At one point in my career, I had a boss who knew that he had
to invite discussion among his key staff members of how the company we worked
for was doing and where it was heading. But he was doing little more than
paying lip-service to business-school conventional wisdom. His favorite
response to anyone coming up with an idea for the improvement of the business
was: “you strike me with the blinding light of the obvious”, suggesting that he
had long considered the idea being brought forward and already incorporated it
in his plans for the future. If the idea had any merit it had to have come from
him.
It will not surprise anybody that this way of denigration of
participative management eventually took the wind out of the sails of all the
key employees and the outcome is predictable: the company, which once was an
industry innovator and leader, was absorbed by a corporate giant and no longer
exists.
In American politics, the blinding light of the obvious
plays a very different role. Even the most common sense steps toward improvement
of the system are being ignored or tabled. It is as if the blinding light of
the obvious never penetrates Capitol Hill or the White House.
How else can we explain that:
1.
At a time of burdensome federal deficits and
debt, we continue to subsidize farmers while commodity prices for the main
crops they produce are and have been at above average levels;
2.
We artificially pump up the price of corn by
continuing to subsidize the use of corn for ethanol production (which, without
government support could not compete with oil) for automobile fuel use;
3.
As the only nation in the developed world, we
allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise their scary wares directly to the
public (with cautionary warnings and all) rather than leave it up to our doctors
to decide what’s good for us;
4.
Congress votes to spend money on military
hardware (tanks and aircraft) that the military does not even want, at least
not in the numbers provided by Congress;
5.
Faced with threatened insolvency of our big
entitlement programs Social Security and Medicare, we fail to take the simple
steps, outlined by a variety of think tanks, public interest groups, columnists
and engaged citizens that can put these programs back on the path of long term
sustainability;
6.
Faced with structural budget deficit and a
messy, ineffective and metastasized tax code, we can’t have a serious debate
about simplification let alone the merits of a consumption tax versus income
tax and the use of sin taxes to discourage dangerous behaviors;
7.
We know that our world dominance depends on how
well we educate our children and yet we let the cost of higher education,
particularly at the top schools, move out of reach for just about all other
than the very rich;
8.
We know that our health care system is the most
expensive in the world without offering, across the board, best in class
results, but we utterly fail to bring cost under control even with the largest
legislative effort in decades: we specifically prohibit Medicare to negotiate
the cost of pharmaceuticals like the health insurance companies do and we
prohibit the free flow of medicine from across the Canadian border.
There is so much the Federal Government, legislative and
executive branch, could do to keep America competitive, but the system is
paralyzed. Washington is immobilized by interest groups and petty jealousy
between Republicans and Democrats.
It is as if the army of politicians inside the Beltway is
under control of the mob and scared to death to do anything that the boss will
not condone. The boss, of course, in this case is the lobbyist for whatever
special interest group rules the roost. It is demoralizing to see how much our
legislators are beholden to institutions like the NRA, AARP, NEA, UAW, ACLU,
not to speak of the lobbies for major industries like defense, banking, oil and
gas, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, financial services and communications. The
voting public should be the boss, but its influence has been hijacked by
institutions with pockets deep enough to buy the subservience and vote of our
representatives.
The net result is that the Nation’s business no longer gets
done. The Federal Government can no longer proclaim that it sets the rules of
the game by which all constituents have to play and it is incapable of creating
optimum conditions for free enterprise and citizens to shape conditions for a brilliant,
sustainably competitive future.
One has to be blind, blinded by the lightning strike of the
obvious, not to see how even the most common sense solutions to our challenges
get stopped in their tracks because of the sway special interest groups hold
over our legislators on both sides of the aisle. So, the question becomes: how
much longer are we going to tolerate this perverted façade of representative
democracy?
