Entrepreneurs and Media Dinosaurs

Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is proabably as good and energetic an interviewer as you’ll get to hear.  He can disembowel a pompous MSMer as quick as a Mexican immigrant can dress a chicken in a meat-packing plant.

But he’s also good at interviewing to bring his interviewee out, as in this radio interview with Michael S. Malone, author of Bill and Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company.  The way Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard did it came to be called the HP Way:

It’s called the HP way, and it’s several things. One of it is it’s a culture built on trust, all the way from the two partners trusting each other completely, down through the entire organization, where you trust people to make their own decisions, and you put the employees first, and innovation right behind, and you drive your way forward by empowering your people to do the right thing. It’s a powerful culture. It’s unbelievable at its peak.

Above all, Bill and Dave had no nostaglia for buildings or for products.

If a product stopped being profitable, they got rid of it. They got rid of buildings, they changed locations. The only continuity in their management career, and the reason they ended up on top, and are as famous as they are, is because they put their employees first.

This has become a commonplace today.  We all say that a company is only as good as its people.  But back in the heyday of the high industrial age, people thought that capital, resources, and labor went together to make prosperity.  Now we know that resources and capital are second-tier.  It is human capital that is everything.

So then we come to the newspaper industry.  Says Malone:

A couple of years ago, I got into a lot of trouble, because I was maybe the first guy to actually come out and say newspapers are all going to die. And luckily, Rupert Murdoch came along two weeks later, and took all the flak from me with his speech. But what set me off was I realized I hadn’t read a newspaper in six months.

In the newspaper they are hanging onto their product, the physical newspaper, and the printing plant out back like grim death.

And what I noticed reading this story about Lileks and the Star Tribune was, and I’m an old newspaper man, 30 years writing for newspapers now, it’s that they’re still attached to the printing plant out back, to the trucks that deliver the newspapers, to the linoleum in the newsroom.

And what are they doing?  They are giving their senior talent golden parachutes and sending them out the door. (Of course, they probably have no option, since newspapers are union shops.)  They are hanging onto the legacy hardware and sending the talent away.

Malone went over to the business school at Oxford University and he gave them a speech.

I gave a big speech on entrepreneurship, and the power of entrepreneurship, and how I thought it was the single most important phenomenon of modern times, and that entrepreneurship needed to be cultivated. It was the source of all the new jobs in the world, the source of almost all the innovation, and yet entrepreneurs had no constituents.

It’s the great issue of our times.  The entrepreneurial model is changing the face of the workplace, but government is still doing the command-and-control thing.

Sooner or later, something’s got to give.

Riling Up the Republican Base

The art of politics is to divide up the electorate neatly into 51-49, with 51 percent for our side.  You want to fire up your base, encourage moderatew with your message of hope, and put the other base to sleep.

But Democrats seem to be working hard to fire up the Republican base.  First of all,  The Prowler reports, the Democrats are planning to reintroduce the Fairness Doctrine that requires  “both sides” of an issue to be aired on the public airwaves.  And the reason seems to be pure politics.

"First, [Democrats] failed on the radio airwaves with Air America, no one wanted to listen," says a senior adviser to Pelosi. "Conservative radio is a huge threat and political advantage for Republicans and we have had to find a way to limit it. Second, it looks like the Republicans are going to have someone in the presidential race who has access to media in ways our folks don’t want, so we want to make sure the GOP has no advantages going into 2008."

Look Democrats, if you want to do one thing that would really rile up the Republican base, go ahead, make my day.

Then there’s the Democratic plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire.  According to the Heritage Foundation:

As it currently stands, the House budget resolu­tion proposes to allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, which could potentially cause the average taxpayer to face an additional $3,026 in taxes. Further, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire could cause great damage to the economy, reducing both job creation and economic growth.

Last time the Democrats increased taxes, in 1993 the result was immediate.  The voters chose in 1994 a Republican Congress.

Maybe the Democrats are doing these things because that’s the only tune they know how to play.

But I’d say that the strategic thing to do would be to keep the Republican base fast asleep and discouraged.

After all, the Democrats spend something like $2.5 trillion in taxes a year on pensions, health care, education, and welfare.  Isn’t that enough to keep their supporters at home?

Let's Throw Good Money After Bad

Yes.  Give us a billion here and a billion there and we could really solve the high-school dropout problem.  That’s about what Education Secretary Spellings is proposing, according to Donald Lambro.

Back in the 1960s President Kennedy pointed out that four in ten youngsters did not finish high school.

"Forty-four years later, the dropout rate for African-American, Hispanic and Native American students approaches 50 percent. We are wasting not just lives but time," Mrs. Spellings said in an address to the National Summit on America’s Silent Epidemic

 Secretary Spellings has a solution.

Mrs. Spellings proposes Title I spending in President Bush’s No Child Left Behind reauthorization be increased another $1 billion "to improve and strengthen our public high schools serving low-income students."

Like that’s going to help.

Look, we know why kids are failing high school and high schools are failing kids.  It is part of the whole welfare state syndrome.

• Why bother to work in school when many low-income women can use the welfare system to get support?
• Why bother to work in school when women are available to you—without having to demonstrate the ability to get a “decent” job?
• Why bother to educate kids when your job is pretty well guaranteed for life?

And so on.  The problem is that we don’t know what kind of schools low-income parents want.  We don’t know what kind of schools would best prepare low-income kids for a productive life.

All we know is what the experts have told us and what the education monopoly has bullied us into funding.

Imagine that the auto industry had been run by university professors and union leaders for the last 160 years. 

