Skills and Tools

When the balance between skills and tools trend to one side or the other, something is lost that is extremely difficult, almost impossible, to get back.

I’ve been doing some finish carpentry work at home the past few days. Doing good work requires a combination of a couple of things – skill and the right tools.

But the truth is that if you have a high skill level, you can get by with a less sophisticated set of tools. If you don't, the quality of the work is entirely dependent on the tools.

For example, as a teen and in college, I worked during the summer and school holidays with construction crews around my hometown. One crew with which I worked was a carpentry crew run by one of the best carpenters in the county. They did everything from framing to finish carpentry. They were so skilled; every miter was cut with a Skilsaw – a hand-held power circular saw. Now that skill isn’t required due to the invention of the sliding compound power miter saw, just about anyone can cut a complex miter with precision.

The downside is that once you commit to using the power miter saw, if you had the skill to make those cuts by hand, you will lose it and the only tool you will want to use is that power miter (I really suck, I have two of them).

I was thinking about this today in the context of government.

When you think about skills and tools of elected officials, a good breakout of each is that those main skills are rational debate and persuasion and the only real tools our government possesses are coercion and money.

As I reflect on my own observations of politics over my six decades on the planet, I can see the skills once considered as the basics for making our government work give way to the increased use of tools that robbed successive waves of elected officials. I think Lyndon Johnson was a reprehensible man and president, but he did possess the skill of persuasion, as did Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton.

Ford was average, he was someone I have always classed as a “maintainer”, as was H.W. Bush.

Each President had his nemesis, Reagan’s was famously Tip O’Neill. Clinton had Newt Gingrich. These men were polar opposites with their own agendas and power, but somehow both sides managed to work together without seeing the other as human garbage.

That era is long gone.

With each administration, and as the tools began to develop and improve, more and more skill was lost until under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the use of the tools finally increased to the point the only thing left were the tools – coercion and money.

President Trump tried to use his business honed debate and persuasion skills, but like a carpentry crew dependent on the sliding compound miter saw, the other side simply knew no other way other than to use the tool. Biden never had any skill of consequence, so he always relied on the support provided by the tool. Today, all he has is that power miter saw that that does all the work for him, what little skill was there has become extinct.

Of course, as skill decreased, the importance and use of coercion and money increased.

The government has concluded that money is the best tool to use, at least first – coercion rarely works long term, because it produces resistance, and eventually, more resistance. You can only punch someone in the face for so long before they get tired of getting punched and punch back. Being that politicians are generally conflict avoidant and don’t enjoy getting punched in the face, money became the sliding compound power miter saw of our governance.

But even a fancy tool has limitations. There are many tasks demanded of a carpenter at which a power miter saw is useless. This one tool can’t satisfy every need and if it is all you have, you simply won’t be able to build that house.

Money is like that. Money isn’t the answer to everything, especially money from the government. That kind of “help” is a problem disguised as a solution, and it gets even worse when you realize it is the only tool they think they have.

Nowhere is that in more evidence than in the past year and a half of the Biden administration.

Completely lacking in skill, this president and his administration have failed to convince anyone either foreign or domestic, so what did they do? They shoveled billions and billions in every direction, some, like the Covid money for schools was so much that the schools had no idea how to spend it all. Some, like the $56 billion in Ukraine aid that will be laundered and returned to the Democrats.

And in true Deep State bureaucratic form, there was zero oversight for any of it, so money was siphoned off to disappear into any number of pockets.

If America is ever to get back to being able to build that house, we are going to have to elect people who are like the carpentry crew from whom I learned. We need people who can build that house through skill, not dependent on a single tool. Persuasion is a far more unifying, powerful and lasting force than coercion and money.

This is the only way America can come back together and heal.