-Caveat Lector- The Unrecognized Republican Key to Small Government © 1998 Philip Hyde, 10 Carver St, Somerville MA http://www.doomdujour.com/1gopwkwk.htm There are three ways to go in governing - #1- No Rules - by now, a mirage - modern societies are far too complicated, #2- Any Rules - which tend to turn into Many Rules, a burgeoning maximum of stifling, peripheral details - but there's also the opposite... #3- Few Rules, a stable minimum of freeing generalities, theoretically just one, so well designed and centrally positioned in the body economic that it supercedes all others and constitutes the single all-sufficient groundrule, the Holy Grail of economic designers. Phil's approach is #3 - sustainable private-market capitalism - which requires only small government to administer the single groundrule and the regular public referendums that finetune it. Common questions - •Why isn't Timesizing socialism? Because socialism is #2 above - a situation that our "mixed market capitalism" is getting closer and closer to, even under recent Republican administrations. Plus people who call Timesizing socialism forget that we already have workweek controls in the overtime section of the Federal Labor Standards Act of 1938. These controls were intended to create a national workweek maximum but, poorly designed, they backfired and created a minimum. Phil wants to redesign them - because if they do what they were meant to do, we can dismantle - safely, responsibly, even compassionately - virtually all the rest of the New Deal legislation and bureaucracy, and its spawning offspring (such as the Democrats' Great Society in the 1960s and the Republicans' Great Military Buildup in the 1980s). Plus socialism assumes all men are angels and neglects incentives. Phil focuses on incentive design. He believes that long-term sustainability is in everyone's self-interest - even the wealthy's - and that each step of the transition can be designed as a win-win "downhill stroll." •Why isn't Timesizing libertarianism? Because libertarianism is #1 above - the "no controls" approach that functions as cover for the "supermen" (e.g., Atlas Shrugged) or "superwomen" (e.g., Ayn Rand herself) to come in and commandeer all they can - regardless of unsustainability in the longer term. Libertarians and socialists share a naivete about regulation, both focusing on the simple regulation level. Libertarians think regulation is the problem. Socialists think regulation is the solution. Timesizing says it's not regulation itself that matters - it's the kind of regulation that matters. It must be general, not detailed; central, not off center; stable, not spreading; enabling, not stifling; limited, not unlimited; automatic, not discretionary; balancing, not skewing = sustainable, not termporary; in short, a few game rules, not micromanagement. That being said, with his Timesizing solution, Phil is not only a registered voter in one of America's two major political parties - he is also a card-carrying member of both LPs - both the Labor Party (socialist) and the Libertarian Party. Why? Because he needs to be able to think like both of them to be able to articulate timesizing and its successors. He needs to be able to dissolve the naive mental ruts and partitions of both Libertarian and Labor thinkers - partitions that exist in his own mind. The future is always deeper into the center than the present - it balances better by triangulating at more extreme positions on the sides. This means the future is further right than right and further left than left in today's terms. But the future finds ways to harmonize them. (The third leg of the "triangulation"? - Phil's also a member of the Mass. Greens.) Phil's best clues in the quest for the single all-sufficient groundrule were (1) the now overburdened groundrules of previous centuries (e.g., "one husband - one wife" and "one person - one vote") and (2) the idea that it's easier to share skills and work than it is to share income or wealth. In other words, employment must be balanced before finances (i.e., time before money). So Phil's best candidate for the single all-sufficient groundrule for our time is "one person - one range of skills and working hours." He calls this approach Timesizing® because it it renders downsizing obsolete (downsizing of employees) and because it fosters the upsizing of wages and markets and the downsizing of government, taxes and public debt. Then people come along and try to tell Phil that Timesizing is "totally impractical" and will "never work in a million years." Phil rolls his eyes, shakes his head, and realizes that he's talking to yet another American who is ignorant of American history.... For most of American history, we have seen timesizing at work in keeping the public sector small. For a century and a half as our technology advanced, we generally converted overtime into training and hiring, and trimmed the workday and the workweek. We started in 1776 with six or seven 12-hour workdays - an 84-hr workweek. For a century and a half, we downsized the workweek to spread among more people the free-market work constantly being taken over by inventions and taken on by immigrants. This worked so well that the overall labor supply was reduced relative to demand and market forces raised wages without government intervention. Repeated cuts in the workweek kept the center of the economy in rough balance so the whole thing stayed in rough alignment with our rising levels of work-saving technology. A balanced center balances everything else, so we did not need big government (and taxes and public debt) to balance everything else. This has been a major Republican (GOP) strategy since the birth of the party in the 1850s. Yes, children, there was a time when the Republican