A Cordell Hull Moment

I suppose I'm one of few people watching the House hearings concerning the recent Toyota acceleration issues. Clearly there are some agendas in play here, especially those of congressmen from the upper Midwest, who would love to see some Toyota sales transferred to one of the US [not so] Big 3; not to mention the guy from Kentucky, who said Toyota employs something like 128,000 people in his state, and didn't have a bad thing to say about them.

The utter lack of automobile or production knowledge among many of the questioners was on display for all to see. We can only be thankful that Barbara Boxer wasn't on the Committee. One of the dumber questions asked was why Toyota had 2 separate designs for their accelerator. Apart from the obvious hindsight behind such a question (Toyota, of course, was supposed to know that the current hubbub about accelerator pedal design would occur), if this Congressman had ever run a factory he would know that, when confronted with a choice between shutting the factory down for months for lack of one of 20,000 parts in the car because a supplier can't deliver, and accepting a part of minor deviation from the current one from another supplier and keeping everything running, the choice is obvious. I'll bet every auto manufacturer has a large number of such cases.

As a former middle management person in a large Japanese-owned company, as well as having studied Japanese military history, I am fascinated by the interplay in these hearings. First of all, it is important to understand that no American has any real power in a Japanese-owned company. Call it jingoism, call it tribal loyalty, the Japanese sense of national superiority, or whatever, Americans are hired primarily to help the appearance of things (more on that later), so that it doesn't look like the Japanese are just shipping this stuff over here without considering the American viewpoint. The important decisions are always made in Japan. When I was with JVC, they used to arrive via the Telex machine, and we would all crowd around it when it began chattering, like piglets around the sow at dinner time, for our marching orders.

One effect of this is that strong upper American management cannot generally be found at a Japanese-owned company. Strong people don't want to be hired as figureheads with little actual power, while the shots are called in Tokyo, and the Japanese don't want people who will speak up or dispute what they, in their wisdom have decided. So it was no surprise to me to watch this guy Lentz (billed as having a sales and marketing background), with the grand title of Chief Operating Officer of Toyota USA (wasn't it interesting that Mr Inaba, fresh off the boat, had the same title?), squirm and babble when being grilled by the Committee. This guy has no real power (which the Committee probably didn't understand), and probably couldn't get a similar job with one of the US Big 3.

The grilling of Akio Toyoda (no relation to Admiral Soemu, who took over command of the Imperial Navy upon Yamamoto's death, tho it would have been delicious) and Inaba
was rivetting to me (and probably only to me). I missed American Idol for this. I've actually missed every airing of American Idol, but that's another story. The grandstanding by Congressmen Dingel and Stupak (anyone want to guess which state they represent?) was embarassing. Dingel, in particular, was just dumb -- reading these guys, in overall charge of the company, questions about details and exact dates of defects and recalls, each beginning with "Now, Mr Lentz . . .", following by some insanely detailed question. When they couldn't instantly come up with the answers, he wanted it "in the record". I'm talking about stuff like what model, color Toyota had a sticky accelerator in 2003, or the exact number of cars that might have a defect. I'm surprised he didn't ask for the VIN numbers. Even if, by some miracle, these guys had had one of the answers, he wasn't interested. He simply wished to create the impression that they didn't know what was going on.

But the answers given by the Japanese were also fascinating. Whenever a difficult question was asked (like "do you intend to reimburse families who lost loved ones for their medical and burial expenses" (!)), they simply didn't answer the question, instead spewing out platitudes about "making every effort to produce safe cars". You could just envision Japanese ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu sitting in front of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, not realizing that the Pearl Harbor attack had taken place and that Hull knew it. The ensuing blast from Hull was one of history's more memorable moments.

The Congresswoman (Maloney?) from New York who asked that question clearly hadn't thought this one through: are we going to go down the road where automakers must price into their products the cost of every potential harmful occurence involving one of their cars? How about counseling for the deceased's children? Hot coffee spilled on the crotch due, no doubt, to a poorly designed window?

In any event, these two Japanese executives rose thru a system and culture where bad news is not given to superiors until absolutely unavoidable. This was true during World War II, where those in charge of the Army and Navy, who were suffering defeat after defeat from June, 1942 on, made plans and strategy as tho they were winning. Any commanding officer who lost a battle was expected to commit seppuku, thus costing Japan many good commanders fighting an unwinnable war, and depriving the survivors of the lessons of that defeat. It was only after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with Tokyo burned to the ground, that the Emperor came out with his famous "the war has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage" -- huh?

