Someone close to me has recently spent some months confronting the abject incompetence of government bureaucracy. The lunacy of bureaucratic cover-my-back-side inactions is something most of us have experienced in frustration, regardless what corner of the government we have dealt with. Each and every time I have found myself confronting the blundering inefficiency of the gigantic government blob, over the years, the experience has usually been impeding, and has always been stressful. I always knew that, “entrepreneurs need not enter”, and as for the public, “don’t bother us, we’re busy and you’re an annoyance”.
I also felt that the Jabba-The-Hut type blob of government was in bad need of overhaul and rarely found any department where a good dose of zero-based budgeting couldn’t be applied.
I’ve always believed that the entrepreneur’s success over the very long term, requires a uncommon capacity for consistently finding the right people, installing them where they’ll do the right thing, and heading them in the right direction. This always requires some talent to accomplish, and always requires a good deal of outright luck.
Government morass is the antithesis of this modus operandi. Government departments grow endlessly, always beyond their intended purviews and budgets, and in our new age of Obama where political ideology drives all department heads and senior ranks, the blob of state has sucked up all of the oxygen in the Nation. Government has become, by far, the principal creator of jobs.
Taxpayers are helpless to turn back the monster, or slow it down. Taxpayers cannot restrict the blob’s assault on their freedom, their incomes, and their bank accounts.
For the first time in over a generation, an individual is within sight of the White House who has depended on hiring the best talent he could find to build his company. He has plenty of faults, but for the most part, he has run a clean ship and raised an exemplary family. At almost 70, we can safely say that he has done it over the “long term” and has done it consistently. It is in his blood and it is what he knows. He won’t change.
Trump might temper some of his behaviour, but Donald Trump will not change his modus operandi. Unlike the current inexperienced Jarrett/Obama team which has mismanaged everything it has touched, Trump will find the right people, place them in the right jobs, and head them in the right direction. He is not an apologist for his country and he won’t be spending his time on the golf course as the Nation he leads disintegrates.
His ego will require him to do exactly what he intends, which is to turn the great Ship America around.
A constituent of the vast baby boomer generation with a career which has been fortunate to know the ponderous corporate worlds, as well as the intimately pressurized, and invigorating entrepreneurial domains of high tech and venture capital, I have harvested my share of mistakes meandering through corridors of enterprise from Silicon Valley, to London and endless, colourful, sometimes praetorian points in between. The voyage has provided an abundance of fodder for a pen yielding to an inquisitive keyboard, a foraging mind, and a passionate spirit.
Whether political or business or social or economic or personal, is it not all political? It is a privilege to write, and an even greater privilege to be read by anyone, and sometimes with the wind at my back the writing may occasionally be legible. I do not write to invite scorn, nor to invite respect, but if I get really lucky the writing can stimulate thinking. I also write for the very selfish purpose of animating my own processes, and engaging the best of what life offers. Above all, whether biting fire or swatting shadows, I am grateful to be gifted the freedom to write and publish whatever flows down to the keyboard. To all those who enabled this freedom, and to all those standing guard to preserve it, I am indebted.