No Skin In The Game I
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Today we begin a multipart multi-week series about the American tradition, using a Warren Buffet management principle, where the average American no longer has or can develop any skin in the game. Whether this no skin life has occurred by design or through unintended consequences truly makes no difference.
This skin is important because the future of the nation is at stake!
In this series I will attempt to put this in a context you will not read anywhere else. As a consequence it is designed to challenge your preconceived notions about the past, the present and the future, both within the current noisy national debate, but also within the picture of the big bad world beyond the borders and the shores.
Today President Obama is speaking about his freshly revised budget view for fiscal year 2012 and beyond. For most conservatives this budget will show what Tea Party Congressman from Florida’s 22nd Legislative District, Lt. Colonel Allen West described as leadership of a Buck Sergeant (E-5). As you will learn later, since my military experience had much tighter enlistment criteria than West’s Infantry, we had some PFCs (E-3) with that leadership potential.
However a miracle did happened in the United States late Friday evening. Of course I am referring to the budget deal hammered out within the Federal Government. A couple of years ago I would have described this event as an evolutionary testament, in that the Republican Party had amazingly developed a spine.
That was then, and being a little older, and none the wiser, I would add the Democrat Party to this wonderful happening, and characterize it as both parties and the entire political class finally having some skin in the game.
Looking back at history, I really can’t come up with the last time that this happened. There would be those who would say that occurred when the Federals were shut down in the 1990s, but those were much different times. It was back then, a marginal huffing and puffing, and today nothing of lasting substance remains.
Searching my vast knowledge of history, it seems for as long as I can remember politicians have made promises to help the middle class, or the working person, or the wise consumer, when in reality they have, at best, ignored those promises, and given anyone who would help them get reelected, gifts, tax incentives, and special interest payoffs.
As we are now only beginning to understand as reality, for the last fifty years these political games have been carried out by designed inflation, loose monetary policy, and overly leveraged debt.
Now for the first time in at least a half a century, politicians have some skin in the game. Sadly we will be treated, barring another miracle, to another four years of childishness, where they will threaten to take their toys and talking points and go home, if they don’t get their way. In the process we will be told of millions of seniors who will die of starvation, and the working stiffs will remain unemployable, or the more politically correct term — without living wage jobs.
Finally, maybe in 2015, enough of the childish bums will be kicked out of office and enough of the excesses of the past century will have become compost, that the United States can have a serious twenty-first century discussion on the role and scope of government and sustainable means to provide the funding thereof, especially the Federal Government.
In the afternoon when I finished last week’s “God in the Details, Part 2”, I decided to take a little perspective break. Later, before I retired for a night of productive sleep, I thought I should catch up on any rapidly changing news. That news really wasn’t news, just more noise, continually interrupted by commercial breaks of three to five minutes, from one-third to almost half of the hour, selling everything from gold, to product scams, to gross consumer toys.
The night’s sleep went pretty well, but very early in the morning, a true mourning about the irrelevance of everything that has been reported recently, its shallowness, and the plain trivial pursuits of the whole process, finally aroused my restfulness with anger.
Now completely conscious I began to work through what is currently happening in the world, and how everyone wants the happy days to return, and how foolish that scam seems to be. Suddenly, a blazing light appeared and I became in enlightened. (Well that concept was just added to whet your appetite for what follows.) But I truly realized I really have no skin in that twentieth century game, and I have no desire to go there.
That is sort of a miracle, not unlike the understanding about eight years ago, that my inability to compete in athletics at the level I had hoped was by Divine design, for it took that long for my body to deteriorate to the point, that we would discover I was born with a congenital heart valve defect. If I had played at the level I thought I could, in a place where it would have been noticed, I would not be writing these words today, I would be dead.
The golden experiences I had in the 1980s never went where I hoped they would go either, because at the present time I would have too much invested in keeping the past alive, to put any skin into the changes that are coming today. Just like with the heart-changing scar I now have, this golden opportunity today, provides a possibility to contribute something, I would have just wasted, or misapplied, back when Ronald Reagan was revolutionizing the world.
Since I have a pretty good idea what is now happening, there is a moment to build upon the past, a very different future, to put some significant skin in the game, but it will only be done in concert with others who look towards that future and have also invested their skin.
Last week we began our discussion of when America went seriously astray with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. This week we will push that back to John Kennedy and what is still described as Camelot. Kennedys’ Camelot has sort of been put to rest by the miniseries, “The Kennedys” that aired last week on that bastion of cable television, the Reelz Channel.
From here on out we will use the whole decade of the sixties as the basis for when the country seriously began to evolve beyond a nation where the prime purpose of the United States was to have everyone, every citizen, with skin in the game. We are now to the point where we have virtually no one with skin in the game, except our military. That professional military has become the tool to change the entire fabric of American culture into a de facto empire, exporting petty materialism and greedy financial services.
The fundamental American paradigm for about the four hundred years of development on this continent is that everyone has skin in the game. That was totally true until the closing of the frontier about a century ago. Coinciding with this American opportunity was a worldview, which would drive the whole world through evolving-progressive-atheistic materialism. The fundamental precepts of this paradigm was that mankind could greatly improve upon the fundamentals of nature and that this would be done without God or anything beyond the nature of mankind’s intellectual (scientific) genius.
Fundamental to this godlessness, was the enlightened thesis that all religion was naïve and primitive, and what historic Christianity defined as Original Sin and Total Depravity, were really fruits of positive evolutionary progress. Hence these sins, became qualities to be developed within the intellectual elites, who deemed themselves superior to the masses of stupid (religious) primitive humanity.
We can trace where we are today by looking at the Russian Revolution, in which what I have called a Collective Elitist paradigm of communism, was tensioned by the libertarian works of Ayn Rand and what I call Laissez Faire Scoundrels. In the United States we see these changes taking place instead of under the banners of communism and socialism but rather under a unified ensign of progressivism of both the major national parties.