There seems to be a cultural desire to avoid strife and stress, including dealing with bad news. Everyone must agree (or appear to), before any decision can be made. This "consensus" style of management is stultifying to innovation and problem-solving, but it provides a more important benefit to the Japanese: the appearance that everyone is united and pulling in the same direction. The actual direction isn't as important as the appearance of unity. And if the decision turns out to be not a good one, it doesn't fall on one person.

Which brings me to appearance. As I discussed at some length in my article "The Other Reasons Japan Lost the War", the appearance of things trumps almost any other consideration to the Japanese. Everyone must appear to be doing his utmost. This is why Japanese corporate-types work such ridiculous hours. Very little gets done, but the appearance is one of dedication and hard work. I remember at JVC that any employee who went home before 8 or 9 pm was frowned upon. We'd sit in the warehouse and shoot the breeze or play with numbers or something to make it look like we were working -- there was deathly fear that "Japan" would call and there would be no one there to answer the phone. Of course, these Japanese engineers (and they were all engineers) were single, over here on a 2-year assignment, and had absolutely no life outside the company. At the time, I chalked it up to their "dedication", but it runs deeper.

Over-emphasis on the appearance of things can be deadly. It was one of the prime factors behind the Banzai Charge -- everyone knew it was futile, but that didn't matter; to the onlooker, everyone had given his all. The officer leading it, waving his Samurai sword so everyone would know who he was, was sure to be among the first to die. And it was worth risking death to remove the Emperor's portrait from any capital ship that was about to sink. So the answers given by the executives were the predictable and meaningless "we're going to try our hardest to make our cars safe". This probably means that they'll stay at the office smoking and drinking coffee until 1 am instead of midnight.

But, taking 2 steps back, what are we really talking about here? How many actual incidents have there been versus the number of Toyotas on the road? At what point is an occasional defect acceptable? It appears never. So here we are again, engaged in the futile pursuit of perfection. Cars today are more reliable that at any time since their invention . . . which is a good thing, since they're now nearly impossible to work on. But it doesn't matter: one apparent case of "unintended acceleration" becomes "Breaking News" all across the country -- doesn't matter that it's later proven that the driver accidentally stepped on the gas rather than the brake, or whatever. Doesn't matter that it's only the 3rd one in 10 years out of hundreds of thousands of Toyotas on the road. Each of us can envision ourselves behind that wheel at 125 mph fiddling with the floor mats, shifting into reverse, dragging our foot. It would be refreshing if someone in these hearings actually ran the numbers and showed what an infintessimally small percentage of Toyotas has actually had a problem. Our expectations are unreasonably high and, as usual, the media, with their context-free, breathless reporting, is largely responsible. Again, it's ratings that matter, and sensationalism gets ratings. Who cares about the facts?

But back to the hearings: this kind of myopic government meddling with automakers is second only to the short-sightedness of the unions, in damaging the auto industry. Can you imagine Thomas Jefferson (or even Alexander Hamilton, Mr Big Government among the Founders) chairing hearings on deaths in grist mills? There are simply risks we run by being alive and, at some point, it is counter-productive to try to drive them lower.

Some People Just Shouldn't Vote

The Founding Fathers had yet another thing right. In the early days of the Republic, and until just before the Civil War, only people who owned land could vote. So could only men, but since few women owned property, this was not generally an issue.

The rationale behind this was that an informed voter was better than the alternative, and landowners had a better chance of being informed than those who didn't. The only practical way to find those people was thru property ownership rolls; obviously, the administration of any kind of written test had too many holes in it, and Al Gore had not yet invented the internet. The other idea was that the have-nots would tend to vote themselves goodies "from the public trough" at the expense of the haves. This had one of my heroes and primary author of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton's, fingerprints all over it. Obviously a far from air-tight, perfect system, but one headed in the right direction. Hamilton and the Federalists had a lot of this stuff figured out in the late 18th Century that, for lack of historical understanding, we're still wasting time on today.

Any student of American history will see how far we have strayed from that original philosophy. One need only look at the last presidential election to see how far, but let's get into this a little deeper:

An Informed Voter:

If I needed heart surgery, I'd go to a cardiac specialist, not to my accountant. If I wanted my car's engine re-built, I'd go to an auto mechanic, not to a cardiac specialist. Does anyone want to make a counter-argument? No? Then I assume you will similarly agree that a voter informed on the issues of the day and, better yet, how they fit into the historical context, is a more desirable voter than one who votes for such a vacuous, purposely vague, ill-defined platform as "Hope and Change". It follows that the more informed the electorate, the better the likely result.

