Payslee-Weigh

Defending Joe Paterno in the Court of Public Opinion (For Now)

2011-11-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

There were no planes crashed into Pennsylvania State University buildings this week, no fights for control of aircraft over the bare mountains this side of State College, and Joe Paterno's physical body was not destroyed. In every other important sense though, many people were paying serious mind to destroying something that is grand--the legend and legacy of football coach, Joe Paterno.

We study entrepreneurship in Economics. I define the concept in its purest and best sense as "ruthless attention to success without being immoral or unethical." As you read what comes next, do it with this American ideal close at hand: A person is innocent until proven guilty. Now I am defending Joe Paterno in the court of public opinion, not a court of law. As such, I do not ask you to suspend disbelief or limit yourself to only things that are permissible in court. On the other hand, I insist that you not conclude based on logical inference, or your own experiences, unless they are supported by the facts that are available. He is charged with something in this most chaotic of courts--either a cover up or a criminally lackadaisical approach to child pedophilia. Either would be sufficient to undermine claims that he has been a great leader and entrepreneur in the purest and best sense. For now, I have not seen adequate evidence that he is guilty of either.

I want you to read the Grand Jury investigation report into the activities of a Mr. Jerry Sandusky and participants in (or victims of) his Second Mile program. Consider it Exhibit A. Sandusky was once the defensive coordinator at Pennsylvania State University. Don't worry if I didn't spit out the proper title, you will find it quickly by Google search. Let me caution you, it is graphic. Even if you are like me, a forty-seven year old tough guy, rest assured you will need facial tissue long before you arrive at the twenty-third page.

Once you have read it, and are trying to make it look like you really weren't sobbing at the horrors committed by Mr. Sandusky against those innocent little boys, think about all of the ways it might have gone down, and all of the ways it might not have. Someone didn't prevent Jerry Sandusky from having access to the Pennsylvania State University facilities, but who...and why? A crime was committed, there were just too many failures to report things that law enforcement needed to know. But is there anything in the Grand Jury report that clarifies that it was Joe Paterno who silenced those with a duty to speak or kept allowing Sandusky into the facilities?

Here are Exhibits unrelated to the charges against Paterno I offer in support of his ruthless attention to success without being immoral or unethical:

Exhibit B - The Football program has always posted high graduation rates (as high as 87 percent over the most recent period).

Exhibit C- The men he coached: Franco Harris, Jack Ham, Daniel Sepulveda, and Paul Posluszny, to name a few, continue to offer him their respect and deference in opportunity after opportunity.

Exhibit D- Pennsylvania State University has had no major NCAA infractions or investigations under Paterno's 45 years of leadership.

Exhibit E - I'm not aware of any time a Paterno team scored more than 60 points in a game. They don't run up the score.

Exhibit F - I grew up a Pitt fan (Dad graduated in 1961). Year after year of pulling for Pitt in the big rivalry (and usually being disappointed), I came to a startling revelation. Paterno had something there. His players seemed to love him. The students and fans were loyal, and indeed the continuity was making Penn State a cut above the other programs. In a particularly touching moment, sometime around the year Woody Hayes decked a Clemson kid for intercepting a pass, Joe Paterno did the unthinkable: he cried...on national television! The reason? His team lost. Now here it seemed, was a leader. A man who could show us tears for his players, and ruthless attention to success, all at the same time.

Now precisely what evidence does the other side offer of Paterno's failure as an entrepreneur or a leader? No one is suggesting that he himself was terrorizing little boys. Many bloggers, sportscasters and others focus instead on the cover-up. Their evidence? Only the logical inference that Paterno must have been involved in a cover up--as if every time something horrible happens, you can assume the most highly respected person who could have benefited from doing it (or in this case not doing it) must have, without further investigation.

Actually, the most damning piece of public information (that I have seen) regarding Coach Paterno is in the Grand Jury report itself. That report describes a 2002 encounter where Paterno is alerted by a graduate assistant to a crime committed in the Pennsylvania State University shower by Mr. Sandusky. The other side's argument is that Paterno didn't do anywhere near enough when made aware of this event. Perhaps, but remember the American standard of justice--innocent until proven guilty--and see Exhibit A.2 below.