That’s the point.  What schools need is what everyone needs: open competition for the votes of the consumers.

Traditional values down, but not out

Some political actors believe that the Democratic capture of Congress in 2006 represents the end of the traditional values movement in America, reports Cheryl Welzstein.

"Huge numbers of religiously observant Americans voted for Democrats, reversing a 14-year trend," according to the liberal People for the American Way (PFAW). "There are hugely hopeful signs that the pendulum in American public life is swinging back from the far-right extremes."

 Well, sorta.  According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life:

Most white evangelicals and white mainline Protestants voted Republican, although by slightly smaller numbers. White Catholics, who in the past have strongly supported Republicans, voted for Democrats in 2006 by a bare majority.
"Nonwhite" voters of any faith, who tend to vote Democratic, backed their party in higher numbers. The biggest Democratic surge came from three small religious groups that skew Democratic — white "unaffiliated," white "other faiths" and white Jews.

But there is definitely a big Democratic tilt developing in the youth vote.

Some observers criticize the traditional values movement for identifying too much with the Republican Party

Says Mark J. Rozell, a public-policy professor at George Mason University who studies religion in politics: "There are many, and I will include myself, that think that the religious conservative movement may have made a mistake some years ago by adopting a one-party strategy, that they should have done more to play the parties off each other.

That’s easy to say, of course.  But the reality is that the Republican Party is friendly to religious believers and the Democratic Party is friendly to secularists.  And that orientation is not likely to change much in the future.  What’s a believer to do?

Last November the voters threw the Republicans out for a number of reasons, and rightly so.  Throwing the rascals out is always the right thing to do.  In fact, the voters don’t do it enough.

Now it’s time for Democrats to demonstrate that they deserve the support the voters gave them.

Global Guerrillas for Breakfast

Alerted by the trend-spotting Instapundit to the new book by John Robb Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization I naturally proceeded to the blog by BNW author John Robb.  Right now he’s taking a look at the Fort Dix six.

We will see this again and again. One reason is that in open source warfare, the barriers to entry are nearly zero. Anyone can participate. All you need to do in order to join, is to act.

And frankly, young men like to create mayhem.  It’s what evolution designed them for.

Open source warfare is what we are seeing in Iraq, in Srk Lanka, in the Niger Delta, in Somalia, and in southern Thailand.  Loosely organized terror gangs form and reform to execute spectacular violence on our vulnerable interconnected world and “hollow out” nation states by negating their monopoly on violence.

For instance in this item Robb reports on the Tamil Tigers air force.  It is just a couple of light planes and it only has hand-held bombs.  But it’s cut tourism by 35 percent in Sri Lanka.

The current surge in Baghdad is doomed to fail because it will not be able to drive out the terror gangs.

It ain’t pretty reading.

Married Mothers Day

Why is it that liberals have made a world with their welfare state in which single mothers are subsidized and married mothers are penalized?  It’s something to think about this Mothers Day. The fact is that married mothers are essential, writes sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox.

[M]arried mothers serve our nation’s neighborhoods, children, and even themselves better than any of the dizzying array of alternatives to married motherhood.

But why? What’s the point of married mothers?  Look at the consequences

• Crime.  The children of married mothers are much less likely to get involved in crime.
• Psychological wellbeing. Children of married mothers are much less likely to experience “serious emotional trouble.”
• Relationships. “[M]others are much more likely to have poor relationships with their children when dad is not in the picture”

It’s all in a “recent report, Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-Six Conclusions from the Social Sciences.”

And of course, there is the modest fact that children are flat out safer with a married mom.

So what’s the problem?  Why do we persist in subsidizing single parenthood?  Is it because of the anti-marriage prejudice of feminists?  Is it because of the money and jobs in all those government programs, not to mention the votes of all the grateful recipients?

Seriously, I’d like to know the answer to this.

A Decade of Blair

First the good news.  The ten years of Tony Blair have been the most successful for a left-of-center party in Britain ever.  Well, at least since W.E. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister in the nineteenth century.  As Prime Minister Blair told his constituents today, according to George Jones:

He said expectations had probably been "too high" in 1997, but he insisted living standards had improved under Labour. "There is only one government since 1945 that can say all of the following: more jobs, fewer unemployed, better health and education results, lower crime and economic growth in every quarter. Only one government, this one."

So it might seem odd that the British people have recently voted heavily against the Labour Party.  And it’s not just about Iraq.

There are those who contest the idea that health, education and crime have improved on Blair’s watch.  In contrast to Blair’s sunny report:

• Education is a mess.  The government keeps dumbing down the high-stakes tests, the A-levels and GSCE tests, and violence is endemic in inner-city schools.  The vast underclass gets almost no education.
• The National Health Service is a mess.  The government has vastly ramped up spending in the last ten years but productivity has gone down, and the staff are demoralized.
• Vast numbers of workers on disability.  About 15 percent of the work force.
• Property crime may have gone down now that everyone has a home security system.  But gang violence and street intimidation is up.  Crime is up 2,300 percent in the last century.  And the murder rate is up.

And then there are the burgeoning problems of single-parent families, a growing feral underclass, and uncontrolled immigration, all of which are probably worse than in the United States.

The worsening social conditions are probably hitting the Labour Party’s natural supporters worse than anyone.  But the Conservative Party hasn’t been trying to attract their votes, instead trying to win back the social liberals who deserted to the LibDem Party in the mid 1990s.  The only party that is really going for the votes of the disaffected is the racist BNP.

Stay tuned.  The problems aren’t going to go away any time soon.