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nuckollsr(at)cox.net
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 Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2007 4:46 pm Post subject: Cause and effect in a regulated world. |
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At 11:14 AM 2/3/2007 -0600, you wrote:
This will be my last comment as I have airplanes to work on and, frankly
it's more fun and much more productive.
Have any of you heard of the Sport Pilot Rule? If the FAA is sooooo bad,
how do you explain what is arguably the most progressive movement
in flying?
Yes, a step forward in one venue amongst
years of stepping backward in others. We
should take care lest our grateful reaction
to little tid-bits of 'progress' blind our
willingness to study or even be aware of
the big picture.
Along with my LSA repairman maintenance ticket, I was given the phone
number of Edsel Ford, the administrator in charge of Sport Pilot, and told
if I had any questions or concerns, please, call him direct, he wants to
keep track of "his guys". Hell, he even came and audited the first class.
Seen anybody from the bureaucracy working that hard for you lately?
I know lots of really good people who work
for the FAA too. Many are dedicated folks
who have reason to be proud of their personal
achievements and honorable behavior . . .
Every barrel has a few bad apples, look at the fine time we have here with
GMCjetpilot. The trick is to get rid of the bad apples and keep the rest of
the barrel.
This isn't about the people, it's about the whole
premise as to what we as responsible citizens of
a democratic republic should expect or even accept
from government. Are we NOT the consumers who
pay the tariffs for goods and services they offer?
As for FAA causing the demise of GA, I'd argue that cost has a lot more to
do with it than anything else. Just eight years ago, when I finally got
around to finishing my PPL, a 172 was $60 an hour, wet. What is it now?
When I worked for Cessna in the mid seventies a new 172 was in the low $20K
range. All the cost of TC had been amortised long before that and look what
a 172 costs today. When you're paying a disproportionate amount of your
hard earned income for catastrophic health care extortion, er insurance,
where do you find the money for an activity like flying UNLESS it is
directed toward your economic improvement?
True, costs have risen disproportionately to other
technology driven venues. When I worked at Cessna
in '63 I think a 150 cost about $5,000 and a 172 was
about $7,500. In 1963 you could buy a Ford Falcon
with all the goodies offered for $2,500.
According to the inflation calculator at . . .
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/
. . . you have to spend about $15,000 to get the same
value for an entry level automobile today. Okay, go
out and see what you can buy for that kind of money
and compare it with the features offered cars sold
for $2500 in 1963. I'd say that cars, like MOST
products we buy today have improved tremendously in
value after considering inflation-adjusted, lower
out-of-pocket costs.
A piece-o-crap Firestone 500 (best-we-knew-how-to-do)
cost me about $40 in 1963. What kind of tires can I buy
for $240 each today? Shucks, my last set of top-o-the-
line tires for my van cost me about $500 for THE SET.
Now consider that C-172. The inflation calculator says
that machine should sell for $49,000 today. Hmmmm . . .
are the airplane companies reaping huge windfall profits?
Is somebody getting paid too much to build them? What's the
deal?
Aircraft manufacturing is exceedingly labor intensive. Because
of low volumes and high development costs, there has been
very little motion toward automated assembly . . . but there
are limits to what can be realized there as well. What I've
personally observed over the years is that we spend 2 to 3
times more person hours in shepherding a new product to the
airplane than we did 30 years ago. Further, all of that
increased labor did NOT go into improving on the-best-we-
know-how-to-do . . . to the contrary, we spend less effort
toward that goal. Unless you pull the wheels up, a C-172
doesn't perform any better today than in did in 1963.
According to the site at . . .
http://skyhawk.cessna.com/pricelist.chtml
a Garmin GA Equipped Skyhawk 172R will set you back $219,500.
Take out all the avionics and I'll bet it's still about $180,000.
That's $30,000 in 1963 dollars!
I'm sad to report that we do less engineering and more
certification in the process of bringing new products to
aviation. Needless to say, all the extra labor adds to
out-the-door costs for the airplane while adding nothing
to its value.