I offer two more exhibits illustrating lack of evidence of Paterno's failure as an entrepreneur and leader rather than support of his success. These are from the Grand Jury Report. Let's title them A.1 and A.2:

Exhibit A.1 - From the grand jury account, and various media reports, it is clear that Coach Paterno told Mr. Sandusky in 1999 he would never be the head coach at Penn State. Sandusky resigned immediately. This coincides with the timing of a security investigation done into Mr. Sandusky's illicit affairs with the Second-Mile program, and its young participants. But there are no answers here, only questions. Why did Coach Paterno tell Sandusky he would never be the head coach? Were rumors swirling? And what if Paterno was not aware of the security investigation, only the rumors? Would you call Paterno's moves to distance Sandusky from the football program an enabling technique in that event?

Exhibit A.2- Paterno was neither a witness to Sandusky's 2002 crime nor was he Sandusky's supervisor according to the Grand Jury report. He received an account of this on a Saturday morning from a graduate student (at home), and called his supervisor to his house on Sunday morning to report the incident. Does this sound like someone trying to do the minimum and sweep it under the rug? I suppose it might, but on the surface it sounds swift and attentive to me.

Two leaps to conclusion have swirled around this story that unnerve me. If you read the blogs, newspaper opinions, etc., there seems to be this view that Paterno had incredible power. With one phone call to the police, he could have had Jerry Sandusky arrested and put away, but held back. As I've mentioned before, the second is because Joe stood to benefit from the image of a squeaky clean program and appeared to have this iron hold on Pennsylvania State University's day-to-day activities, he was obviously working to cover-up the Jerry Sandusky story while enabling him to torture more young boys.

I'm asking you to consider the third possibility. The chance that Paterno is the man we thought he was all along. A guy who either didn't fully understand Sandusky's vile nature, or didn't have the power to completely dispense with him. Given the 2002 Grand Jury account, if nothing else, this demonstrates a personal shortcoming. Among the differences in Paterno's account of the incident and the graduate assistant's account, there is no disagreement that the graduate assistant reported "something of a sexual nature" involving Sandusky and a boy. In other words he saw some kind of crime. Paterno reported it as described earlier, but didn't make sure it got to the police as he could have. However, if this is the extent of Paterno's involvement in the crimes, it is proof of his fallibility, but not a justification for overturning his legacy.

On the other hand, I accept that evidence of Mr. Paterno's involvement in a cover-up of Mr. Sandusky's actions may be forthcoming. He would have had much to gain from it. If we are compelled to accept that a cover up by Paterno must have happened without evidence of its truth, though, then we risk destroying an inspiring leadership and entrepreneurship story that should have only been footnoted. When we move beyond fables and children's stories even the best leadership stories have inglorious footnotes, reminding us that people can be heroic, but not God-like. Whatever comes to light at Pennsylvania State University, wherever Joe Paterno fits between thug and hero, we must get to the bottom of it. We must never accept that the only difference between heroes and thugs is that the former haven't been caught yet.

Throughout the past week I have often felt like a victim. I share that with the kids that demonstrated at Pennsylvania State University earlier in the week. While I can't speak for them, I can tell you that I haven't appreciated the logic leap many have tried to force upon me that Paterno must have been covering for Sandusky. The evidence isn't there (yet?). It also troubles me that I may have been admiring a thug for the last 40 years. However, we aren't the victims. The victims are the somewhere between eight and 100 boys that Jerry Sandusky was able to abuse because of a conspiracy of silence--a conspiracy that Joe Paterno, arguably the most ethical man in football, played a role in. I want to know as much as I can about that role--was he a naive, old icon that could have done more, or a thug trying to preserve his legacy at the expense of at least eight pre-teenage boys? However, I will not rush to judgement.

