There Is No Perfect Boat

One of the things sailors learn early on is that there is no perfect boat. Boat designers have to first learn the purpose for which a boat will be used before putting pencil or pen to paper. If the boat will be used for more than one purpose, he must craft a compromise design (racing and cruising, for example).

Dogma has its place and sometimes intrudes. Almost always to the detriment of competition with designs crafted without dogma. The best case study of a boat designer little hampered by dogma and free to follow design considerations wherever they led was Nathaniel Herreshoff. His designs were so successful in competition that they were often banished from racing by rules changes.

In my view, the tasks of government should be managed by people untrammeled by dogma, focusing only on the aim or goal of government policy.

But we seem unable to agree on goals.

I believe the goal of economic policy should be to craft policies that work. But work to what end? To the end of general prosperity.

Not necessarily equal prosperity, but neither should the end sought be vast inequalities.

From the beginning of the New Deal until some time in the 1970's, our general economic prosperity was the envy of the world. It was a time of strong labor unions, effective government regulation of banks and corporations, of steeply progressive income taxes. And a prosperous middle class.

In recent years it has become fashionable to speak of the generation that lived through the depression, went off to triumph during World War II and returned to the GI Bill and jobs that built our postwar prosperity as "the greatest generation."

They surely merit our admiration.

But in my view the greatest generation were the leaders who had the vision and persistence to guide us through this economic catastrophe and succeed in war and reconstruction afterward. That generation was born in the late nineteenth century, educated early in the twentieth century and with formative experiences during and after World War I.

This was my grandparents' generation, not my father's.

The guiding principal of my grandparents' generation, at least among the best leaders, was to question dogma and abandon it if necessary. Do what needed to be done, in a rational way after studying the problem.

This generation and the generation before them built the Brooklyn Bridge, America's great railroad system, designed and built automobiles affordable by working families, set aside national forests and parks for public enjoyment, and generally fashioned a world we all could enjoy.

They certainly had disagreements among themselves, but in general were able to debate public issues on their own merits.

This tradition is fading.

One place the tradition had continued was in weekly discussions on National Public Radio between Robert Reich, President Clinton's Secretary of Labor, and David Frum, a former speech writer for George W. Bush.

Last Wednesday, David Frum withdrew from the radio show on the grounds that he can no longer represent the views of the Republican Party.

Robert Reich lamented that decision on the grounds that we need to explore and debate issues on their own merits, not on the basis of dogma.

Reich is right.