On Smaller Governments and Corporations

"The skill of making and maintaining Commonwealths, consisteth in certain rules as doth Arithmetic and Geometry",  John Hobbes in the Leviathan.

George Rebane

Time to review some important tenets of my credo as they impact Rebane Doctrine’s prescriptions for the size and complexity of good governments, good businesses, and good organizations in general.  I do this so that I can reference it for the intelligent reader when the inevitable questions of governance and corporatism come up in these pages.  For the longtime reader of RR, there is really nothing new revealed in the sequel by this retired systems scientist and registered professional engineer in control systems.  However, it is the correct way of looking at the realworld, one that really works and has provided us the QoL we all enjoy.

I make this attempt at pedagogy to both educate and illustrate our unfortunate uneducables, many of whom are in positions of power.  Since RR is a socio-political blog, we shall see here the tragic error that underlies and makes dysfunctional all collectivist ideologies, especially in their approaches to governance.  We will then see the spectrum of responses that illustrate this.

The above diagram is a summary of how closed-loop, controlled systems work.  Stay with me.  The system to be controlled in a desired way is called the ‘Plant’, and the subsystem that wants the Plant to work in a certain way is called the ‘Controller’.  The Plant can be anything from a rocket heading for Mars to a Medicare for All program.  The purpose of building/developing the Plant is so that it can beneficially impact certain aspects of the ‘environment’ in which it is to operate – interplanetary space, a population requiring healthcare, a temperature regulated house.  The environment, of course, in return impacts the Plant, its operation, and sometimes even its structure.

To read the rest of this little missive, please Download Smaller Governments and Corporations

Comments

[The Estonian Fox]

Good letter declaring for small organizations.

Taken from your "Smaller Government" screed:
"Today we witness the malady of leviathan governments in their gross inefficiency and growing incompetence in handling the affairs of state. In our country the disease is noticeable in our deteriorating infrastructure and people’s dealings with bureaucracies."

Look no farther than the 8/18/19 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story of "Pittsburgh's Property Lottery". There were 1479 purchase requests on abandoned properties (literally deteriorating infrastructure) in the city in the last 2 years. An overwhelming 25 were actually sold to investors, or adjacent property owners who want to get a bigger yard or a fixer-upper house for relatives. These parcels have no tax receipts on them once abandoned. Council members can even cancel a potential sale for any reason, or no reason, with no notice given to the requester.

You would think that someone would be fired for this inefficiency. You would be wrong. If a small business owner performed as poorly as this, the government's lawyers would be on them within the day.

I guess that Pittsburgh is such a young city (founded only recently in 1758) without enough experience in taking care of its property owners. The reasons of course are political, since there is no logical reason for the long & complicated process of transferring ownership of unwanted (by the current owners) properties to willing buyers.