Something Large

2011-08-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

The average wage an American earns is among the highest on earth. During 2009, the typical yank earned about eight times more than the his counterpart in China, ten times the salary of the Indian, and over 100 times as much as the gentleperson form Burundi (Central Africa). How sorry can you feel for the Virginian, Appalachian, or Californian who is likely to collect more in his or her unemployment check than the Chinese or Indian does by working? Gosh--his food coupons and access to Medicaid are likely to go farther than the Central-African's paycheck.

Yet here we are, mired in in the economic doldrums, wondering if it's a recession, depression, or jobless recovery we're talking about. America's problem has festered for a while, and it's quite simple if you think about it: We don't make enough things or offer enough services that the world wants to buy. I'm not talking about cell phone components, clock radios, or even cars. The globalites buy these from the guys that work for less than $4 per hour. I'm talking about the stuff that humanity (American and otherwise) is willing to pay more than $22 per hour to get because it's so large.

The rest of the planet will pay more than $22 per hour for cures for Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and pancreatic cancer. It will gladly shell out more than $22 an hour for the production of robots that do all sorts of things faster than people do them. Sadly, but truthfully, nation after nation will also offer up such a price for well trained, and well equipped armies to defend them. And then there's my favorite...Those nations and their constituents will invest such sums on space commercialization. The latter, not merely to see what's out there, but rather to be more comfortable (less crowded), more efficient (travel faster and be better suited for harsh climates), and more entertained (vacation in the most exotic of places)!

Ed LaSalle and I have commissioned students to help write and illustrate a book entitled Six Flights Out of This World: The Science Fiction and Astronomy Reader. We hope it will inspire them and their fellow learners to engage in large thinking, because too many Americans have been thinking small for decades. The chickens are coming home to roost! How many times have you run across someone who refuses an education and then refuses to work in an unskilled environment because of poor pay and job conditions? Do you know adults who have quit their occupations merely because they no longer like them, without regard for how they will earn $22 per hour? And what of the guys and gals who say there's no money in legitimate work, but there's a booming drug trade?

Against this backdrop, it's hard to fathom where the government fits in...problem, solution, both or neither? Public involvement in 2008 and 2009 saved the nation from a much deeper recession or even a depression, but at what cost? Were Washington's efforts to charge us less in taxes, even as it did more to supplement our salaries, softening the blow of a global economic fallout, or merely enabling us to keep thinking small?

We'll see. Leaving the answer to your interpretation, I predict that the United States is three years into an economic blah period that will last 25 . I hope I'm wrong. You'll know we're out of the hard times though, when large numbers of Americans are making things the rest of the world will pay more than $22 an hour for. You'll know it's a brand new morning here when Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are the social safety net for a few of our infirm or destitute countryfolk rather than an alternative to earning the $22 we spend. And you'll recognize the return of our vibrancy and resiliency when the Federal Reserve is conducting monetary policy to smooth out the business cycles rather than supplement the underemployment, Social Security, and unemployment insurance Americans rely on to keep consuming at present levels.

So let's prepare beau coups of those large things the world will pay our $22 per hour wage for--space buildings, militiary technology, robots, and cures and treatments for exotic diseases. For more than 200 years this has been the land of opportunity. Notwithstanding a blemish here or there along the way, we have been the most inclusive society in the history of the earth. This is no more apparent than when I travel abroad. What other nation could send any combination of Red, Yellow, Black, or White people to represent it abroad and not raise an eyebrow? Make no mistake about it; inclusion establishes opportunity, just consider what the Nazis lost when they discriminated against Albert Einstein. America will emerge from the economic malaise, but not until we are transformed into thinking large along the way.

Go Steelers!

2009-01-29T05:28:00.000-08:00

This Sunday I'll be waving a terrible towel during Superbowl Forty-Three. A taller, slimmer version of the kid who cheered Chuck Noll and Terry Bradshaw perhaps, but I have yet to move on and slip my graying head above the Iron Curtain into focus on the more important things in life. Perhaps that's because the Pittsburgh Steelers organization is one of the best led enterprises in the world.