There are a lot of areas of knowledge that help one be a more informed voter, but I can't think of a single one more generally valuable than an understanding of American history: what has been tried and worked or not in the past and in what context, and how we got where we are today. I know it's a lot easier to choose a candidate based upon how he/she looks, speaks, panders, etc, but when someone said "freedom is not free", taking the time to learn about the issues before voting, or even studying American history so that some historical background can be applied to the decision, is on the Bill of Sale. My accountant might quote me a lower price for that triple by-pass, but am I going to use him for it?

Freedom is no different than anything else: if you're not willing to pay the price for it, sooner or later someone is going to come along and re-possess it. If you don't know anything about the issues, and therefore also don't know how they fit into the continuum of history, you will not be sufficiently deeply rooted to avoid being swept along by such shallow appeal Hope and Change. In my opinion, this explains the results of the most recent presidential election. Only with an historical understanding of how the current state of affairs compares to previous ones, does one have the perspective to resist the temptation to "improve" upon it. While Hope may have positive undertones, Change goes both ways.

It also explains irrational attribution of the good and bad that occurs. Barack Obama is no more responsible for the current economic climate than was George W Bush for creating it, or than man is for causing Global Warming. They are blamed or credited simply because the average voter isn't interested enough to learn what the real causes are -- it's easier just to blame or credit the President and go back to watching The View or the utterly uninformed person called Joy Behar.

And speaking of being uninformed, the internet and talk shows are, in my humble opinion, primarily responsible for the strident political tone in the country today. As I am fond of saying, the internet makes too much information too easily available to too many people lacking sufficient knowledge to understand it. An internet surfer insufficiently grounded in the subject he is "Googling" is ripe for being converted to a point of view without merit. All the current fuss about man causing Global Warming is a good example: there is almost no scientific (or common sense) merit to it. Used to be that one had to spend time and effort to learn about a subject -- hours upon hours of reading, etc, versus someone bereft of knowledge Googling a few key words on the subject of which he is otherwise ignorant, and clicking on a website of uncertain credibility.

And talk shows. Among the worst are two quasi-conservative guys in LA called John and Ken. The ratio between the stridency and volume of their delivery and their
knowledge of most of the subjects they rant about is not a favorable one. In fact, they regularly demonstrate that they have almost no general knowledge. Joy Behar
gives no sign of knowing anything about anything, and Rachel Maddow is not far behind, Rhodes Scholar or not. If these people would indicate that their condemnations of, oh I don't know, anything George W Bush ever did, were based on anything but the shallowest, immediate knee jerk reactions, I'd have more respect for them. Their condemnation of the war in Iraq apparently stemmed from nothing so much as their visceral, fact free hatred of Bush II. Even guys who are generally correct in their views like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved (certainly one of the best) have gaping holes in their knowledge, the most obvious to me being any sense of the military or military history as it bears on current events. They (and most talk show hosts) clearly grew up in a time when serving in the military simply wasn't cool.

A little historical knowledge would help one see that there is a lot of hindsight at
work in assigning blame: no one complained about the boom times when they were booming, just as no one faulted the Maginot Line when the French were spending their national treasure to build it. Only in light of later developments were both faulted for containing the roots of disaster.

Speaking of the economy, it has always struck me as ironic that the Left, big believers in Darwin, evolution, Survival of the Fittest, and all that, somehow don't transfer that logic to economics. Hello, but isn't free market capitalism essentially economic Darwinism? So them Lefties believe that man is the ultimate product of Darwinian evolution, presumably unhindered by regulation of a higher power (which most Lefties don't believe in anyway), but can the economic free market be allowed to work? Noooooo -- gotta meddle so that everyone feels good and evolutionary dead ends, such as social welfare programs, are propped up at the expense of the viable ones.

