Sorry, but I love electronics, and I often find analogies in Electronics and Physics to other areas of life. So, bear with me, because this applies... I promise.
Guitar amplifiers are made to amplify weak signals from a guitar and make them audible through a speaker. In order to keep them from running away and amplifying the crap out of any other signal they can receive, including television signals, static, magnetic inductance and even cosmic radiation from distant galaxies, as well as amplifying signals that it creates itself, engineers use what they call "feedback loops." A feedback loop is when you basically take some of the end product and add it back at the beginning to stabilize the amp. Negative feedback is when you take some of the end product and invert it so that as the amp tries to go crazy, the load on it becomes heavier and it fixes itself. Genius eh? I thought so.
So this got me thinking about our Democratic Republic, which has mechanisms that allow the people to basically HANG THEMSELVES. Or shoot themselves in the foot, or to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. However you want to put it, that is what voting for more welfare, healthcare, bank bailouts, pork-barrel projects, farm subsidies, artist endowments, etc. is. You are hanging yourselves! An ancient Greek philosopher once said, “A democracy is doomed once the people discover they can vote themselves funds from the public coffers.” Like I said in my other blog: You cannot vote for it to always be Friday!
So here is what I propose: we pass a new Constitutional Amendment that says that any time our yearly budget exceeds our yearly tax revenue, voting gets restricted to only those owning their primary residence and paying property taxes. See how this is negative feedback? When we start to exceed our means, the ability to keep voting for more is diminished. Property owners in general are people with a vested interest in the economic health of the country and usually vote economically Conservative out of self-preservation. There are other ways of doing the same thing, such as tying total congressional compensation to GDP. They only get paid if the country is doing good and growing. I would even make it so that their pension gets docked if we go into recession. I also had a great idea where CEO salaries (including perqs, allowances, stock options, etc.) could only be, say, 20 times what the lowest employee in the company makes. So if Bill gates wants to make $1 million/ year, he has to pay the janitor $50 thousand. And we all know he makes way more than a million per year. A great idea, but socialist in nature. I guess you could make it a requirement for a business license? Hmmmm.
Anyway, feedback is how we can get an idea of the consequences of our actions, especially when those consequences mean life-or-death to real people and are sooooo far in the future. And using that feedback to temper our decisions in the present is only rational. And being rational with the future happiness and well-being of our children is our moral duty.
Steve Casas
PS: Incidentally, today I gave a bid of $5/ SqFt to frame a patio cover. That's half price for general framing, and a fair price for my talent and my tools. The guy choked on it and I told him if he wants it done for less he'd better learn to speak Spanish and go pick up some guys down at Home Depot who are getting food stamps and welfare checks and whose families are clogging our emergency rooms to get free health care and are paying no taxes. I told him if he added all that up it would probably be cheaper to hire me. Besides, it would be done right, by a guy with a great reputation. But he'll probably get it done by Julio and Sancho and it will look like Tijuana, right next to a $200,000 pool! But you see... he's shooting himself in the foot and enticing more illegal aliens into the country and he's gonna pay for it anyway, one way or another!
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