Air Resistance -- A lesson in Governance

We start with a simple analogy: when you buy a tennis racket, you usually get a head cover. Swinging a tennis racket with the head cover on more difficult than swinging it without the head cover, not because of the weight, but because of the air resistance. There practically isn’t any air resistance without the head cover. And that’s all there is, with it on.

Now imagine your automobile. It’s got the head cover on. It takes a lot of power to push through the air resistance, our atmosphere. Reducing the effect of air resistance would reduce the amount of power needed to move forward. Given the constraints under which cars are designed, i.e., a rectangular box-like container, big enough to seat a specific number of adult humans, with a wheel at each corner, there can be only one optimal design for maximum penetration of the atmosphere.

So why don’t all cars look exactly the same? You work on the answer while I forge on ahead…

Politics suffers from something similar. While not claiming to know what they are, I would like to believe that there is a set of political rules, above the level of tribalism, that can make a country ‘run smoothly,’ and its inhabitants do the best possible job of ‘getting along.’

Think about what cars looked like back in the 60s and 70s. Simplicity, efficiency, realism were not in the equations that designers used to create them. Things are changing now, which is why more and more, cars are starting to look alike.

But not so in politics. Things, designs, are still business as usual. (Business is not used in the prior sentence ’on accident,’ as they say down on the farm.) Political leaders who gain ’clout’ do so because they become aligned with forces that control money and/or votes. This has resulted in ‘political designs’ that can’t help but end up being complex, often illogical, and seldom beneficial to more than a nominal percentage of “the People.”

If elected, I pledge that it will not be business as usual.