In Thomas Sowell’s collection, The Thomas Sowell Reader he offers an interesting idea in the chapter , ‘Reflections on Term Limits’.

Pay Congressmen $1,000,000 a year.  No benefits, no retirement pension.

The biggest problems with the current system,  in Sowell’s opinion, is the amount of time that is spent on campaigning and the failure to attract qualified prospects from many fields.

The problem with term limits is that unless the term limit is a single term, too much time will still be spent on campaigning.

Congressmen face several critical issues that demand a lot of thought and mental space.  They should not have to redirect those resources to the prospect of campaigning.  The more expensive and complicated our campaigns get the more costly the distraction.

Campaigning has become a different skill set from governance and we are learning that we need those who can govern.  Top leaders in law, finance, healthcare, and business make more than Congressmen and few can afford to take leave from their careers. The result is that we either elect those who need the compensation, unable to replicate the income in the private sector, or those so rich that they are only attracted by the power.  The working wealthy, those most familiar with federal policies’ daily impact, are kept out of the pool.

By paying the Congressmen $1,000,000 a year with no other benefits and limiting the term to a single term, the elected can eliminate the distraction of a campaign and the conflicts of interest that come from it.  While this sounds like a big expense Sowell notes that “Paying this salary to each member of Congress for the entire 21^st century would cost less than running the Department of Agriculture for one year.”

This salary would also attract the best in the fields whose input we sorely need.

There are for sure some shortcomings to the idea.  It may make the campaign for the single lucrative term more intense and may attract the more of the very influences Sowell seeks to minimize.  But lobbyists are a byproduct of regulations more so than campaigns.  There may need to be some restriction on the ability of the elected to deliver on promises made to get elected.

Those that earn seven figure salaries in the private sector are either selected by boards in some objective meritocratic fashion or are self made and measured by their results.  Candidates are selected by a population that is often more motivated by populist appeal than critical analysis.  It would be a mistake to assume voters will make the same decision as a Fortune 500 Board of Directors.

Still Sowell’s idea has merit and is worthy of consideration, if only because it addresses serious flaws in our current system.

A few gems from Thomas Sowell from the last chapter of the Thomas Sowell Reader.

“There is no greater indictment of judges than the fact that honest people are afraid to go into court, while criminals swagger out its revolving door.”

“Few skills are so well rewarded as the ability to convince parasites that they are victims.”

“Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like national interest.”

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth.  When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”

“Ideology is fairy tales for adults.”

“No matter how disastrously some policy has turned out, anyone who criticizes it can expect to hear: “But what will you replace it with?” When you put out a fire, what do you replace it with?”

“People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together.”

“My favorite New Year’s resolution was to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people.  This has reduced both my correspondence and my blood pressure.”

“Some ideas sound so plausible that they can fail nine times in a row and still be believed the tenth time.  Other ideas sound so implausible that they can succeed nine times in a row and stil not be believed the tenth time.”

“It is amazing how many people seem to think that the government exists to turn their prejudices into to law.”

“As a rule of thumb, Congressional legislation that is bipartisan is usually twice as bad as legislation that is partisan.”

While our students perform poorly on standardized tests relative to other countries, we have the most desirable institutions of higher education in the world and have a disproportionate share of Nobel Prize winners.  How is this so and do we denigrate out school system too much?

One explanation is offer by Thomas Sowell in Success Concealing Failure.  This was published in the Jewish World Review on 10/29/99, and is included as a chapter in The Thomas Sowell Reader.

excerpt:

AMONG THE MANY clever and misleading defenses of our failing educational system is the assertion that our universities are among the highest rated in the world and Americans consistently win a disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes. Both these claims are accurate — and irrelevant.

While Americans won the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes again this year, not one of these winners was actually born in the United States. If people born and raised elsewhere choose to come here and use their talents, fine. But do not claim their achievements as some vindication of the American educational system.

On the contrary, the painful question must be faced: Why were a quarter of a billion native-born Americans unable to win a single Nobel Prize this year, when a relative handful of naturalized Americans won so many? This is not a vindication but an indictment of our educational system.

Even more revealing, there is a systematic relationship between the difficulty of the subject and the percentage of American doctorates which go to Americans.

