Unpatriotic Vlad

I really appreciate it when you folks email me. My address is vlad@vladville.com. I do read all of it, if it impacts what I work in I even respond (if it doesn’t you’re more likely to get a response by posting a comment here and calling me out on it in the open and letting the world judge who the bigger fool is) – so yesterday I got called out for being unpatriotic for my previous comments:

“In this struggle the last thing we need is for people like you to be second guessing funding for people in trouble. Very unpatriotic Vlad!!!!”

Ok, so here is the difference between “funding” and “bailout” and why it’s not a good thing for anyone.

Love me or hate me, I have a fairly consistent set of what is right and wrong and bailing out the idiots for their catastrophic lack of work ethic or competence is a dangerous long term proposition. Once upon a time I wrote a blog post titled “Is the IT community a good substitute for training” where I argued that helping people bridge the gaps across their areas of incompetence is a practice that endangers the end users that are then serviced and damaged by the consultants, sometimes beyond repair. Needless to say, ’twas not a popular thing to say.

Yesterday, I pretty much said the same thing about corporate America.

I’ve been saying the same thing about people who reject the notion of taxing and expect someone else to fix their mistakes.

Here is the bottom line: When you fail, and fail big, there should be consequences. That is what keeps people in line and always calculating tradeoffs, being risk averse, responsible for their decisions.

That is what keeps companies honest and less likely to float the entire company down the tube in order to gain massive payoff at the expense of everyone losing their jobs.

That is what makes people put reasonable investments, work with others, compete on price and services.

The initial .com boom was fueled by the “do-no-wrong” Venture Capital funding that basically encouraged people to build castles on sand beaches as close to the wave because the oceans were going to freeze over real soon now. How did that turn out? Everything but the biggest telcos went under and now we have no choice and no competition. We have three telcos with effectively the same pricing.

When you eliminate risk you encourage people to be irresponsible. If you’re well taken care of and have nothing to lose and the more you fail the more likely you are going to get saved with a huge severance, you not only get encouraged to dream big but you are almost penalized if you fail little. You have to fail huuuuge.

That is not the American dream, that is not corporate America, that is not how this country was built and how the great industries and innovation we have here came about. It came from some frugal people (Ford, Walton, Gates, Jobs) who kept a tight ship and did all they could to optimize their workforce and their offering until they had their own bankroll to change the world and call the shots.

If we change the rules now, and we have, we have effectively become worse than Russia. When you take the incentive out of the markets to perform and be responsible to your clients and employees you end up with stagnating companies on one end with a totally demotivated and depressed workforce not interested in education, and megalomaniac assholes with world domination goals on the other. Russia came under fire a few years ago when they institutionalized (i.e. Government came in, claimed taxes weren’t paid and they jacked the largest oil company in the country) a successful and growing industry. Our government is buying out and covering for the failing industries who are failing due to their own overindulgence in their excesses. Who got to this point by fueling the real estate boom where credit was extended to everyone with no questions asked.

Congress is set to vote today to give the White House the blank check to buy out distressed properties. You remember what happened the last time we gave the Bush Administration a full unaccountable control over anything he wanted to do with no checks and balances? Iraq War. Patriot Act.

Folks are scared of a massive failure. They are afraid to let the system implode in a public way ahead of elections because their jobs are on the line if it starts to seem like they sat through some really bad events. America be damned and all its hundreds of thousands of employees that are about to be homeless.

All so we can save a few politicians.

One day we will return to the days of accountability and risk–reward tradeoffs and maybe at that point people will be able to start investing and creating a promise of returns for the hard work. That day certainly doesn’t look to be close.