Planes Are Designed to Fly Level

With the election over and the Trump transition team in a furious race to get names and positions filled, thoughtful friends of mine shake their heads and lament the difficulty in managing complex systems.

Every incoming president, supposedly, tries to find the most talented leader-managers to head agencies and agendas. The federal government is a labyrinth of agencies, a massive web of bean counters and pencil pushers. The number of things these agencies try to track and the sheer volume of data they assemble is ostensibly to make the country run better.

I remember during my college debate years in the 1970s spending hours in the massive Government Depository library, an official compilation of all government studies and reports. You could not find anything in American life that hadn’t been examined by a well-meaning government agency. Diet, education, football helmets, backyard swimming pools. I’m sure if we wanted to know how many spotted salamanders exist, some government study would have known.

Managing complexity is indeed a Herculean task, but the phrase begs why for most of our nation’s history no party can seem to tame expanding government tentacles. Today you can hardly pee without a license. President Reagan, darling of modern conservatives, took product liability exposure away from pharmaceutical companies who make vaccines. Look where that brought us: most kindergarteners need about 70 vaccines to sign up for public school.

President Carter gave us the Department of Energy to cure our energy problems. President Johnson’s War on Poverty and several trillion dollars later have certainly cured that problem. President Nixon gave us the Environmental Protection Agency but the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico keeps growing.

Obamacare intervened to stop the problems in health care. Does anyone today think it solved anything? The Department of Education, ostensibly enacted to reduce the disparity between poor and rich school districts, has now become the facilitator of boys in girls’ locker rooms and the notion that horrible, terrible white privilege wrote the Declaration of Independence.

Managing complexity is difficult. Have you ever tried to solve a problem but your solution created unforeseen additional problems? Later, looking back, you sigh and realize you should have just left well enough alone. Our human creativity seems to scream “INTERVENTION!” in everything. We can’t keep our grubby hands off what others want to do. We have to look over the fence, meddle, and provide assistance. Oh, that’s a good phrase. Provide assistance. How many lives have been worsened by well-meaning folks trying to provide assistance?

Here’s the point: managing complexity is not easy. It’s not been easy forever. Humble people realize quickly that intervention often causes more harm than good. Indeed, today’s boomerang young people (always coming back home) are a direct result of helicopter parents (hovering parents suffocating their kids with assistance). Managing complexity is the Achilles heel of all policy and protocol, whether private or public.

That brings me to a fascinating real-life principle. When training to fly an airplane, students invariably encounter turbulence for the first time. Think about when you’ve taken a bumpy flight. You’re sitting back there in 10B jolting around and putting your life in the hands of the pilot. Have you ever wondered what’s going through the mind of the pilot?

I’ve never flown an airplane, but friends who have tell me instructors have one piece of advice for their fledgling fliers in bumpy conditions. As you can imagine, usually these first encounters happen in a small single engine plane. Most flight students solo in a simple, single-engine plane that is far more prone to bumps and jolts than a big jumbo jet.

Without much experience, these novice fliers tense up and fight panic. My dad flew in the Navy in WWII and my brother is a pilot today. I didn’t get those genes. But the universal instruction in turbulence is this: “Take your hands off the controls.”

The novice grips the yoke (an airplane’s steering wheel, for the uninitiated) as sweat beads up on the brow. “I can’t make this plane stop bouncing!” the terrified first-timer yells. The instructor simply says “Take your hands off.” Why? Because planes are designed to fly level. As long as the airspeed is up and the prop turns, the first thing that happens when you take your hands off the controls is the plane stops turning, diving, climbing, and just levels out. It can’t turn unless the pilot makes it turn.

It’s quite an amazing thing. To the pilot, turbulence is complexity. Clashing warm and cold fronts, jet streams, towering clouds – all sorts of things create an atmospheric environment that can clash with a smooth ride. But as a pilot, you can’t anticipate when a rising tower of air develops. You can’t see it. You can’t anticipate it. But when the rudder returns to neutral, the flaps return to neutral, and you just let the plane do its thing, it actually moves through the complexity easier than intervening.