Management thinker, Max De Pree, champions the search for intimacy and covenant relationships among an organization's stakeholders as important for a leader, in his classic book Leadership Is An Art. Dan Rooney, the Steeler's owner and most senior decision maker, attracts employees and customers who believe in the organization with higher regularity than any other business leader I've studied or interacted with. Whether Dan thinks about it this way or not, he encourages autonomy among coaches, players, and even us fans. How do I know? Because there is never a moment when I worry that any of us will do something inconsistent with our collective soul.

When the Steelers have a disappointing season, and granted that's a rare occurrence, I never sit around counting minutes until Dan fires the head coach. He won't. Nor will he release the trap door on half of the players. On the other hand, I remember the good years when guys like D.J. Johnson, Plaxico Burress, and Bill Cowher, didn't have their contracts renewed. Johnson kicked a guy in the head and was ejected from a playoff game. Dan seemed to know we Steeler fans wouldn't want him back. Burress just carried himself as too much of a hot shot for us. Coach Cowher would have been renewed except for the part about overvaluing his role in the 2006 Superbowl win, when he asked for double pay. Although the Steelers are no more an army of saints than the patriots of 1776 (not Tom Brady and company), I honestly don't believe a guy with O.J. Simpson's character could play ten years for Dan Rooney and then kill his wife. (I'm speculating on Simpson's deed here, obviously).

The Pittsburgh Steelers are America's team if there ever was one. I'll count fan for fan with Dallas, New England, or any other powerhouse. One statistic I'd be interested in is comparing the fervency of the lifetime fans who began with those teams before Superbowl X with our old timers. Styles may change, but we still have the same soul I united with in 1975.

Our franchise is not exclusively Pittsburgh's either. Claims of the death of Pennsylvania's queen city are greatly exaggerated, but that's a different blog. I grow fatigued with the endless news accounts of the Steeler franchise being some gritty product of a dead steel town with one hard luck story after another. Hardly anyone on the team grew up around Pittsburgh, and I'll bet I can say that about half the fans as well. We're an cross-generational, multi-regional American story about how true leadership on the part of Dan Rooney and his family has created a uniquely successful American business--an entertainment enterprise that has thrived in great times and would weather the worst recession in style.

Those of you crying that tomorrow's game will be but a tiny bubble in the history of violent and useless theatrical activities fools call football are entitled to your view. Hold up your political, artistic, charitable, or entrepreneurial playmakers to the leadership style and integrity of Dan Rooney. And those of you who would compare Jerry Jones (owner of the Cowboys), or Al Davis (Raiders' boss)to Dan, well bring it on. Go Steelers!

Is This How a Depression Starts?

2008-09-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Today I received an e-mail from noted economist, Brad Schiller, suggesting that the economy was rolling along fine. The United States's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was up recently, way up. I believe Brad was preparing his newsletter before the stock market's Black Monday or Wednesday, and of course prior to AIG's implosion on Black Tuesday. Even so, you may be wondering: is all the news bad, or are these good little tidbits like Brad's GDP an indication that the weak nature of the economy is being blown out of proportion?

The simple answer is that this is how the Great Depression started. People and businesses lost confidence in the financial system and many didn't want to trade until that confidence was restored. Don't let anyone including an economist or a parent convince you that we aren't slipping into depression, because nobody knows for sure.

On the other hand, there are many differences between the circumstances leading up to the Great Depression and what's going on today. Before the Depression, we had no FDIC insurance, and the government had no authority to buy failed businesses such as Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, or AIG. So far, investors have taken some comfort every time the government takes over another failed institution. We have believed that the government will keep the business running satisfactorily.

What then does Bill Conner think will happen to the economy over the next several months to a year? Well I have no crystal ball, but I am a student of history and economics so here goes: I believe the government will satisfactorily keep us out of depression by operating these failed financial institutions. Apparently, even if this means imposing temporary martial law in the financial markets as they would in say communist Russia or China.

Government control will come at a price. We may pay operating costs for these institutions by taxing, borrowing money, or printing it. Small tax increases may be possible, but anything large enough to be substantial would slow private spending and could cause depression by weakening demand for goods and services. If the government borrows from private investors or even other countries, this will be borrowing. Like taxing, this option will take money out of other areas of the world financial system and could weaken demand for goods and services.

