31. (Seepage 50) How far have we come. Since that was written we have built an enormous welfare bureaucracy which has a heavy financial interest in keeping up the supply of poor people as clients. NASA has become swollen with civil servants appointed on merit but entrenched in a system that produces little but paper. It is needless to multiply examples.
32. (Seepage 51) It's pretty clear that Senator Byrd was right and Heinlein wrong in this instance.
33. (Seepage 51) All that has been changed. Con-gresscritters get enormous perks as well as quite good pay, and have access to other sources of income and perks. State legislators are well paid, and often are full time. The original notion of a legislature was that a group of citizens would go approve laws they then had to live and work under. That got lost, in part due to well meaning "reform" efforts. Heinlein argues that the laborer is worthy of his hire: the evidence is that in politics if you pay the legislator what he is in theory worth he will cease to be a representative, and become a professional politician. What happens is that when the salary is worth competing for, people will compete for the salary. It's possible that what's needed is a legislature made up of one full-time paid professional house and one part-time amateur house. In any event, one can hardly argue that legislators are underpaid today: or that paying them a lot more solved more problems than it raised.
34. (Seepage 51) The public trough used to be slim pickings, but things are very different now. An obvious reform is to go back to what Heinlein describes. Government today dispenses a much larger part of the Gross National Product than when this was written.
35. (See page 51) Nothing has changed here, of course. The lawyers dominate all the legislatures: which may or may not have a bearing on why the laws are always so complex as to require the citizens to hire lawyers in order to obey them.
36. (Seepage 52) Ed Crump used to distinguish between "honest graft" and "dishonest graft." Dishonest graft was stealing from the public; making work that didn't need to be done in order to be paid for it; overcharging for services to the public; that sort of thing. Honest graft was patronage: channeling money that had to be spent to one's friends or associates, or where it would do the most political good, always insisting that the work or services bought be honestly delivered. Although Crump probably wouldn't have cared for Affirmative Action (Memphis was legally segregated during his era), he would almost certainly have included Affirmative Action, Hire the Handicapped, etc., as "honest graft" since those programs involve transfer of public money to people selected by political means.
37. (Seepage 52) I don't know what Heinlein's views on this would be today. My own are that the experiment was tried, and now we need term-limit laws. See above: the problem is that if you pay people a living wage to be politicians, they will make a living as politicians: which removes government from the people and hands it to a political class.
38. (See page 52) The disgust of the public with officeholders is stronger today than when that was written, despite our having made most legislative offices full time and highly paid. See note 37.
39. (Seepage 53) I agree: moreover, I think it was a very good thing that many of our political leaders were mostly motivated by patriotism. In fact, by professionalizing public office we made it more likely that office holding would be merely another job, not a patriotic act. Clearly I am in disagreement with what Heinlein says earlier in this book. I don't know what his views would be today. I doubt he'd have been much impressed by the current group of officeholders; I seem to recall him saying once that the California Legislature was the finest money could buy, but whether this was intended as jest or serious comment I can't say.
40. (Seepage 53) The heart of the matter. Be a party regular. That, however, presumes that the parties matter. Increasingly they don't. The federal structure of the United States has always made life difficult for national political parties. The state parties were fer more important Members of Congress and senators were part of the state party system, generally drawn from the same pool and acting interchangeably with state legislative and executive officers. Periodically the state parties would get together to select a national standard bearer; that was usually as a result of discussion and debate and "power brokering." Today it's far different. The parties have little role in selecting a president; that's done in a series of endurance contests called primaries. Primaries are supposed to be more democratic than a party caucus: this supposes that the ordinary voter, who generally knows no more about a candidate than has been reported in the newspapers and conveyed on TV in 30-second sound bites, will make a more intelligent selection than a party official who may know all the candidates fairly well. It's not a compelling theory, and the results could be imagined if they weren't all too clearly in front of us.
The Founding Fathers of the United States hated political parties, which they called "factions"; but they soon found they couldn't govern without them, and Madison, whose Federalist Papers essays denounce "factionalism" in ringing terms, had no choice but to participate in the building of a party system. For those familiar with the details behind Marbury vs. Madison, the case in which John Marshall asserted the right of the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down acts of Congress as unconstitutional, the irony is delicious: Madison as Secretary of State under Jefferson was acting as a party leader when he failed to deliver the judicial commission demanded by Marbury (who had been appointed by Adams in his outgoing hours).
Heinlein is saying here that parties, particularly local parties, are the most important part of citizen participation in politics; that parties are, and should be, worthy of your support and loyalty.
This is a view not much held any longer; but it is a view very much worth attention. In my judgment Heinlein has come to the heart of the matter: you cannot have citizen control of government without strong LOCAL political parties; and you cannot have strong parties without the kinds of activities he describes. I wish every citizen concerned with reclaiming the republic would read this section carefully and reflect on it.
41. (Seepage 54) Exactly so. I've put a note here to draw attention to the text, not because I have anything to add.
42. (See page 56) Still true, although the Congress-critter will pretend to be impressed. The simple fact is that Congresscritters pay attention to PACs bringing money and not much else. There is a standard price for an hour of a Congresscritter's time, and every PAG leader knows it.
It used to be that Congresscritters paid a lot of attention to people who held party office; what we have to do is make that true again.
43. (Seepage 57) More of the heart of the matter. Some of Perot's support comes from people who never before took part in politics. Others are people disaffected with their parties.
If these people are to have any lasting effect on the American political scene, they must organize along regular party lines: either take over an existing party, or build their own.
The alternative is to chop away the "reforms" of the past 40 years and return the system to what it used to be: but in that case diey will still have to join the regular parties to keep control.
There is nothing more temporary than the enthusiasm of a reform movement. Parties endure. Reform movements flare and vanish.
44. (Seepage 58) What Heinlein is saying here comes right out of old Boss Flynn's book You're The Boss, and it's spot on.
45. (Seepage 59) While most of us agree that divided government is not a good idea in theory, the Cold War produced some odd - we can hope unique - situations. The Left demanded a number of domestic political concessions, notably the Great Society, in return for allowing the Right to conduct the Cold War and continue building up defenses. The Carter presidency demonstrated that the Democrats were not optimum for handling the Cold War. By the time Reagan was elected, Congresscritters of both parties were the beneficiaries of such powerful incumbency advantages that it was impossible to bring in Republican control of the House. Whether having a Republican majority in both houses would have been a good thing is another matter, and one subject to legitimate disagreement.