Both views of progressivism believed that we could evolve into a just society by either elitist control of government, or the abstinence of government and so called free markets; where a shining city on a hill could be achieved. These views were not all that fundamentally different than many of the nation’s founders. It was the founders’ belief however that this source of greatness was God’s exceptional vision for the United States, not man’s abilities.
In the last two Presidents we see in the compassionate conservatism desires of the George Bush the triumph of the Laissez-Faire Scoundrels. In Barack Obama we see the liberal desires for the government management of personal wealth and power. We are told only the Collective Elitists can fathom the evolved intellectual wisdom of this atheistic evolutionary ascendancy. This of course doesn’t take place within Darwin’s evolutionary time frame, but rather within the individual, as they move beyond the temporal world of things, into a lust for power and the domination of others.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” begins the Kennedy legacy.
Ask the junior senator from Florida, about the Bay of Pigs, and Marco Rubio, will tell you that John Kennedy is directly responsible for Fidel Castro’s regime being entrenched in Cuba from 1959 until today. But then again, after the November 2016 Presidential election, we might have our first Cuban American as President-elect of the United States.
The failure of the Bay of Pigs, led directly to the Cuban missile crisis, and a domino theory of communist expansion plans to take over the world, led Kenney to send military advisors to Vietnam. The rest is history, especially after the Kennedy assassination, when he was replaced consecutively by two of the most nefarious federal politicians in American history. The biggest difference between Johnson and Nixon was that Johnson never got caught.
The 1960s, the era of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows have thus far given us two presidents who came of age during that decade. I too share that vintage. Both presidents were former governors; both served two terms in the presidential office.
President Clinton was highly gifted intellectually, from humble origins, so was forced to put his skin in the game early in life to achieve his goals. By the time he got to the presidency his political gifts allowed him to be pragmatic when need be, but moral issues have greatly impaired his governmental legacy. Not only did the Clinton presidency close out the century, it finally brought a discouraging end to the idealism of sunshine, lollipops and rainbows.
President Bush was a child of one of America’s most prestigious families. As such it was probably not until he became governor of Texas that he had to put any personal skin into the American game. Bush did not possess Clinton’s intellectual gifts, but by the time he was elected president his Christianity had provided him a personal peace and morality that continues agitate his political opponents to this day. By September 2001 cracks were seen in America’s material veneer, which would be radically exposed on the eleventh day of that month.
As for me I probably had the best childhood that anyone could possibly been given. When combined with the grace of God, this has allowed me to gain a different perspective of this history, unfettered from any significant skin in the game up to the present. However my individual gifts are also quite unique. All these will be used to give you a distinct perspective, of where we are now and where we are headed.
I fully realize that what you are about to read over the next few weeks, will challenge what you may have always believed, but I hope it will give you a fresh view of what went wrong, and what we should do to make significant changes in our future course.
This vision all begins when I was still in high school when an Air Force recruiter came and gave our class a leadership aptitude test. If I remember correctly the test measured three areas of personal attributes. Those were mechanical ability, analytical ability, and what I will call people skills.
While some other students excelled on one of the test parameters, I scored at the ninetieth percentile in all three areas. Upon checking with his superiors, my scores were so unusual, I was offered a position in the Air Force Officer Candidate School (OCS) right out of high school, something usually reserved for college graduates and those with advanced degrees and highly specific skills. Thus began my military tension with my Uncle Sam.
I turned down the offer, but somehow I was on the military enlargement list for the Vietnam conflict. To leave out the details, in late November 1969 I arrived in Augsburg, Germany the first of about twenty something reluctant officer recruits in the Army Security Agency.
As I recall I was the only ROTC graduate, the rest had reached our Voluntary Indefinite (Vol-Indef) Status through OCS training. Vol-Indef meant that we were to be on active duty until the Army told us we could seek a discharge. What this meant in reality was we were guaranteed a posting in Germany until such time we might be needed elsewhere, and we were betting that this time would keep us safe from Vietnam, or from going elsewhere until such a time we were no longer needed within the military.
All of us had the highest level of Top Secret security clearances. At least within my focus of duties, I was provided the opportunity to read the weekly highest level intelligence briefings from both the Warsaw Pact and Vietnam, as well as given a general idea of what would be the tactical requirements of everyone, should those nasty communists attack the peace loving Europeans.
With Vietnam protests growing in the states, tensions between true career officers and us reluctant volunteers began to rise. Since I had the most time in service and a minor problem with one of the inept pronounced career officers, I became the first of the group to acknowledge it was my decision to return to civilian life.
Vietnam really was America’s first major war, which was fought with really no skin in the game for anyone, provided you could make it through, “364 days and a wake-up.” Sadly almost sixty thousand young men were not able to keep that commitment, dying in the process, and probably at least that many continue to deal with some after shocks.
To provide for a secure national future and to provide further domestic tranquility, the concept of an all-volunteer military was adopted. We will revisit this situation in detail next week, but keep the following in mind.
Without this domestically produced mercenary force, Iraq and Afghanistan could not have occurred the way they were developed and could not continue into the indefinite nation building future.
In the history of the world’s exceptional nations states that have bit the dust; they share at least two significant factors:
That first step was that they cease to have broad based civilian involvement in the nation’s military struggles. Normally they hired mercenaries or created true professional militaries, which have no skin in the daily routine of the country, but only their own skin in the game as it relates to personal survival.
Second, in order to maintain what twentieth century theologian Francis Schaeffer described as “personal peace and affluence,” these nations begin serious manipulations of their financial system, essentially to limit to the maximum extent possible, citizen participation with true skin in the game.
Check back next week for widening developments.