This may leave the government to borrow from itself or banks, and it will be as if the Treasury's printing presses were used to print new money. I suspect this option as being the most feasible. To the extent the government prints a lot of new money though, there will be additional pressure on inflation. Inflation will quite possibly increase to significantly higher levels than it is today. That won't be good, but it will be better than a depression.

So what are the odds that I'm wrong about inflation, depression or some unnamed new problem? I don't believe there is an economist, a psychic, or a minister that knows. It's all uncharted territory much like it was in 1929.

My Pilgrimage To Plains

2008-08-20T17:41:00.000-07:00

This summer my daughter and I embarked on a Georgia vacation. We tamed every roller coaster at Six Flags except the one that was closed for cleaning. We visited the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic site and the Jimmy Carter Presidential Museum and Library. On Sunday morning, we attended a Sunday School class in Plains, Georgia taught by President Carter.

Mr. Carter's lesson entitled "Doers of the Word" reinforced my astronomical opinion of him. The lesson about practicing what you preach was relatively forgettable, which ironically was one of the reasons it was such a positive reflection. I simply could not imagine any president of a large company let alone one of the other former Presidents of the United States standing in that small church and being so forthright, humble and accessible. Mr. Carter conversed with many of us before the lesson, and stayed long enough after church so that everyone who desired could get a photo with him.

We live in an era when our business and governmental leaders are under intense pressure to please their masters, be they voters or shareholders. Many of these managers such as the Enron and Arthur Andersen executives have been disciplined and publicly disgraced for doing so dishonestly. Jimmy Carter has often been considered an unsuccessful President and occasionally a treasonous humanitarian. I'm not aware of anyone who seriously questions his honesty though.

President Carter's integrity and humility then are what qualify him for greatness. If he is studied in the future as a great President, as I think he should be, the student will consider his approach to the office of President more intensely than his accomplishments. There are Presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt who will be remembered for their unique achievements on behalf of our nation. Which of them besides Jimmy Carter will be remembered for the willingness to lose rather than doing things they believed to be wrong? That stubborn humility and integrity was what Tori and I sought upon our visit to Plains. It was reassuring to find it alive and well there.

Thanks, Evel!

2007-12-07T18:08:00.000-08:00

As a youth my hero was John Lennon. I still get all choked up when I pass the the place he was shot in New York City. It was easy to idolize the Chief Beatle: He wrote beautiful ballads about peace, spoke his mind, and could hit notes that would make opera singers blush. I wonder if some of those guys who spent 1976 strumming tennis rackets, listening to "Helter Skelter" (the Beatles song), and roller skating to the "Rock and Roll Music" double LP with me in Warren, Pennsylvania thought about me when Lennon was slain in 1980.

You see, I've been thinking about them lately. One of theirs died this week...Evel Knievel. If I'd completed the list of things we were doing during America's bicentennial, I'd have added: jumping barrels on bicycles, throwing our Evel Knievel figurines over ditches and matchbox cars, and watching Knievel's escapades on the Wide World of Sports. In that gentle little town, my buddies tried to dream with me about bringing world peace through music, but a guy our parents' age jumping buses, buildings and rivers on a motorcycle--now that was reality!

What is truly ironic is that Lennon died "with his boots on" and from the accounts I've seen, Knievel withered away. No one in our little circle would have predicted that when I left town for Newport News in 1977. Be that as it may, like George Bailey in "It's A Wonderful Life," Evel Knievel changed at least one life, mine! He wasn't quite my hero, but I think somewhere among Caesar's Palace, the Snake River, and the six barrels I jumped on my 20-inch Huffy in 1976, he had a hand in convincing me that, in the words of the 1974 hit--the Ballad of Evel Knievel:

I can move a mountain
Leap across a winding river
Once I've made my mind up
There's nothing I won't try.

I hope that his life hasn't not inspired many people to jump impossible things with motorcycles. On the other hand, since this most optimistic of men has convinced a few of us to exceed what we perceive the limits to be, then his was a life to be celebrated. If I'd have been by his bedside on November 30th., I'd have slipped my boots on him. I hope someone did. Thanks, Evel!

