Neanderpundit

Just to see if I can penetrate the thick skull of someone used to “Chain of command”

See, in the military, there is a hierarchical chain of command by which only the immediate superior of an individual can give a person a command and that person can only pass that command down one level. That is, of course, a gross oversimplification of the process, I’m sure plenty of people will come along and “Set me straight” on this, but I am of the opinion that this is generally if not specifically accurate.

Thankfully, the world is not the military, though there are plenty of parallels.

Let’s say for example Ralph Gotrox has a huge mansion. He hires Billy Bobs mansion Maintenance Company to take care of it.

Billy Bob farms everything out. He’s actually just a figurehead and spends most of his time on a beach in Jamaica, his nephew Ray Bob actually runs the business
Ray Bob maintains many mansions, so he has a team of housekeepers that clean all of them. He also has a team of roofers, because mansions have roofs that need maintaining, and it takes a lot of people. there are also tuckpointers and snowplowers and groundspeople.

One of the groundspeople is Juan’s mean and green. Juan mows a lot of lawn, but he never sees a blade of grass, he has five teams of actual groundskeepers. One of his teams is led by a guy named Jesus who everyone calls Chuy. Chuy has three mowers, a trimmer, and one guy who is especially good with flowerbeds. The flowerbed guy’s name is Andre.

Andre is out in the front of billy Bob’s mansion, carefully deadheading the roses. Who does he work for?

No, not Chuy. Chuy is just his immediate superior, but if Chuy wasn’t there then Juan could just as easily tell him what needs doing. So is it Juan? Why the fuck would Juan tell him what to do unless Ray Bob told him what he wanted done? So is Ray Bob the boss? Fuck no. Ray bob doesn’t give a flying rats ass about that bedamned rosebush, and would leave it alone except for the orders he received from Billy Bob, who, on his beach in Jamaica, is too damned drunk to give a shit. No, the boss, the customer, is Ralph Gotrox. In any employment hierarchy the employer and the employee are the only two elements that can not be removed from the equation. the man who pays for the work, and the person who does it. The only reason the intermediaries exist is convenience- and the same is true of our government. because as individuals we didn’t want to have to ALL deal witht he teachers on the school board and ALL have to negotiate with US steel for the material to build a battleship. We as taxpayers have, over the years, created a hierarchy that allows us to accomplish all the myriad tasks of operating a nation, but somewhere along the way, the hierarchy got the impression that IT was in charge and forgot the real employer- the one who pays the bills. This is not a motivational poster, it is an unassailable fact. Any other attitude is not merely wrong, it is actively evil.

Professor Hale has shown himself to be a reasoning and moderately efficient steward of the resources for which he is entrusted. otherwise I wouldn’t even have this conversation. The fact that he has bought the “You’re not the boss of me” party line is distressing because he is one of the good ones. Imagine what the real scumbags are like. And the core of the problem with the government- the whole nation, in fact- is that people think their boss is just the person that can fire them. And we, as the providers of the currency, have had that ability forcibly removed from us in almost all cases. it is rarely the elected officials that are the major problem, but the mass of bureaucrats who are insulated against reprisal for incompetence.

Once again: The employer and the employee are the last two people in the equation when everything else has disappeared. the one who pays, and the one who gets paid; the one who needs the work done, and the one who does the work. Everyone else is just a parasite or a bureaucrat.

fusses at me that he can’t get bloggers to catch fire with the fervor he has for the issues he husbands.

I understand his frustration, but I can’t fix it, because I understand why nobody gets upset. We’re used to it. I’m not capable of being surprised by the machinations of the left, or the treachery of the right, or the stupidity of the average person. What I haven’t seen with my own eyes, I can easily imagine, and for everything I have seen I can imagine worse and expect to eventually see it.

Nobody wants to read a blog that dwells on the same shit over and over again. And nobody wants to listen to anyone bitch- we have a nature that wants to fix things, and someone who presents problems without solutions is only a reminder of everyone’s impotence.

