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.

Hillary Got Hacked! Can She Be Blackmailed?

I've worked in IT for almost 45 years.  I have spent the last 3 years working on security.  Hillary's email server was protected by out of date commercial security with known holes, based on what I've read.  Any foreign intelligence service with reasonably good hackers could get in, copy everything and get out without a trace.  For part of the time, a subcontractor was backing up Hillary's server to the cloud.  The possibility that Hillary was using the server as part of a pay to play scheme involving the Clinton Foundation only makes it much worse.  At that point Hillary can be blackmailed with information stolen from the server. 

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-other-server-scandal-1457653794#lf_comment=475891012

In Defense of Snooping

Everybody knows the ultra-secretive NSA was snooping.  The program was called Stellarwind.  The snooping of Stellarwind has always been falsely described as listening in.  In fact it was more like reading the addresses and return addresses on envelopes, something which was routinely done without a warrant back in the days of snail mail.  The NSA tracked what phone originated each call and what phone was dialed, and that's all.  No phone conversations were listened to without a warrant, at least under Stellarwind.  Based on who called who, Stellarwind constructed a pattern of groups of people who were in contact with each other.  Whether that was a big enough threat to privacy for it to be cancelled is a question for the reader.  My personal opinion is that it's a very close call.  I would feel better about allowing the NSA to do it if Lois Lerner had not deployed IRS powers against President Obama's political enemies.  I still think it's probably worth doing despite the risk of abuse. 

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-defense-of-snooping-1456184621#lf_comment=465743734