GM Strike - Will North American Automakers Be Unionized?

2007-09-24T09:19:00.000-07:00

Before today's strike at 11 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, conventional wisdom was that General Motors (GM) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) would avoid one. How could that have been? The "Big Three" had been emitting warning signs about their financial health in a variety of ways over the last few years. This always seemed an ominous sign that the UAW would be pressured to accept significant concessions in this year's contract talks.

What many experts seem to have missed was the way the momentum has switched in the direction of the UAW over the last several months. For starters, Democrats won both houses of Congress last fall. Blue politicians have always been more supportive of labor issues than their red counterparts, but last year's winners, including Ohio's Sherrod Brown, have been unusually empathetic.

Politics are important in the area of labor relations, but the court of public opinion is at least equally so. After all, politicians work for the public. In a year that has seen one recall of foreign-made products after another, the public is understandably sympathetic to U.S. made--often union made--products. Couple this with concerns about illegal competition from immigrants, and it's easy to arrive at a position where Mr. John Q. and Ms. Juanita X. Public are fed up with the various pressures on the law abiding, hard-working member of the UAW. Are we there yet? The UAW will probably proceed as if we are.

This is by no means an ideal season for the UAW. Membership has been declining for decades, and the U.S. companies which employ union workers have never been weaker. In some ways though, that's the point. Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Kia and Volkswagen aren't unionized, but General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are. This contract, which also applies to Ford and Chrysler, may be the first battle in a war over the future of North American automobile manufacturing. Will unions deliver benefits to North American autoworkers in the years to come or not? Look for the UAW to push for the answer now, while it's walking with the wind. For much of my lifetime, it's taken all of labor's energy to remain erect in the eye of the hurricane.

Men Are From Mars. What Planet Are Women From?

2007-09-11T10:19:00.000-07:00

An honest man is overrated? I have to admit the headline was enough to push me through the entire op-ed piece. It turned out to be a light hearted comparison between the way men and women interact with others. "Don't tell your spouse or girlfriend that she's fat, ugly, or stupid," the author lectured. "She's really only asking, to hoodwink you into complementing her." The week before reading this cute piece, though, I waded through a more serious one where the columnist described male mentors advising that to get dates she should feign disinterest and then act like a slow poke. I started to think: if Romeo admires deceptive women slower than a seven-year-itch, no wonder I've never been compared to him!

In all seriousness, I hope women aren't being encouraged to carry these notions into the business world. The woman who tries to use an indirect question to obtain a raise will come away with only the indirect answer, even if the boss did get the hint. Similarly, being deceptive or down right lying does have its place in the business world, but it's hardly to win a job, a promotion, or the boss's affection. Sun Tzu, the Ancient Chinese warrior whose ideas are often appropriated as business philosophy, did teach of "doing certain things openly for purposes of deception," but this was to trick his opponents against defending themselves.

Generalizations of men and women are just that, each male or female is an individual. Even so, voters who love to hear Rush Limbaugh call Hillary Clinton a feminazi probably won't appreciate hearing her reply that he's a masculnazi. Because some people expect women to be softer or less direct, you won't hear Mrs. Clinton borrowing from Rush's playbook during this election season. On the other hand, don't look for Hillary to be the crawling turtle at debates or chief around-the-bush beater in national defense or economic policy discussions either. No one ever gets what she wants in business (or politics) by beating around bushes.

This brings us to today's Connerism for women (and men): If you want what's around the bush, dig there; and if you want what's in the bush, charge there. Beat around the bush when you really want it, only if you think this will improve your odds of taking the bush by surprise. And never, ever, or even ever, go slower than you must to own the bush!

Is the Space Program Spacey?

