posted October 13, 2013 08:59 AM            

Progressives also have the undeserved mantle of intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority wrapped tightly around themselves. The problem is that progressives bestowed that mantle on themselves and there's not one iota of evidence supporting superiority of progressives. In fact, the general consensus among those in fly-over country is that progressives couldn't find their own as$es with both hands and that progressives don't measure up to average Americans in norms of intellectual capabilities and moral and spiritual rectitude.

Perhaps the most disagreeable thing about progressives...aside from their policies always blowing up in everyone's faces..is that progressives are the long nosed busy-body meddlers true individualists despise. They just won't leave other people alone.

10/07/2013 @ 2:52AM
Why Progressives Always Get Tech Wrong
Michael S. Malone

Two technology stories have filled the airwaves in recent days: the impending Twitter IPO, which is predicted to raise more than $1 billion; and the Obamacare online roll-out, which has crashed in a welter of locked-out applicants and frozen exchanges.

The connections between the two events are deeper than you might think – and they represent the latest milestones along the diverging responses by industry and government to the birth of the technology revolution more than a century ago.

The impact of information technology on business is well known to folks working in the private sector. It has been the subject of hundreds of books and is central to the curricula of most business school and executive training programs. Its basic message for the last few decades is: because of Moore’s Law (constantly accelerating the rate of change), globalization (rapidly expanding the customer base), and the Internet (giving users the information they need to make their own informed decisions), the traditional model of top-down, command-and-control decision making that characterized corporations through the 1950s is both obsolete and dangerously self-destructive.

Thus Twitter, the next great Silicon Valley IPO, following Facebook and Google, two other celebrated companies with hundreds of millions of ‘users’ – but more accurately: empowered, unpaid volunteers – and comparatively tiny staffs.

This lesson has never been learned – or more accurately, has been learned backwards – by our Federal government. And no group has run further in the wrong direction, all the while claiming to be more technologically savvy than its political counterparts, than the Progressives. From the original Roosevelt/Wilson/Brandeis party, through the New Deal, to the Great Society, and now the Obama party of Hope and Change, Progressives have assiduously aligned themselves to the latest tech revolution, courted its leaders . . .and then extracted from it exactly the wrong lessons. Thus, President Obama, who was elected with the help of social networks, regularly flies out to the Valley to sup with the Brahmins of high tech, listens to their ideas . . . and then goes back to Washington forever unenlightened by the real lessons that the careers of his dinnermates have to tell. Even the late Steve Jobs tried to warn him about micro-managing the economy. But the President, wearing Progressivism’s blinders, didn’t listen.

Though it had roots as far back as Charles Darwin, the divergence between the two paths took place at the end of the 19th century with the work of scientist Fredrick Winslow Taylor at Midvale and Bethlehem Steel Companies. The story of Taylor’s research is well known – it is often taught, wrongly, by Progressive-tinged history texts to schoolchildren, as the zenith of industrial exploitation of workers. That is, by using time-motion studies, Taylor learned the most efficient way for factory workers to do their tasks; then corporate bosses took those techniques, speeded them up, and dehumanized those same workers by turning them into overworked machines. They revolted, which led to the rise of trade unions.

The reality is more complex. What Taylor realized, and proved, was that work was a measurable activity that could be systematically made more productive using scientific techniques. But Taylor also argued that workers should be rewarded commensurately with their increased productivity – something management didn’t agree with . . .and paid for with labor strife for the next half-century. Industry largely learned its lesson – and when it forgot there were forward-thinking entrepreneurs to remind them: like a young David Packard, who told a gathering in the late 1940s of the nation’s biggest corporate executives that if they didn’t trust and empower their employees even more in the years to come, they were doomed. History proved him right. And smart CEOs changed their practices because, in the end, they valued profits over power.

But many of the nation’s political leaders saw the Taylor experiments differently They went for the power that came from a big, centralized government. In the weird amalgam of contempt and pity for the average man that has always characterized this ideology, the Progressive saw a confirmation that human beings really were essentially machines (there aren’t a lot of truly religious Progressives), whose performance could be improved using scientific techniques. Indeed, with the right performance targets in place – and the Progressives had their list – the entire population could be controlled and pointed in the right direction to Utopia. Most of this agenda was camouflaged by the calls for ‘social justice’ and the positive improvements in public health and agenda for which the Progressives are still celebrated today.

But Progressivism failed, and it continues to fail today – Obamacare, the bailout, cash for clunkers, etc. – because it still adheres to two long-disproven ‘truths’:
1.All problems have scientific/technological solutions;
2.Those solutions can be imposed on everyone by an enlightened few who know what is best.

Add to that an underlying belief, undeterred by historical evidence, that human society is perfectible, and everything is in place for a tyranny of good intentions – and a ‘scientific’ justification for imposing it.

If we have learned anything (not least from Progressivism’s crazy cousins Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism) over the last century it is that none of this is true. Human beings are messy and unpredictable creatures, with 10 billion different perspectives and opinions about how to live a good life. There are also more good ideas, intellectual capital, in those 10 billion brains – especially regarding some problem at hand – than in the combined faculty of Harvard and Stanford. Moreover, some people actually prefer liberty to comfort, freedom to happiness. That’s what Steve Jobs was trying to say; and that’s what’s going unsaid at those select Valley dinners with the President.

So, instead of a healthcare Twitter, we get a gigantic mess as the government tries to impose a single, software-driven system on 300 million Americans. Anyone who has ever worked on or, worse, bought a big software application – and this is one of the biggest in history — could have told HHS that the final result would be buggy, late, unsatisfying to users, unable to live up to its billing, and most of all, resistant to upgrades, much less wholesale changes. In the real world, you can’t just order “Make it so!”

Whatever else it was, Progressivism was a top-down, mass-control, limited-freedom political philosophy that has only grown more anachronistic as the decades have passed and as, ironically, technology itself has increasingly supported de-centralized, networked, and bottom-up institutions. Corporations learned that a generation ago (or they disappeared). In successful corporations today, management works best when it is the servant of employees and customers: look at the backlash from a billion users every time Facebook or eBay tries to impose some new rule or pricing scheme from above. And what are open systems and crowd-sourcing but the next evolutionary step in the inversion of the old top-down model?

That leaves the federal government the last true bastion of late 19th century command-and-control thinking. It can build as many websites and social networks as it likes, but as long as it tries to impose mass solutions from the top in a world of personalized solutions from the bottom, it is doomed to fail – and our nation continue its slide into debt and enfeeblement.