can’t make it.  Each of these right actions carries with it painful consequences for some of us.  We can and must make these changes to our national direction.  But we can and should make them without being asses.

We all know how painful and maddening it was to hear Democrats and liberals cheer American casualties in Iraq and fantasize about the assassination of a Republican president.  While we might not go so far, why take the chance?  Let’s sell our superior system of economics and limited government.  The deficincies of their alternative will be undeniably obvious soon enough.

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