A Rocket Scientist Looks at Politics

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Invitation

Credits

A Place to Begin

Why Are There Governments in the First Place?

What Should Governments Actually Do?

I Have My Rights!

Just What Is Politics Anyway?

Socialism versus Capitalism

Congress Off the Rails

Big Complex Stuff

What’s with the Electoral College?

What about a Federal Sales Tax?

Stop Messing with Our Votes!

Trails End

Ideas from a grateful citizen

Ed Marion

A Rocket Scientist Looks at Politics

Copyright © 2025 Ed Marion

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2025

ISBN 979-8-89315-724-6 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89315-747-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Invitation

The United States is a bastion of personal freedom all over the world. We have a responsibility to support this role, and one way to help is by striving to make our governance run better, faster, and cheaper. Join me as I look at practices used to operate our federal government and ask if any of the tools I encountered throughout my career in systems engineering might suggest changes that could help in this direction.

I came up with nineteen specific suggestions, ideas you might feel are worth a closer look. I intentionally steer clear of political discussion, pro or con, in the direction of either party. Chapter one is an introduction and chapter twelve is an overall summary, but the intervening chapters are stand alone and can be read in any order. I hope you enjoy the read.

Credits

I would like to thank my family and friends who stood patiently while I tried to explain my latest weird view of some aspects of the political processes going on around us. Some tried to understand or offer counterpoints. Many just looked at me in sympathy or irritation and just shook their heads. But mostly, I want to thank my wife, Iris, who was so patient with a guy who spent way too much time at the computer, trying to pull his thoughts into some kind of sensible order.

Chapter 1

A Place to Begin

I’m guessing what you’re thinking. Why someone with even a small amount of common sense would think of turning an inquisitive technical eye to politics? I grant you the prospects for finding something worthwhile seem dim, and it’s likely to be a big waste of time, but I couldn’t help being curious. So with the philosophy that you never really know what you’ll find until you try, I decided to give it a go.

Now I know, from personal conversations with my friends and family, that techies can sometimes get way too fascinated by obscure technical details. It is clear that this examination of politics must avoid abstract formulas, equations, obscure special terminology, and messy lines on graph paper. Most of the people I know, when they see this kind of stuff coming, will gladly excuse themselves to go have a root canal. I promise every effort to follow the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!) principle.

In the world of science, bias is an enemy. Personal preferences and beliefs should be put aside. Issues are resolved based on facts. Theories and opinions that cannot be tested are simply words with little scientific value. If you tell me you believe beating tom-toms makes the sun reappear after an eclipse, I must accept that as a true statement of your belief, and that is relevant to understanding you. But the belief itself is untestable and so has no scientific value. It’s easy to see why, from a scientific perspective, the term political science might be considered an oxymoron. Still, let us venture on.

I remember a saying from the early days of personal computers:

If builders built buildings the way computer programmers write programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization.

It’s clearly a jibe at computer programmers, but it also contains an important truth: it’s not at all clear that the concepts and ways of thinking that work for one field of endeavor will have any relevance to another field. But sometimes, looking at things from an unusual point of view can provide new and interesting insights.

As for me

I spent the first fourteen years of my career working in the aerospace industry, first at Douglas Aircraft, working on the Nike Hercules antimissile system, and then on an upper stage of the Saturn 5 rocket as part of the Apollo Lunar Landing program. Later, I spent seven years as a systems engineering consultant with Bell Laboratories, planning advanced manned missions for NASA headquarters. After the completion of the Apollo program, I worked for eighteen years at Bell Laboratories, writing project modeling software and creating the project management software that AT&T used for ten years to manage all their military development projects. During this time, I also taught project management and risk management to project personnel.

I am an analyst who likes simple declarative answers or at least clear descriptive responses to questions. When it comes to the subject of politics, I expect to be disappointed from time to time, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.

We can probably all agree that technological progress, or any progress for that matter, is a mixed blessing. Nearly everyone at one time or another has said something like, Ain’t technology grand! When it works! When it fails, we are often thrown into a state where our intuition no longer helps fix it.

Fifty years ago, you could fix almost anything on a car with an adjustable wrench, a pair of pliers, and a screwdriver. These days, there is almost nothing on a car you can fix. The other side of that coin is that, accidents aside, you very rarely have to fix something on your car that has simply stopped working. No tune-ups every six months, headlights last the lifetime of the car and don’t need aligning, and transmissions and shock absorbers last much longer than they used to.

I know that my faith in advancing technology is not unanimous or perhaps not even a consensus. My great-grandchildren will probably never know what homemade ice cream tastes like, what wiggling your toes in just-plowed earth feels like, or how the smell of fireplace fires on a cold autumn morning can be so soothing. But my great-grandfather never saw how the telephone could keep a widespread family in touch with one another. He never had a chance to see how beautiful our galaxy looks or sleep in an air-conditioned room after working in the summer heat. He had lots of children, but a fair fraction of them never got to be teenagers. Advancing technology changes everything—the good and the bad.

Thomas Malthus was a British economist who studied population growth. He is credited, in a 1798 publication, with observing that increasing our ability to feed the masses would have the direct effect of increasing the amount of misery and starvation in the world. He meant, of course, that more food means more people, and more people also means more people at the bottom of the socio/economic scale. People, left to their own devices, will replicate until they outstrip their ability to feed themselves.

The message here is not that progress is bad but rather that no change is simple—every change has both good and bad effects. Rain is good for the grass and bad for the worms. Television means you can easily find entertainment, but you may also get couch potato fat and die at a young age of heart disease. There is no such thing in the real world as an unmixed blessing.