HKO comments:

While Sowell’s comments may be accurate there are other factors that have accounted for American success stories such as Steve Jobs and Steven Spielberg.  There is an American spirit that combines impatience, a healthy disrespect for authority, personal freedom, and a can do attitude.  What is missing in this article is why so many groundbreaking technologies the product of American minds.  Mark Zuckerberg, Sergin Brin (Google) are a few others that come to mind.

While this is not to excuse the quality of our school system and its importance for those who are not the outliers of success,  perhaps there are other factors that have allowed us to overcome this problem.  Perhaps formal education has proven itself less relevant.  This is a product of their poor performance and breakthrough widely available technology made available by some very smart dropouts.

I am guilty of associating freedom with democracy.  Thomas Sowell writes in his book The Thomas Sowell Reader that there is a distinct difference in the chapter ‘Freedom Versus Democracy.’

Democracy and Freedom are too often confounded.  Britain itself did not have anything cloze to democracy until the Reform Act of 1832.  But it had freedom long before that.

The fundamentals of freedom- limited government, separation of powers, and independent judiciary, free speech, jury trials- existed in Britain for many generations before the franchise was extended to most males.

Just as freedom can exists without democracy, so democracy can crush freedom.  During the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, blacks in the South had many rights that they lost when the occupying Union army was withdrawn and democratically elected state governments took over, ushering in the Jim Crow era.

Today, the confusion between freedom and democracy leads far too many Americans, including those in high places, to seek to spread democracy around the world- in complete disregard of the circumstances of the of the particular countries.  In some respects, we may be more dangerous to our friends than to our enemies, when we pressure them to set up at least the trappings of democracy.

Both freedom and democracy have prerequisites.  When those prerequisites do not exist, democracy especially can be a house of cards.

It is much easier to imitate the outward institutional forms of Western democracy than to synthesize the centuries of traditions that make those institutions work.

HKO comments:

For democracy to function it takes an educated populace.  Freedom is more directed related to capitalism.  Democracy without freedom can be exceptionally oppressive.  As Neil Boortz noted democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner.

This is an important distinction.  George W Bush push for democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, when freedom was more important.  But freedom as we know it would have been much more difficult to obtain.

Thomas Sowell writes Best Way to Aid Economy? Just Do Nothing in the Investors Business Daily, 9/14/11.

Excerpts:

The grand myth that’s been taught to whole generations is that the government is “forced” to intervene when there is a downturn that leaves millions of people suffering. The classic example is the Great Depression of the 1930s. What most people are unaware of is there was no Great Depression until after politicians started meddling in the economy.

There was a stock market crash in October 1929 and unemployment shot up to 9% — for one month. Then unemployment started drifting back down until it was 6.3% in June 1930, when the first major federal intervention took place. That was the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill, which more than a thousand economists across the country pleaded with Congress and President Hoover not to enact.

But then, as now, politicians decided they had to “do something.” Within 6 months, unemployment hit double digits. Then, as now, when “doing something” made things worse, many felt the answer was to do something more.

Both President Hoover and President Roosevelt did more—and more, and more. Unemployment remained in double digits for the entire remainder of the decade. Indeed, unemployment topped 20% and remained there for 35 months, stretching from the Hoover administration into the Roosevelt administration.

In 1987, when the stock market declined more in one day than it had in any day in 1929, Ronald Reagan did nothing. There were outcries and outrage in the media. But Reagan still did nothing. That downturn not only rebounded, it was followed by 20 years of economic growth, marked by low inflation and low unemployment.

The Obama administration’s policies are very much like those of the Roosevelt administration during the 1930s. FDR not only smothered business with an unending stream of new regulations, he spent unprecedented sums of money, running up record deficits, despite raising taxes on high-income earners to levels that confiscated well more than half their earnings.

Like Obama today, FDR blamed the country’s economic problems on his predecessor, making Hoover a pariah.

Yet, six years after Hoover was gone, and nearly a decade after the stock market crash, unemployment hit 20% again in the spring of 1939.

HKO Comment:

Sowell dispels the narrative that government must save us from the imperfections, or at least the short term dislocations inherent in capitalism. Perhaps the opposite is more true.  The political battle centers on who controls the narrative and which one we accept.

Tips to Gary Meyers.