A fair amount of blame can be trowled on to school systems more interested
in training children to take meaningless tests than in actual learning, too.
An interesting point . . . but consider the bureaucrat's
role in "managing" an educational system. Anybody outside
the classroom except for the janitor is a bureaucrat.
They do not teach, they can only make rules, police rules and
punish transgressors of the rules. Furthermore, they draw
salaries and benefits without adding to the task of
product delivery in the classroom. Sound like government?
Okay, government goes to the bureaucrats in charge of
schools and says, "you ain't cut'n it Jake. Shape up
or we'll punish you (cut off funds)." What tools do
bureaucrats have to guage performance? Of course -
standardized tests. All this posturing, rule making,
policing, test taking and threat of punishment totally
ignores the simple-ideas that govern the educational
process:
Teachers who possess a command of simple-ideas and
a willingness and talent for explaining how they are
used to do useful things like communicate, calculate,
bring new and beneficial ideas into a free-market
economy and to be responsible and honorable users of
those ideas. And most important - understand how we got
where we are and what duties the honorable citizen takes
on under a democratic republic.
This is best achieved when consumers (parents) have
absolute responsibility and control over the services
they're paying for (knowledge and talents of teachers).
When I was in grade school, the school board (5 citizens
at zero salary) hired one bureaucrat (a principal at
a salary about 1.5x that of a teacher), and the principal
hired teachers. The parents (through their fellow citizens
on the school board and an exceedingly small bureaucracy
of one) had short-coupled input to ALL the suppliers
of goods and services offered in the classroom. (Medicine
Lodge, KS circa 1949-1953.) Anyone from the state of Kansas
or Washington, DC who decided to dictate anything would have
been told to "take a hike." Our teachers goals were to
EXCEED what were then suggested 'standards' for education.
I suspect they met their own goals. It's a sad state of
affairs when schools today are struggling to even meet perfectly
reasonable minimums.
It was a certainty that I received a higher quality
of education then than anyone gets today where the
focus shifts from teaching to raising test scores
to forestall loss of funding (got to keep all those
bureaucrats employed and their pension fund contributions
flowing). I suspect that most school systems could get
along nicely without funds from Washington if they
operated with a truly utilitarian bureaucratic staff.
But there are other systems that would need to be tossed
out as well.
A study of the big picture reveals that it's not a
"breakdown of schools" but no-value added growth in
several systems that have been allowed to take over schools.
Systems where the consumer/supplier relationship has been
corrupted to benefit the systems and forsake a
responsibility to good teachers, willing students
and those parents who view schools as having duties
beyond that of keeping their kids off the streets a few
hours a day.
Flying takes hard work and a dedication to continued learning. Our school
boards seem to be more interested in finding out how many angels can dance
on the head of a pin, than in giving kids a good grounding in science. I've
done presentations at elementary and high schools to kids who have never
heard much of anything about aviation except that it is used by vacationers
and terrorists.
And as for my wanting to save the stupid from themselves, I believe the
adage that aviation is like a self cleaning oven. When my oven is cleaned,
the nightly news doesn't find much interest, unlike the Cessna 150 hanging
upside down from the power lines.
Your cynicism is well stroked by anecdotal observations
but I think the underlying cause for increases in the
price of airplanes AND the perceived reduction in
numbers of responsible and capable folks to use them
has roots that go right down to public perceptions
of the proper function of government. For every responsibility
we turn over to someone else, a bit of freedom
is lost. Further, a constant companion to loss of personal
freedom is loss of efficiency coupled with loss
of the consumer's choice to refuse to pay for an inferior
product and force a poor performing producer out of business.
The short answer is: Everything we allow government
to touch becomes more expensive and offers less value
than products which compete with each other in the
marketplace. Every service supplied by government is
non-competitive and what-you-see-is-what-you-get. In
the few cases where we're allowed to refuse a service,
we are compelled to pay for it anyhow. Therefore, producers
of poor product are not at risk for going under due
to lack of customer acceptance. Aviation, medicine and
schools are great demonstrations of how this phenomenon
works when compared to computers, automobiles, and
most consumer products.
