Mercedes Benz lyrics
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ? 

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a color TV ?
Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me.
I wait for delivery each day until three,
So oh Lord, won’t you buy me a color TV ? 

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town ?
I’m counting on you, Lord, please don’t let me down.
Prove that you love me and buy the next round,
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town ? 

George Will  suggests that President Obama has missed the big picture with Russia.  When I was a kid Russia had about the same population as the USA, well maybe that was the Soviet Union, at any rate, no longer. Russia decimated its own population with internal revolution, mass starvations by Stalin and then losing millions in WW II. But the latest trend is strictly internal. Russia is the accelerating to the downside population wise. Alcoholism, disease, a failed health care system, family dissolution, amidst the lack of hope is decimating the population growth. 

Dennis
Elam

April
16, 2009

Word
Count 740

Big Brother is Planning

Lyndon
Johnson observed that politics is all about getting someone else to do what you
want them to do, and believing it was their idea to begin with. Reagan went on
to observe that you could get a lot done in Washington, DC if you let someone
else take credit for it. Those ideas are being ramped up to a new level.

For
a look at where the new Administration is taking us, read Nudge and Predictably
Irrational. Here is what they are all about. The column just commanded you
to read two books. Realistically you probably won’t . Indeed you may well rebel
at the idea of being commanded at all.

Okay
suppose instead  you learned that
two books were the most popular at the Andrews library, that there was a two
month wait to get the books (for a three day checkout given their popularity),
and that 30% of all with a library card had read them. The information contains
no admonition to go read the book. Now, are you more interested?  Might you even read a review or buy it
off the internet, you bet you would.

The
concepts involved are known as anchoring, herding, and the default syndrome.
Anchoring is the process of giving us a starting point. Schools learn to ask
for $100, $250, and $500 donations as silver, gold, and platinum. This brings
in more than asking for $50, $100, and $250. One is anchored to the initial
suggestion of the initial gift. Herding is the process of renaming the get on
the band wagon approach. Obama girl on Facebook was no accident, she was
promoted as a way to anchor the choice of new young voters. The default
syndrome holds that if you are in a situation you are less likely to withdraw.
Hence health clubs get one to sign longer memberships for less per month
realizing that even if not used, people are less likely to withdraw once
committed.  Remember Bill Clinton
saying that he could let us make the decisions with our tax money but we might not
make the right ones?  But wait, he
is going to invest our money, not
spend it.  Hello default syndrome,
once in , the government decides for you.

Hold
on, in the case of cigarette smoking, for once, the government got it right.
Fewer people smoke leading to better health. But on the other hand, like most
reformed smokers, it appears they began eating more, America is growing more
obese. How shall we solve that problem?

The
idea here is that we all need a nudge to do the right thing, eat right, save
money, avoid littering. The Don’t Mess with Texas Campaign was hugely
successful in this regard. The problem of course appears on page 13 where
Thaler and Sunstein reveal their own bias about an ultimate goal.

As the experience with
Hurricane Katrina showed, government is often required to act, for it is the
only means by which the necessary resources can be mustered, organized, and
deployed.

That
is not my recollection. My recollection is the famous photo of the school buses
axle deep in flood water while residents were stranded in  New Orleans. The aftermath saw the
election of the first Republican governor (an Indian Catholic no less) in
decades.   Wal Mart responded
more quickly than FEMA. There are still people living in FEMA trailers for all
I know. Mississippi and Iowa had very different results with very different
governments in a similar situation.

Such
ideas are now at the core of what is about to happen. The carbon tax will
preclude one from finding or using energy, Obama said it would be too expensive
for us to use. He was not kidding. 
Forbid  executive salaries
over $500,000, penalize incomes over $250,000, tax large pickups, subsidize
hybrid cars, the sky is the limit. 
The first carbon tax  effort
failed with Democrat Senators from coal producing states. Which raises the
question, what if the Nudge does not work, then what?

Clearly
the Tea Party  (Taxed Enough
Already) participants ore not being nudged into the Stimulus program. Will the
administration give up this nudge and adhere to their wishes?

We
invite your comments , or do you need a nudge to send me an e mail? 

Dennis Elam teaches at Texas
A & M San Antonio and can be reached at denis.elam@att.net.

Here is a great seven minute you tube about Texas. Indeed the Houston DFW SA Triangle they call Texaplex is one of the remarkable economic engines in America, especially if one does not have to live in Houston….

A summary of the story to date including the resuce appears here.

Management strategy outlines the overall goals of a company and how to get there. The same holds true for foreign policy for a country. It seems to me that the Pirates learned quite a bit at a relatively cheap cost to them, pirates after all are somewhat expendable in that line of work, not to be callous but….

Most of you are too young to recall the Evil Empire (Peggy Noonan, Reagan speechwriter's phrase) of the old Soviet Union. Say what you will, they never had a pirate problem. Yes they finally made a big mistake in Afghanistan, and we seem to be follwoing their example there. 

The big problem here is that the pirates have no real reason to fear anyone.  After all they only asked for $2 M dollars, pretty cheap considering an entire, ship, cargo, crew, and other ships are held hostage. Why would they be afraid, no nation has done anything to stop them and the cheap ransom is priced on I think, the theory that it is just cheaper to pay than fight. this is precisely the same thing that happened two hundred years ago with the Barbary Pirates. Ransoms were demanded from British and French ships and kidnappings were in vogue. It finally got to be too much and the US and Britain finally took action (to the shores of Tripoli, Marine Hymn) forming the basis for the modern US Navy.  Google wikipedia.org on barbary pirates

What do you suppose it cost us sending multiple warships, having people up 24/7 watching satellite images, burning up phone lines about negotiations with Pirates, now there is an oxymoron, and not to mention the testosterone charged parachute drop at night from an airplane into the ocean which miraculously worked, ie, this is not a movie, the military is usually not this lucky in real life. And then the great Tom Clancy ending, shooting from a rolling ship, and again, they hit the pirates not the Captain. Absurdly I am sure the permission to fire had to come from the White House. Lyndon Johnson tried to run the Viet Nam war that way, it did not work.

A strategic policy would be that massive retaliation occurs if pirates even think about trying to take our ships. Our ships are armed and ready. If boarded  the ships  are armed and ready. I read that the pirates come abord with knves in each hand and another between their teeth, a ferocious image to be sure. Funny, for all our high tech stuff, isn't this the way pirates have always boarded ships. 

Anyway, there should be no comments about we are trying to negotiate to avoid the loss of life. I mean , how reassuring do we need to be to the pirates?  No Hillary, we are proceeding in such a fashion to make sure no one very thinks about trying this again,Trust me, in the larger issue, all this has not been lost on Vladimir Putin, a KGB trained pirate himself, with eyes on re acquiring his former Republics….not to mention dominating Europe by control of their sole energy sources.

Do you think any of this scares that chap in North Korea who just launched his own missle?

But I digress. the lesson here aside from international diplomacy, is that a company needs to proceed in the same manner. I see that today MSFT is again trying to buy Yahoo or someone else. MSFT has to buy the competition, the never are THE competition…..

Ford is trying something new to re introduce its Fiesta line of small cars. After asking for video submissions, Ford is giving 100 Feistas to young folks for six months. Those 100 will be postin gtheir impressions, good and bad, on You Tube, Flickr and Twitter, all personal sites.