Trego's Mountain Ear

This system puts real authority in the hands of an elected mayor, with the council still involved in passing laws and budgets.

In a town like Eureka, where only 8 to 24 people show up regularly, this system changes one major thing:

Everyone knows who is in charge.

Instead of power being spread across a small group, it is centered in one person elected by the whole community.

That creates:

• Clear leadership
• Faster decisions
• A direct line of accountability

If something is going wrong, people don’t have to guess who is responsible.

Yes, there are risks:

• A mayor could hire friends
• A mayor could push personal agendas

But here is the key difference:

Those actions are visible.

You don’t have to dig through layers or guess which council member is influencing what. The responsibility is out in the open, and voters can act on it.

In a low-participation environment, this matters. People may not attend meetings, but they do vote in elections.

Bottom line: Power is concentrated, but so is accountability. In a town with low turnout, this is the most visible and easiest system for voters to control.

Dad often commented that when he went into the Navy, he was paid $21 a day, one day a month. The other day I did a google search to confirm that number, and realized that the US Military maintained the same pay schedule from 1922 through 1940. Yes, he was paid $21 a day, one day a month. On the other hand, the pay rates stayed the same for eighteen years.

Grade note 1	Years of Service
	Under 4	Over 4	Over 8	Over 12	Over 16
1st note 2	126.00	138.60	144.90	151.20	157.50
2nd	84.00	92.40	96.60	100.80	105.00
3rd	72.00	79.20	82.80	86.40	90.00
4th	54.00	59.40	62.10	64.80	67.50
5th	42.00	46.20	48.30	50.40	52.50
6th	30.00	33.00	34.50	36.00	37.50
7th	21.00	23.10	24.15	25.20	26.25

It’s probably worth noting that grade 7 back then was what an E1 is now, and the 1st Grade would be today’s E7 (or maybe E9). When I checked with the inflation calculator, it showed that an item that cost a dollar in 1922 only cost 83 cents in 1940. On the other hand, the Great Depression probably had a hand in whipping inflation over that twenty-year span.

Since high school, when I began to look at such things, I’ve identified as economically conservative – and I really haven’t changed. In June, 1962, a ten-year treasury bond brought 3.93% interest. Treasury bonds zoomed to 15.15% interest in October of 1981, and are about 4.3% interest today. Interest is basically rent of money – and that high interest of 1981 includes a heck of a lot of inflation. I turned 13 at the end of 1962 – and to date, I’ve lived through 982% inflation since then. If we look at 1962 to 1980, to compare things with Dad’s pay scale 40 years later, there was 173% inflation. So far, my lifetime inflation, from 1949 to present, comes out to 1,273 percent.

I’m a fiscal conservative – an economic conservative if you like – but from my teen years to my geriatric years, I have never known a stable currency. At first, I thought it was because the Dims (who were in charge) believed in tax and spend. When the Repugnants took over, I learned that their belief was borrow and spend. Both parties are fiscally irresponsible.

I think it all boils down to the fact that it’s easy to spend other people’s money. Our school board members are unpaid – but I haven’t seen that correlate to fiscal responsibility. Our congresscritters are well paid – and they find it even easier to spend other people’s money.

It’s been a long while since I’ve heard anyone talking about passing a balanced budget amendment. Not that it’s a bad idea – but politicians of both parties get some sort of a rush from spending other peoples money, even when they have to borrow to do it. And the value of the dollar drops. My solution, and it isn’t great, is to vote against any incumbent who voted in a fiscally irresponsible manner. Others might suggest alternatives such as rope, tree, some assembly required.

It was never necessary to devalue the dollar by 1,273 percent in one lifetime. But politicians love to spend other people’s money.

This is a reminder of my time in the academy, and of some of the things I saw some colleagues publishing – while the university system does operate under the idea of publish or perish, some of the publications and research projects do require kindness when reading. Calvin’s title reminds me of someone’s dissertation.

This system gives direct power to the people. Everyone votes on decisions in public meetings.

It sounds ideal.

But in Eureka, where only 8 to 24 people typically attend, it doesn’t work the way people imagine.

Instead of the whole community deciding, you end up with:

• A very small group making decisions
• Strong personalities carrying more influence
• Outcomes shaped by who shows up, not the full town

This creates a different kind of problem:
Not official corruption, but informal influence and pressure.

If participation were high, this system could work well. With low turnout, it gives too much power to too few people.

Bottom line: High transparency in theory, but not effective with low participation.

I’ve seen polls that show Iran is 98% Muslim. 99.98% if you take the official 2011 Census. On the other hand, social media polls show Iranians as between 32 and 38% Shia Muslims.

Iran shows one of the big problems with polling – if a pollster calls on the telephone, he or she already has my number. It isn’t much of a problem to learn my name and address. Many of the pollsters call and want to speak to Michael – they already know my name as well as my phone number. There is no anonymity in telephone polling. I watched polls in South Dakota that were intensively anti-abortion proven invalid by elections turning down the same laws that the pollsters supported. People don’t tell pollsters what they’re really thinking without anonymity. Heck, I’ve gotten to the point of, when a pollster asks for Michael, putting a sad note into my voice and explaining that he’s dead. We’ll see if that reduces the interruptions as we move into this next election cycle.

So how should I understand Iran’s religion under the Islamic Republic? All Arab News quotes Mohammad Abolghassem Doulabi as saying that 50,000 of the country’s 75,000 mosques have closed their doors. He made his speech hoping for more government money to support the mosques – but when the official sources say that two thirds of the mosques are closed, and the social media polls identify somewhere on the close order of a third being Shia Muslims, that’s kind of a correlation. I suspect the Islamic Republic is a minority rule – a plurality at best – and has been for a long time.