Plotting present trends in aviation, medicine and
schools out into the future does not paint an attractive
picture in my mind. I'll leave it to you to paint your
own pictures. But if we're going to react to injustices
heaped upon us as a MINORITY of pilots, we'll have to
support those objections as a MAJORITY of honorable
citizens who expect better behavior from their government.
In the final analysis, if government adhered to the
Constitution, then there would be no special interest
groups prowling the halls of Congress or pitching their
complaint du jour to the world . . . that's because
government would not be making legislation that puts
one citizen or group of citizens above or below another.
I.e., if the only thing your legislators are chartered
to do is protect liberty, then it matters not who you
send. Further, there will be no troughs to fight over for
a great share of the public purse. Lobbyists would be
out of a job!
Bob . . .
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lhelming(at)sigecom.net
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| Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 11:23 am Post subject: Cause and effect in a regulated world. |
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WOW ! ! This exchange is something we could all consider for forwarding to
our congressmen, state representatives, and local school boards. I for
one do not know who Bob is responding to. Larry in Indiana
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nuckollsr(at)cox.net
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| Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 1:42 pm Post subject: Cause and effect in a regulated world. |
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| Quote: | Good point. I thought your points on education were especially insightful
and would be important to all those holding office that affects the future
of our country. Please let me just say I agree with your writing and
could not have expressed my feeling any better than you already
have. Your wisdom spans far greater than aviation electronics. Thank you Bob.
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Everyone can do it. Whether you're cooking with
salt, flour, eggs, sugar, etc. or building electro-whizzies
with transistors, capacitors and microcontrollers, it
all comes down to identifying and understanding simple-ideas,
ingredients that go into recipes-for-success.
The vision of our founding fathers was deeply rooted in
simple-ideas crafted into a recipe having the greatest
possible chance for success while holding the protection
of a citizen's liberty above all else. And while they
would not have predicted our hassles with the FAA over
what we can attach to our airplanes, they knew full
well the consequences for failure of citizens to exercise
a duty to protect and nurture THE recipe for success.
But as two of my favorite authors (Paine and Bastiat)
have explained, every society is plagued with individuals
who do not understand nor do they embrace those ideals.
We (United States) are a real-time demonstration of what
happens when a recipe that stood us well for the first
150 years begins to get a bit more salt here, some more
water there, and oh yeah . . . "that liberty" stuff is
not for everybody."
Some of my favorite questions of a bureaucrat:
Do you embrace the idea of liberty?
Is any citizen not entitled to liberty? If not,
then who?
If some citizens are not, then who should have the
power to decide who and by what magnitude their liberty
is sacrificed?
Then make passing suggestion that they tune into
C-span's coverage of either chamber of Congress. THOSE
are the folks who have taken it upon themselves to
limit the size and scope of anyone and everyone's
liberty on a whim.
Ask them to cite words from anyone's speech
that gives one a warm fuzzy feeling as to motive
and outcomes (ESPECIALLY unintended consequences)
for having made "adjustments" to anyone's
liberty.
THOSE are the folks who need to get excited about
the FAA slapping our wrists for putting a portable
radio on the panel of personal property. Where do you
believe this issue falls in their grand scheme of
things and how likely is it that we'll get anyone's
attention? That sacrifice of liberty thing is a disease.
Once it takes root, it spreads. The longer it's around
and ignored, the more comfortable we are with its
presence in our lives.
It's not complicated. The results were predicted by
Bastiat 156 years ago. Now we're watching it happen
before our very eyes. Smart fellow that Bastiat.
Bob . . .
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( IF one aspires to be "world class", )
( what ever you do must be exercised )
( EVERY day . . . )
( R. L. Nuckolls III )
----------------------------------------
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