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It's
a new year, time to get out of that proverbial box
Melvyn D. Magree Originally published in Reader Weekly January 4, 2001 One of the catch phrases of the last two decades has been “Thinking out of the box.” It has been most prominent in high-tech industries and has lead to spectacular results. A single word for the same idea is “innovation”, literally meaning “the act of doing something new”. Unfortunately, it is generally applied more to the making of things than it is to changing political and economic ways of doing things. Fortunately, “thinking out of the box” does occur in these areas of our lives. James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and others believed that there were better ways of governing a nation than had been done in the past. They spent the greater part of their lives laying the groundwork and implementing the result. Abraham Lincoln, confronted with a nation being torn asunder, said, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew.” Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, seeing the inefficiencies of the Soviet system domestically and internationally, called for “new thinking”. His “new thinking” brought about more than he foresaw, both good and bad, but it has allowed the world to get out of at least one rut of polarized thinking. Let’s start off the new year/millenium right. Let’s give up some of our dogmas of our not too quiet past. Here are three areas where thinking out of the box might give us better results than the current business as usual: Iraq, oil prices, and taxes. With regard to Iraq, western thinking seems to be divided into two camps: Saddam Hussein is one of the greatest threats to the security of the world, or Euro-American politicians are causing the suffering of the Iraqi people. Thinking out of the box might blend these two seemingly contradictory ideas. Instead of blowing up Iraq military installations with not-so-smart bombs, why not bury them with food and medicines? Every dictator needs an external threat to hold his power. Saddam Hussein gains support by saying that he needs a strong military to protect against Anglo-American bombing, and so the current embargo plays right into his hands. But what if the bombing was with bags of rice? Would the cost of dropping hundred of tons of rice from high-flying bombers be cheaper than one smart bomb? If leaflets told the Iraqi people where the rice was, and if a large number of sites were so buried, wouldn’t word spread throughout the country? Oil prices and related costs are linked to Middle East politics. The United States needs to support dictators and intervene in squabbles to ensure its supply of oil. But if demand for oil is reduced, the region becomes less important to the U.S. Al Gore and Bill Clinton blew a good opportunity to think out of the box when they responded to rising fuel prices by releasing some federal petroleum reserves. What if instead of temporarily increasing supply they had permanently reduced demand? Not so much by great sweeping actions but by small symbolic steps that others might emulate. Most symbolically, Al Gore could have cut back or even ceased his campaign travels. Think of the thousands of gallons of aviation fuel that could have been saved if he had stopped flying hither and yon over the country. Think of the thousands of gallons of automotive gasoline that could have been saved by motorists idling their engines while waiting for Gore’s motorcade to zip in and out of city after city. If Al Gore is such a big supporter of the Internet and telecommunications, why didn’t he become the first presidential candidate to rely almost exclusively on telecommunications. Bill Clinton could have used one of his flurry of last-minute executive orders to make a long range cut of direct or indirect federal government fuel use. He could have reduced the government’s own consumption of petroleum fuel as well as its employees’ consumption. He could have ordered a cut in the travel done by federal employees both on government business and commuting. How much additional government business could be conducted via the internet? How many federal employees could work from home instead of driving to an office? If employees did have to go to an office, how many could take public transportation? What if the federal government struck deals with transit authorities all over the country for bus passes. What is the percentage of alternate fuel vehicles owned by the Federal government? What percentage of those vehicle are actually run on those alternative fuels? Flex-fuel vehicles could be run almost exclusively on 85 percent ethanol in many major cities. Taxes really require thinking out of the box. The current political climate calls for more and more reduction of taxes. Almost all of us would rather not pay any taxes, but what are the alternatives? Might lower taxes cost us more in the long run. For example, if we didn’t pay taxes for fire departments, would we have to pay for-profit firefighters directly out of our own pockets if our houses caught fire? And if our neighbors wouldn’t pay, would sparks from their house ignite our house? If we don’t want to pay taxes to have our walks kept as clean as our streets, do we want to do the taxing work of lifting all that snow, especially after a plow dumps all that heavy, sand-laden stuff? And isn’t needing to buy a snowblower to lighten the load another form of tax? We seem to think we pay less taxes if a higher level of government provides funds for local projects? Shouldn’t the largest portion of funds for local projects come from local sources? We pay the taxes for the projects no matter what level funds them. We may even pay more because the administrative costs can be larger. However, we punish local politicians for raising taxes for local needs and projects, but we reward our representatives to higher levels of government for getting state or federal funds for local projects. Complaints about “pork barrel” aren’t new, but it would be “new thinking” if we insisted our representatives voted against all local projects, including our own. Many of these ideas are not original with me. Others have been thinking this way for years. What is needed is to move these ideas out of the nooks and crannies of little groups or little papers and discuss them on a wider basis. One way is to get out of the boxes of liberal vs. conservative, alternative vs. mainstream, and other polarized positions to where we discuss issues of common interest. ©2001, 2007 Melvyn D. Magree |