To complicate things, we are all interconnected, intertwined even, in ways that are not immediately obvious. Any sensible judgment demands that we look at all sides of a story and try to find most, if not all, of the important effects that trail out from an event if we want a true evaluation.

I tell you this so you can see that I am coming to this subject with absolutely zero experience in federal government politics but with a definite technical and scientific bent. I have pursued a lifelong armchair interest in anthropology, archeology, natural history, and the history of science and civilization. In addition, a family accident has also given me a particular interest in theories of the human mind. That’s the intellectual baggage, the hopes and the biases, I carry with me.

I also suffer from a malady that I will call engineer syndrome. Engineers are taught by their profession to be problem solvers. Show an engineer a problem, and they will instinctively set about trying to solve it, even if they have no expertise in the problem area and even if the person handing them the problem was just making conversation and had no interest in having the problem solved. It’s something that we can’t help. And after pondering a problem, if we can’t offer some constructive suggestions, we have a tendency to say nothing and simply wander off to another conversation looking for a problem.

Here, I am running this process backward. Normally, engineers start with problems and set about finding solutions. But here we are, starting with a number of solutions and looking for problems, ones that those solutions can serve. To give you a more concrete sense of what I am thinking about, here are some of the technical approaches used by scientists and engineers that might turn out to be useful:

Systems engineering—managing to a plan

Risk management—what could possibly go wrong

Peer review—evaluation by knowledgeable people with no vested interest

Pilot plants and models—starting small and using digital models

Chaos theory—sensitivity analysis to find where tiny input changes cause huge results changes

Evolutionary operation—continuously improving a working product

Control system theory—sensor stalemates and sensor reliability

I don’t want to scare anyone off here. These tools have some involved math and complicated processes associated with them. But we are not interested in any of that stuff. What’s important is the analytical and control concepts these tools use. The ideas that are the basis behind these tools are what we might be able to apply to this strange endeavor called politics. We will try to leave the equations and graphs behind.

For any particular issue, several or none of these tools may be helpful. For each chapter, I will typically first examine background material, trying to understand the issue. I will also try to summarize the conclusions at the end of each chapter. I do not guarantee that any approach suggested here will be the best or even work, only that it might work and is worth a more detailed study by involved parties.

One more thing, just to avoid unfulfilled expectations. This is not a scholarly tome with an extensive bibliography and abundant references. It mostly depends on thoughtful observations and the common sense that is available to everyone. You are, of course, welcome to disagree whenever you feel like it. I only hope to stimulate thinking about the many topics being discussed.

How to start?

When I am poking around in the dustbin of my mind, I like to use questions to provide some focus. Here are a few that crawled, unbidden, into my head. They seem as good a place as any to start:

Why are there governments at all? Why didn’t we just stay as groups of gatherers like our other primate cousins, the chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas?

What should a government actually do? They seem to do a lot of stuff, but how much of it is stuff we really need or want?

What is politics anyway? Has the federal government always been this rigidly organized and this functionally disorganized?

How do bureaucracies really work (assuming they do)? And why are they everywhere you look in the civilized world?

That was enough to begin, but as I struggled to find something useful in the explorations of these questions, other issues, other questions emerged.

How might we get Congress to function better? The phrase function better carries an implication that it functions now, an assumption that gave me momentary pause, but you get the idea.

What can be learned from the way engineers deal with big complex systems? Engineers create bridges, skyscrapers, rocket ships, and refineries. Politicians create complex systems like congressional bills, federal programs, election processes, and taxes.

How does socialism compare to capitalism for governing a nation? And is there a difference between Socialism and socialism?

What understanding can be unearthed by examining the concept of a federal spending (use) tax to replace an income tax?

This is a complex, meandering road map, but the landscape itself is pretty messy. Our travels will touch, ever so briefly, on the history of humanity and governments. Ignoring the lessons from the past simply means we are doomed to repeat past mistakes.

I apologize for the somewhat random-walk feel about the rest of this discussion. I make no claim that it is particularly well organized or complete. I simply let one question or topic lead me to the next. These are only cursory explorations, and in some cases suggestions, that come from prying the lid off a topic and rummaging around inside. Hopefully, you will find a few things interesting and worth a deeper look.

This is not an analysis of partisan views but rather of how humanity tries to control itself. Along the way, I will do my level best to steer clear of partisan political issues, and I hope you will see that in the results. I also am concerned that for some, this is going to seem like a drink from a fire hose. I have tried to be as clear and straightforward as possible, and I welcome suggestions and comments. Enough said…let us begin.

Chapter 2

W

hy Are There Governments in the First Place?

Let’s start at the very beginning—the nature of humanity. This may seem like digging a little too deep, but it’s not all that involved, and the effort will lead us to a clearer understanding of what we need governments for and why some things seem to happen at the geopolitical level.

To start with

Humans are physically animals that use sexual reproduction. The fact that we use sexual reproduction means that continuing the species starts with at least three individuals: mother, father, and offspring. For many animals, that’s the end of it. Many birds and mammals have such a family structure but no larger social structure.

The male in these families is often the larger simply because he must often fight with other males for access to the females and fend off other animals trying to steal his food and his bride. Even in these small family groups of related individuals, there emerges a leader who controls where the group travels and where they stay. We know from numerous studies that the physically largest individual in any group is most likely to wind up as the group leader.

This is a fairly simplistic picture, and it seemed to hold sway for millions of years. To move beyond this scenario, we have to consider nonmechanical aspects other than size and strength that developed