This is a great allegory for governance, I think. The reason things get more dysfunctional no matter who is in office is because most everyone goes in thinking their regulations, their intervention, their manipulation will be better than the last guy’s. As a result, we trade a woke educational agenda for regulations banning Critical Race Theory. The real solution, I suggest, is to eliminate government control over education. Take the hands off. Let parents sleuth out the best option, keep their tax money, and spend it however they want. Or at least just give parents a voucher they can spend at their discretion. If I think the best education for my kids is a Vietnamese atheist school for bowlegged students, fine. Over time the plane will level out.

Old Ironsides, the iconic naval ship, had 60 tons of American-made hemp in the sails and rigging. Today, hemp regulations preclude its production, and the US imports the fibers from foreign countries. As a farmer, I buy a lot of baler twine, and it’s unconscionable that none of it can be made in the US Drugs? Hemp? Take your hands off. It’ll level out.

Homeless? Emotionally disturbed? Poor people? Take your hands off; it’ll level out. What I see are both conservatives and liberals exchanging one set of regulations for another set. One set of interventive policies for another set. Folks, it’s too complex. The problem with all big-government solutions is that regardless of how well-intended, the interventionist hand ultimately creates dysfunction.

I had two great-aunts, pious and well-intended ladies, who devoted many days in the Women’s Temperance Union to outlawing alcohol. They succeeded in passing Prohibition. But a decade later, as the country cried “Uncle,” that movement created the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) which prohibits a winery from selling their own wine to neighbors without copious licenses and permits. It’s obscene.

My great-aunts meant well. They did. They were not tyrants. They thought the country would be better if alcohol were criminalized. But all Prohibition did was give us a horrible agency and a legal precedent for the federal government to determine what was acceptable and unacceptable passing over our lips. A direct result is the current war on raw milk. Thank you, dear aunties. Why does the government have the right to determine what I swallow? I call that an invasion of privacy, but my aunties thought they were engaged in righteous indignation. 

Today’s righteous indignation can be tomorrow’s tyranny against choice and creativity. President Teddy Roosevelt acquiesced to the begging, biggest meat companies in 1906-08 by creating the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). They had lost nearly half of their market share following Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Sinclair was a communist and wanted worker safety. He had no idea his efforts would outlaw neighbors from engaging in a voluntary pork sausage transaction among consenting adults.

What if the Socialist Roosevelt had simply looked at those seven large packers and said “You won’t play me the sucker and tell me to put my hands on the controls. No, I’m going to let your despicable behavior play out in the marketplace. You’ll have to figure out how to get the public trust back. I’m going to just let the plane fly level.”

Had that clarity won the day, today those seven packers controlling half of America’s meat supply would not have morphed into four packers controlling 85 percent. Creating the overbearing and prejudicial FSIS directly created the centralized industrialized fragile crony capital corrupt food system we have today. And mad cow. And children going through puberty earlier due to hormone use in meat animals. And superbugs due to subtherapeutic antibiotic use in livestock.

The cure is not RFK, Jr. slapping regulations on the big, bad meat packers. It’s a Food Emancipation Proclamation to let neighbors engage in food commerce without ANY government oversight. Take your hands off the controls. Whatever any powerful official thinks is the best cure, if it involves intervention and marketplace interference, social complexity is too unknown to assume a different set of rules will cure things.

When doing media interviews, I love to answer “I don’t know.” Too many people think they have the recipe. A new crew sits in the government office and too often thinks “if they’d just exchange my recipe for their recipe, all will be well.” More often than not, the real solution is to not offer a recipe at all. Let the market figure it out. Let the press do their job. Let individuals sleuth their own findings. It’ll be okay. The invisible hand of the marketplace is designed to correct things, to fly level. Take your hands off the controls.