Party was THE progressive party in this country after the Democrats renounced the Declaration of Independence (1844) so they could embrace slavery and slave-owners. The backlash gradually created a Republican Party that worried about the longer term and wanted to enhance American freedom by abolishing slavery and limiting the workweek, thus easing the ever-tougher competition for jobs and its stifling effect on wages and markets. Nine of the 14 GOP administrations in the first century of GOP history made significant use of this strategy: •1863, Lincoln bans unlimited (and unwaged) workweeks, i.e., human slavery (technological slaves still pour in). •1868, Congress (GOP) fights depression by cutting federal government to 48 hrs/wk. •1872, Grant bans parallel wage cuts. •1892, Harrison spreads 48-hr week. •1903, Teddy Roosevelt (TR) cuts mining industry to 54 hrs/wk. ....Ref: David Roediger & Philip Foner, Our Own Time (Verso: 1989), p.161. •1907, TR cuts railroads to 96 hrs/wk. •1908, TR enforces federal 48-hr week. •1912, TR advocates (in his Progressive Party platform) 40-hr week for women, children and continuous-production industries such as steel. ....Ref: Roediger & Foner, Our Own Time (Verso: 1989), p.179. •1912, Taft strengthens 48-hr week. •1922, Harding cuts the last holdout of the 84-hr workweek, Big Steel, to 48. ....Ref: Ray Wilbur & Arthur Hyde, The Hoover Policies (Scribner's: 1937) pp.126 ff. •1932, Hoover avoids mass layoffs by cutting the federal government from 44 to a 40-hr week and, calling shorter hours the fastest and most efficient way to "create" jobs, builds momentum for FDR's Senate passage of a 30-hr week on April 6, 1933 (the Black-Perkins Bill). Progress by Democrats Cleveland, 1888, and Wilson, 1916, is then reversed by FDR's tragic flipflop: he blocks the 30-hr workweek in the House, in 1935 admitting his mistake and using a 30-hr workweek (four 6-hr shifts instead of three 8-hr shifts) in the TVA program. With too little too late, he cuts the nation to a 44-hr week in 1938, 42-hr in 1939 and 40 in 1940. The 38-hr week that many people are expecting in 1941, never comes. The Democrats cite war and later Cold War. So it's stuck at 40, despite all past U.S. history and all future technology. ....Refs: Wilbur & Hyde, The Hoover Policies (Scribner's: 1937) p.135; Roediger & Foner, Our Own Time (Verso: 1989), p.252. •Still, in 1956 Nixon boasts the GOP will bring everyone 2 cars, 3 TV's & a 32-hr workweek (Ike squelched the idea & the GOP drifted toward cold-war military spending on a colossal scale). Reagan ended the cold war but we're still stuck with our frozen, 57-year out-of-date, wartime workweek. We need to get it adjusting downward again and spreading free-market skills and work widely enough to provide well-paying jobs for all - and the time to spend that good pay so our domestic consumer markets can take off and stop sputtering. We don't need government-mandated childcare. We need more time away from work to take care of our own children, instead of leaving it to strangers. And if we can't set things up so that our incredible technology provides that for us, what the heck good is it?! Are we going to go into the 21st Century with more and more efficient technology and less and less time for our families and our communities? How long are we going to stay this stupid?! And don't tell me "That's the new reality of the global economy"! Like hell it is! We have designed it this way and we can redesign it. And we will eventually do so - the sooner, the better. And we do not need government job creation in any way, shape or form. We just need to spread the private-sector work - and skills - to include everyone. When everyone is included and self-supporting, taxpayers can stop supporting them and business will have a much bigger domestic customer base. If we can't share the easy things - skills and work, we'll never be able to share the hard thing - money. And if we don't find a way to centrifuge money soon, we're going to be a Third World nation like India. It doesn't matter how much money a country has, if 99% of it is owned by 1% of the population (and there's absolutely nothing stopping that from happening in America in the next 25 years), you have one miserable dirt-poor Third-World situation with a tiny fraction of the economic dynamism it could have. Executives, CEOs - let's give this a chance. Let's stop starving our own potentially gigantic customer base of time and money. Let's reinvest in our employees - our "human capital" - at an appropriate colossal level. The future will look back on what we've been doing so far, shake their heads and say, "Colossal failure to reinvest!" And concentrating the profits in your own pay and perks does not count as reinvestment. That's just putting spending power "on ice" and strangling the "goose that lays the golden eggs." The American economy is so big, we don't need exports. We just need to stop concentrating skills, employment and wealth in the top income brackets where people have neither the time nor the need to spend on any level remotely resembling that of their astronomical incomes. And a smoothly engineered cut in the background labor surplus can centrifuge these skills, jobs, and paychecks and deliver economic growth on a vast wartime scale without war. "...Our balking, backfiring profits economy can - by injecting one planned adjustment - be made to work in socially desirable ways, and even be made to satisfy high-grade engineering standards of efficiency, with even less involved governmental interference and industrial control than we already have." Arthur Dahlberg, Jobs, Machines and Capitalism (1932!) DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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