NCAA is Conspiracy in Restraint of Trade

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o    I think that the NCAA is an illegal conspiracy in restraint of trade.  I think they could and should be prosecuted under the Sherman Antitrust Act.  I think the conspiracy is so open and notorious that it would be easy for the government to meet the burden of proof.  The price fixing involved is also obvious. Using the NCAA, universities hold the wages of college athletes at zero.  Given the "cheating" uncovered from year to year, where rich alumnae pay athletes on the side, it's clear that the market price would be a lot higher.  Certain schools, like my alma mater the University of Illinois Urbana, get slammed for "cheating," usually when they manage to have a good team.  So often, like when I was there from 1968-1972, they just have an excellent band.  There's not as much money in that, so there's no equivalent of the NCAA for marching bands.

Wasting Time Against ISIS Lead to European Terror

A February article in Foreign Policy Magazine caught my eye at the time, but jogged my memory after the terror attacks in Brussels. The gist of the article was that there was nothing to worry about in the small size of the military budget, we are spending plenty of money on defense. The argument in the article was that any appearance of US military weakness was due to the Constitutional limitations imposed by US civilian control of the military.  As a Vietnam Era veteran, I could not let that go unchallenged, especially now after we know about ISIS terror networks in Europe.

First, the primary argument of the article, that our military is well funded and strong militarily is hogwash.  The state of our military is really bad. Our procurement practices add several years and tens of billions of dollars to our costs. Most of the airplanes we're flying are as old or older than the pilots, although they may have new electronics.  Our training budgets have been slashed. We have fewer ships, soldiers and sailors than we did in the 1930's, when our weakness contributed to the start of World War II. The article is completely wrong in each and every particular on that score.

But inefficiency in war not only wastes time, it wastes lives and results in disastrous failures.  And inefficiency from the Commander in Chief does the most damage.  Lyndon Johnson ran the Vietnam War from the White House during his term in office.  He ran it inefficiently, incurring many more American and Vietnamese casualties than would have been necessary if he had listened to sound military advice. In particular, Johnson wasted the overwhelming US advantage in air power by attacking targets that didn't matter. Johnson chose targets primarily to “send a message,” not to gain military advantage.  When Nixon finally decided to use US air power effectively, Operation Linebacker II shutdown about 90% of the flow of supplies to North Vietnam in less than a month. If we had done that in 1965 instead of 1972, the cost and aftermath of the Vietnam War would have been vastly different. US casualties might have been less than 15,000 instead of over 55,000. Pol Pot might not have been able to kill 2 million Cambodians.  The North Vietnamese would have been less likely to violate any peace agreement, because the US would have been more likely to keep its commitment of continued military aid plus air support, in 1965, if the North Vietnamese invaded the South.  As it was, the US made both those promises, but kept neither.

Barack Obama is running the war against ISIS from the White House, just like Lyndon Johnson ran Vietnam. If anything, Obama is much more restrictive and less efficient than Johnson ever thought of being. According to some military sources, Obama canceled the orders to attack Bashar al-Assad's air force at the same time we initially attacked ISIS. That decision alone probably killed 100,000 Syrian civilians and created the opening for Russia to enter the war in support of Assad.  The decision to not bomb ISIS controlled oil fields in Syria for fear of environmental damage, and not to bomb ISIS oil transport trucks for fear of killing the civilian drivers, made the failure to bomb Assad’s air force even worse. It let ISIS sell hundreds of millions of dollars in black market oil in Turkey and use the proceeds to fund establishing a large and threatening terror network in Europe.

 
Delays in war have hidden costs, but they usually are very real and very large.  Frittering away time costs lives.

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http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/17/defense-budget-pentagon-obama/

Hubris, The Basis of Big Government Spending

Federal government spending problems are based entirely on hubris in government. In the US, our massive entitlement spending and huge regulatory structure is based on the idea that government experts can make decisions for people better than people can make decisions for themselves.

The morality of the government “taking care” of everyone is questionable.  It’s a given that some people are mentally unable to make their own decisions, it’s appropriate that a responsible person or institution be appointed by a local court to take care of them.  It’s not appropriate for a federal government bureaucracy to decide whole classes of people are unable to take care of themselves.  It’s even worse for the federal government to offer cash rewards if you give up taking care of yourself and let them take care of you instead.  When the federal government is taking care of you, you have to do what they tell you to do.  That includes voting for the people who take care of you, or they will stop doing it.

The faith of liberals in the purity of federal government workers’ motives has always astonished and amused me in its total naivete.   The people from the government will have the best of motives, while the evil private sector workers will not, according to liberals.  These judgements are never connected with the career paths of actual people who move between government and private sector jobs through the “revolving door” everyone complains about.  It also seems to be some miracle, a weird kind of transubstantiation, that people stop being people and become selfless saints once they start working for the government.

Computers have lead the government knows best crowd to argue that the government can use computers to collect all the information they need to run things, including large complex things like whole sectors of the economy.  Voters should notice that the government does not do computers very well. The Obamacare roll out is just one in a long line of technology flops. The Office of Personnel Management got hacked for 20 million personnel records because they did not have up to date security. Background checks for military, FBI and CIA personnel were stolen including finger print records.

If you're old enough to remember the $600 toilet seats the Pentagon was buying in the 1980's, you should notice that the problem was government using obsolete computer technology. The printers used to print parts lists could not print very wide reports. So the reports never had a part description and a price on the same page.

We need to cut government spending. We need to notice that government does not have the competence to run the things it’s supposed to be doing right now. There is no way the federal government can take on anything more.  We need to stop the idiots who think government should do more.  It’s clear from the results that the federal government can’t do any more.