Yesterday I tried to educate professor Hale a bit, but he’s decided that he’s not interested, and this gives me the same sort of frustration that I’m sure Pascal feels, because it is obvious that so damned few people understand these few simple facts:

Since the beginning of time, there are people that want things, and people that have things. The people that want things have always made bargans with the people that have things. That bargaining is called commerce, and from the beginning of time, people have understood, that you profit by being the best overall provider of that product.

All commerce is barter, when it comes right down to it. Cash is simply a marker that is assigned an arbitrary value. it used to be that gold was used as currency because gold had an innate value, and it was portable. Since we are on the paper standard these days, the marker is just that, a promise to pay however many pigs or loaves of bread or PS3 consoles.

Commerce takes place everywhere, inside and outside of any form of government, and will certainly outlast government of all kinds.

In normal commerce, the producer with the best price, best product, best service is the one who will be favored above all others. That’s how it works- thats how it always works. The car that people like sells well. The computer that people are comfortable with sells well. The bank that makes customers feel secure does the best business. There is one constant among successful businesses: The customer is king.

Where business is concerned- and everyone in retail knows this- the buck stops in the customer’s pocket. If you want the buck to be in your pocket, you have to convince the customer to let go of it. And you do that by providing better. Better service, better product, better anything and everything. Because for the duration of the transaction, the customer is the employer and you are the employee. If you want to repeat that profitable encounter, you have to give your temporary employer the perception of value.

In industry the successful people are the people who understand this, and strive to give their customers the perception of value, The actual value is useful, but can be secondary to the perceived value- our competitors provide similar products and services but our company is perceived as being more professional, more responsive, and more capable. So our customers keep coming back.

A powerful lot of people work for large enough corporations that they cannot see beyond the room they work in or the union they belong to. “That guy is my boss” they’ll say, and they’re wrong. That guy may be their immediate superior, but the Boss is, at the end of the day, the person who buys that truck, or donut, or toolbox, or sewing machine. Henry Ford knew this instinctively, and became wealthy understanding the needs and desires of his customers. Even then, though, he had a hard time communicating this innate understanding to his employees.

Now we have separated the payer from the payee by layers so thick sanity cannot penetrate. And since most people never see the faceless person who consumes their product or service they dont’ give a shit about them.

Oddly enough, G-d forbid their Comcast doesn’t work they way they want, because they will bitch until it does. Or their car has issues. Or their Amazon package is a day later than it was promised. because ME ME ME ME ME!!!.

A stunning and astounding number of people have a complete unrelenting disconnect between what they do and where they paycheck comes from. The geek at the Best Buy has a better understanding of the nature of commerce than the highest paid Government employee. This disconnect is the core of the issue with our government and our society; Government is (and is even more so with Obamacare) Commerce at gunpoint. Or more accurately, as I said at Hale’s place:

I pay Professor Hale to make me a chair. He is contractually obligated to make me a chair.

This is how commerce works. He is the employee, I am the boss.

Professor Hale holds a gun to my head and takes my money, he then uses that money to do some things he says I want, and some things he says other people want, then blows the lions share of the money on hookers and blow.

This is how Government works.

Everyone will nod their head and agree. And that is the problem! It has become the norm that we simply accept this, and it is completely unacceptible, and as Hale has demonstrated, some people will even argue about the veracity of the simple fact that the government takes our money and is completely unaccountable for how it is spent.

The government provides nothing, and in fact consumes. the infrastructure, organization, defense, and regulation it “Provides” is in every way and in every case subpar, less effective than that provided by private contractors, and far, far more expensive. Doesn’t make any difference if it is a bridge, or (coming to an asshole near you, soon, ) a colonoscopy, someone will do it better, faster, cheaper than the government, but we are obliged to pay the government the price it sets for the things it says we need.
Not until this ignorance is eradicated from our entire race will anything ever change, because, since people are “Used to it” and since “We won’t ever change it” we no longer even think about it.

So in this respect I’m on the same platform as Pascal, watching the trains roll on past the last stop before perdition, because nobody wants to have their own ignorance pointed out to them. Those lies they’ve been taught to believe are much more comfortable.