Mar 23, 2020, 2:40 PM

—“I hope you are well Curt. Can I ask, where does P stand on redistributing or Nationalizing corps like Boeing? Obviously it’s a question of Nation Security to have warplanes and such. I don’t like the propping up where the corps have no fear of loss though. Can’t we take it over, keep the jobs, keep it producing as-is, but extract all the old profits from the Losers? I’m sure you have an answer, so I’m not trying to start any shit here. I’m interested.”— Twitter

EASY ANSWER

  1. Management and investors must pay for their folly not force the people to pay for their folly.
  2. If the management and investors fail to manage the company and it can survive by taking a loan, that’s the answer.
  3. If management and investors fail to manage the company so that it can survive shocks, and it must be bought back by the state (nationalized) and the investors wiped out, then resold once recovered, at a profit, then that’s the answer.
  4. If it is a strategic industry then the state should be an inactive majority investor, and sell off only a minority interest to investors. Why? Private companies make FAR better use of capital.

Why state interest? If you look at how the russians and chinese produce military technology it is an industry better managed. American advantage is only in that we spend more on training and on practicing individual initiative and manoeuvre in combat, are more empirical in our training, and we are more loyal to each other than other peoples.

I hav not studied the russian procurement process but I know it is far better than ours. They don’t appeal to congress. Our congress interferes all the time. We have many hands in the pie during every stage. we have too many people involved and not enough soldiers testing iterations of the equipment. The russians give one man responsibility for a program. That is probably enough a set of changes to fix most of it.

My great-x uncle jimmy doolittle did a postwar evaluation of the pentagon for the president and was not terribly critical. I do not know what I would find if I did the same.

The clinton military change and the obama undermining of the military did severe damage to the trustworthiness of the officer classes – but that is still repairable.