I'll hand Jimmy Carter one thing--just this once and it's between us, and it is the deregulation of the telephone industry. In the sixties and seventies the biggest whipping boy in America was Ma Bell, and I put on hob-nailed boots and jumped on the carcass too, and she didn't get all that she deserved. But on the breakup of Ma Bell, and the entry of MCI and other long-distance carriers, that rage subsided.

Remember in the 70s the rage at the post office? How the mails were slower and slower and more and more expensive and things got lost? Enter UPS and FedEx and all of a sudden there's not as much glee in beating up on the post office. Why? Use someone else. Do something else. FedEx, DHL, fax, email. Something non-PO.

Have you ever quit hating getting a driver's license? Paying property taxes? Registering a car? Dealing with a water bill? No, and you won't.

The difference is that in each case when we quit hating something as much, it was because we could fire it. Anger, I learned a very hard way, comes from helplessness--if you are presented with a simple fact that is immensely irritating and there is nothing you can do about it, it takes a certain strength of character, and maturity, to bow to it without feeling a certain sense of surrender, of servitude, of the loss of being a free agent. For after all, the problem with slavery is not just being owned, or not entirely with being owned--for there were some good masters. The problem, the overmastering problem, the essential problem, with slavery and its first cousin socialism (more on that some time later), is that there is no sense of free agency, no sense that actions have consequences. You takes what you gets. It's morally evil.

AT&T is full of rat bastards. Verizon is full of rat bastards. In fact, I'm prepared to say that every single big corporation is stuffed past the Plimsoll line with rat bastards, and every damned one of them has designs on your purse.

Which is just the way the government is and the way the government works. But there is a difference. Rat bastards which are not only children have cannibalistic siblings: AT&T's rat bastards would dearly like to carve up Verizon's rat bastards and have a barbecue on the remains while digesting last night's meal of Alltel.

Now consider, say, the IRS, which spent hundreds of millions computerizing and then admitted it hadn't a clue what it had done with the money it spent to track the money it had but couldn't put its hands on. Is there another IRS in the wings ready to eat it and make it shape up? To take its part of the budget? To eat it? No. It doesn't even bother to apologize. It merely sniffs and says, "So what?" And wants more money for...you guessed it.

The Texas Department of Transportation thinks that water runs uphill, and when I pointed that fact out to them, I got a bored, "So what?" That's because there was no alternative TXDoT licking its lips to get a chunk of the money. I promise you that Southwest Airlines knows that jet fuel doesn't run uphill because they know that Jet Blue knows it too.

Theocritus' First Law of Rat Bastard Capitalism: Anything that you have to deal with is your master. Anything that you can fire is at least to some extent your servant. If you can't fire it means it's your master. If you can fire it means you're its master. Well, it has lots of masters but enough of them can fire it enough that it has to take notice. IBM did, and IBM is doing good work. Now. IBM no longer has a monopoly on machines. IBM had a near-death experience. We cannot expect that from say the Social Security Administration or TCEQ.

Any organization that you can fire must listen to you, enough of you, to survive. Any organization that you cannot fire will give you service that is entirely dependent on the good will of the people working there. Ever seen a bad county clerk's office? What's the difference between a bad one and a good one? Only the attitude of the clerks. Only the attitude. Not the laws, not the job, not the records, not the building. Only the attitude.

People of a statist mind believe that things will be better if enough regulations and guidelines are enacted: heaven through policy, which must please their Tintenpisser (German for ink-pisser, or bureaucratic) minds, the worship of form over substance for that is after all what policy is: in its own way the policy itself becomes reified, the point, the thing, substituting for the objective which the policy is to enable. The cart is before the horse, the tail wags the dog. This is why you should fear mightily whenever you hear a business boast about its mission statement: you may be sure that the mission statement is getting more attention than the service. Organizations which cannot be fired may indulge without penalty in endless orgies of erecting increasingly elaborate edifices of regulations, conditions, stipulations and decrees, all stated to serve in meeting some need, but the policy itself becomes a fetish, and the service sits in the back seat. And since there is nothing, no revolting customer base, that can kick apart the altar of policy, there is nothing which can chase away the rat bastards dancing, praying, and worshiping around it, paying homage and feeding your dollars to the chief rat bastard sitting atop his shiny heap of policy, fat and happy and content, fed on other people's money, of course, fooling himself only that he is providing good service and he will not be dethroned.

Because he cannot be fired.

Now note the endless organizations of failing companies. Sears, being devoured by the rat bastards of Bentonville, Arkansas, tried one thing and then another and then bit the bullet, and they're back. Monkey Ward didn't take it seriously--and they're dead. In each case the rat bastards are minding their manners, in the case of Sears and IBM and in business, or out of work, in the case of Wards. The EPA? It doesn't care.

Theocritus' Second Law of Rat Bastard Capitalism: The only system that works for you is a system which has objectives roughly coterminous with yours. And the only system that does that is one that you have control over because otherwise, it doesn't give a merde. Because it doesn't have to. Any good that you get out of an organization that does not depend on your good will comes only from the good will of the individuals in the system, not from an institutional fear of its demise. That well-intentioned individual can die or move or go away, or be fired for competence. Reread that last sentence. Think again of county clerk's offices that changed overnight when the clerk retired. It's a shaky existence to depend on the kindness of strangers.

And that, dear reader, is why I'm a capitalist. I know the Rat Bastards don't love me. And therefore I want them to fear me.