As an aside, one of the distressing promises Obama made was to "even out" the economic "boom and bust" cycles. Hello? In a free market economy (or what remains of it) boom and bust is an intrinsic part, and the method by which an economy shakes out the dead wood. Even Adam Smith recognized this in the 18th Century. By
continually kicking the economic can (full of inconvenient problems that no politician wants to deal with on his watch) down the road, the can eventually becomes unkickable. One has only to look to the [former] Soviet Union to see how well trying to manage every aspect of the economy so that there are no booms or busts works -- it's all bust all the time. It is distressing that Obama either a) believes this is possible, or b) thinks his supporters are dumb enough to believe it is. It is also distressing that he appears to have been right about b).

I wonder how many Obama voters from the last election now wish they had had enough knowledge to understand a little more about the impossibility of the promises upon which they based their vote. After all, their disillusion has been all over the news lately.

Goodies From the Public Trough:

Remember how you were always badgering your parents for an increase in your allowance? Anything thereby gained had no downside (unless you had to take on additional chores as compensation, in which case your parents were very good, notwithstanding what you thought at the time). The well-intentioned social programs that began during the Great Depression, have led us well away from the Founders' intent that only those with a stake in the system should vote, and they would be horrified to a man (there were no women) at where we now find ourselves in that regard. Your allowance was kind of a social program writ small.

Despite periodic attempts at reform, we have now burdened ourselves with an enormous social welfare system, either in the form of welfare payments to those who manage not to work, those who have been irresponsible enough to have more children than they can support, or in the form of tax subsidies (credits or write-offs) to give a break to those whom a "compassionate government" thinks need them. To adopt the old metaphor, these people are essentially riding in the wagon that the rest of us are pulling, and there are more and more of them riding. I know this is a broad generalization (see my article elsewhere on the unappreciated virtues of generalizations) but, in general, it's true. And this doesn't even address the corruption, mismanagement, and gaming of the system that is endemic in it.

Thomas Jefferson's admonition that "that government which governs least governs best" was not just an advocacy of small government per se, as is generally assumed. It was also a recognition that a) government is the least efficient way to do most things, and only those things clearly inimical to being done by private enterprise (public roads, national defense, etc) should be assumed by government, and b) once a society goes down the path of relying upon the government for more than the barest essentials as above, the growth of government is progressively hard to control and impossible to reverse. Its tentacles become insidiously entwined in everything via a process in which each increase in government involvement is seen as eminently logic and necessary to solve the immediate issue, the longer-term consequences shoved aside in the interest of the immediate.

This really accelerated with the programs of FDR: in the midst of the Great Depression, who could argue with government programs to create jobs, save banks, regulate the financial markets, create infrastructure, etc? The precedent thus set in the dark days of the 1930's made later creation of such as Medicare, AFDC, expansion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into instruments of social manipulation, and an endless list of problems alienated to government for solution, with the inevitable incremental increases in governmental control of all facets of society, relatively easy. We are now paying the price for all that well-intentioned government meddling, which I have discussed elsewhere and won't reiterate.

A Voting Test:

A qualification test for voting has a lot of merit, it seems to me. The demagogues will immediate raise the specter of discrimination via poll taxes, literacy tests, etc, so we must get past that. It just seems to me that demonstration of some basic understanding of American history and governmental institutions would raise the level of voters, and therefore raise the quality of the result. More voters would be equipped to examine the substance of a candidate's qualifications, see thru his pandering, and shoving such frivolous attributes as appearance and speaking ability way down the list. After all, absent an understanding of some of the complex issues, nearly irrelevant considerations such as the above have priority.

I would like to suggest the following simple, 10 question test:

1) From what country did the original 13 colonies gain their independence?
2) Name the 3 branches of the US Government
3) Explain the Dred Scott decision
4) Name the Vice President of the United States
5) During what decade did the American Civil War take place?
6) How many US Senators are there?
7) What is meant by a "line item veto"?
8) Who was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence?
9) Who was Adam Smith and for what treatise is he famous?
10) What WW II American General was in command of all Allied forces in Europe post D-day?

Now, I know you think I stole these from Jay Leno's Jaywalking segments. They are, indeed, painfully elementary. Is knowledge of any or all answers important, per se? Probably not, but knowing, say, 7 out of 10 at least demonstrates that you're paying attention and have a pulse. If we could get the electorate to at least this level of understanding and knowledge, we'd have a better chance of avoiding the kind of result we had in the last Presidential election.

If you think the questions are too difficult, and would rather be asked to name Oprah Winfrey's ex-husband (or was it boyfriend?), you should not be voting, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that the majority of people who voted for the current President could not answer most of them, but can probably name the drug re-hab clinic treating Lindsay Lohan.