2007-08-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

In 2004, President Bush stunned space enthusiasts like me by boldly proclaiming that real-life Americans would be returning to the moon and Mars. While others scratched their heads, wondering how space funding could sprout from the arid shadows of budget deficit shrouding the U.S. Treasury, we space nuts simply checked our hearing. By the time Grandma had plucked me from playing flashlight tag to witness Luke Skywalker and his friends save my theater from the Empire for the first time, real-life astronauts had been permanently grounded to Earth's orbit. For trekkers even a few years younger than I, space flight has seemed ironically historical rather than futuristic.

In fact an invigorated space program has much to offer our economy. If there are little green men, Romulans, or alien trade federations out there, one can only imagine the market for weapons of universal destruction. On the other hand space exploration seems more likely unfold as in 2001: A Space Odyssey-- absent the monoliths. Unlike the expeditions of Columbus, Cortes, Newport, or even Lewis and Clarke, earthlings are likely to head into vast areas ripe for colonization with more hostile environmental issues than their ancestors faced, but no competition, friendly or otherwise.

Seeing these more realistic probabilities in the stars presents an entirely different economic picture than merely defense. Laboratories, vehicle factories, clothing manufacturers and other space economy enterprises will pay premiums to individuals with experience in physics, biology, basic medicine, computer science, human resource organization, engineering, and accounting. In the early stages space exploration and travel will have to be heavily funded by the government because they will initially be public goods. In economic terms they will be non-rival (two or more people can benefit from the same discovery) and non-excludable (because we won't be able to keep those who didn't pay from receiving benefits). Small government types should remember that the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria were public goods in the 1490s although air and sea travel are conducted by private enterprise today. Would there be privately owned ski resorts in the Blue Ridge or peanut farms here in Suffolk without fifteenth and sixteenth century public investments by Western Europeans?

This week saw China and Japan each announce major space initiatives. Enticing as these announcements were, there appears a sense in some quarters that the communication revolution was the practical answer to science fiction's fascination with space travel and exploration. Let's hope not. Sooner or later the world will not offer enough for all the people on it. Somebody or some bodies, will fulfill the demand for more. Most likely more will initially be provided by a government. Let's answer this call! God knows we have the skilled laborers, the education system, the open society, and the government necessary to make it happen.

The Bridge That Broke

2007-08-16T14:05:00.000-07:00

As the Interstate 35 bridge came crashing down toward the Mississippi River waters on August 1st. an age-old debate heated up--was the government the problem or the solution? Economist Thomas Sowell of Stanford University questioned the incentives for politicians to keep bridges in good repair (Virginian-Pilot, August 13th.). According to Dr. Sowell, politicians (and by association the government) were likely the problem in Minneapolis because they had more "showy" things to spend taxpayer money on. A privately run organization could have done better.

Unfortunately, it's not so easy to banish government from bridge construction. Economists describe bridges as quasi-public goods. This means it is too hard for private enterprises to identify and bill users of new spans before they are built. Almost all bridges are commissioned by the government rather than the marketplace, as a result. Repair work is usually purchased by the government for similar reasons.

If Dr. Sowell is correct about the nature of politicians and economists are correct about the nature of bridges, the answer is transparent: Society will only get adequate bridge repair from its government! "Starving the beast," or defunding the showy stuff, won't work because politicians are as human as the selfish constituents trying to save tax bucks. Taxpayers will have to fund the showy stuff even if the bridge repair bill is optional. On the other hand, good ol' fashioned inefficient government (consumer of the showy stuff and the repair work) is the only tool at our disposal sure to keep the bridges standing.

(Blogger's Note: The photo used with this blog depicts the Brooklyn Bridge in New York, New York. It appears courtesy of "Brooklyn Bridge Gallery" http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/bbridge/bbgallery)

Welcome to Payslee_Weigh

2007-07-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Payslee_Weigh! I plan to post comments on news, politics, and entertainment. As a professional in the fields of accounting, economics and higher education, I plan a majority of the postings to reflect my opinions in these areas. Unfortunately, although my lifetime earnings from music is negative, I will be unable to avoid opening my big mouth in this area as well. The Payslee_Weigh reflects my personal outlook and absolutely does not reflect the opinions of my employer, my friends, or even my mother.

Look for the first opinion to appear between now and August 20th. Regular updates are expected thereafter.