Dismantling Government

The past is prologue to the future.

   Investors know that past success is no guarantee of future performance, but it can be a reasonable guideline. The same can be said of politicians, just as it is also said of race horses.
   Past performance is a useful predictor for those at a racetrack, but when it comes to government, experience is more important. When choosing managers to help run a corporation, experience in a related field becomes an important measure or predictor of future performance.
   Whether intentional or not, both the chooser and the choosee are likely to continue the same path and make decisions similar to those made in the past. Some patterns of behavior are hard to break, and unless there is a strong incentive to break a habit, a pattern will continue.
   So it's hard to see how the promises of America's President-elect will be fulfilled when he chooses people to manage various departments and their past experience and performance run contrary to the chief executive's promises.
   Conclusion: The incoming chief executive did not mean what he said when he made promises during the Presidential campaign. Or, as a supporter recently said, the candidate should not have been taken literally.
   Here's a wakeup call for politicians and their supporters: When you say something, people assume you mean what you say. Later, when it turns out you didn't mean what you said and you do the opposite, people conclude either that you lied or that you're incompetent.
   Or both. In short, trust cannot be demanded. It must be earned. And as folks in New Jersey used to say, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
   When a candidate repeatedly makes promises and says, "Trust me" to voters, then violates that trust by breaking his promises, the public will react.
   Donald Trump made many promises that helped him to victory in the Presidential election. However, even before his victory is confirmed by the Electoral College and before he is inaugurated, he has begun to break his promises, sometimes even denying that he ever made them, insisting that his comment was only "a euphemism."
   Trump has a history of starting a business venture, either by purchase or acquisition, paying himself big bucks for a while, then letting the business venture go bankrupt.
   It's one thing, however, to do that in business. It's quite another to let a nation go bankrupt while your family business organization rakes in profits as the government is dismantled.
   Judging from the choices announced in the past week of senior administrators, with their long history of opposition to government and its programs, the stage is being set for a large-scale takedown of government regulation and monitoring of corporate activities.
   The country has in the past survived widespread corporate bankruptcies. Whether the nation can survive a government bankruptcy is quite another case.