Two comments on yesterday’s blog NCUA’s transition in 1981:
- Ed Callahan was a leader who made you feel we were part of something big.
- from a George Will column: “Musk was ten years old in 1982 when Ronald Reagan appointed entrepreneur Peter Grace to purge government of waste and mismanagement. . .Grace’s commission produced 2,478 recommendations including this: Electricity produced by the Hoover Dam was being sold to parts of three Western states at Depression era rates that were one-fourth to one fourteenth of the rates paid by unsubsidized Americans. Congress responded to Grace’s proposal-stop this-by stampeding to extend for thirty more years this way below market price for a federal resource.”
- From Canada-an example of accountability:The Alberta government fired the entire board of its pension manager, saying the $116 billion Aimco increased compensation and staff, but not its returns. (an example for Coop Boards?)
- Why CEO’s who offer their credit union in merger to enhance their retirement benefits: “People love unjust gain because money is their highest trust.”
- On the challenge for informed public discourse: Reducing complex issues and any public policy into one sentence is not conducive to the civility, magnanimity, and intellectual processes needed for a free society to flourish. Doing so performs a double disservice, in that even while it redirects one from issues to personalities it also kills the search for truth by ignoring the need for real arguments, even ones made with magnanimity. The human mind was created to seek and know the truth. . . Democracy requires compromise, and compromise requires the two virtues lacking most in American society–prudence and humility.
- What hope is there, then, now that technology and social media have only deepened the virtue deficit? To paraphrase the great orator, Cicero, who lived at the time of the Roman Republic’s decline into instability, impiety, and autocracy, “silent prudence” is always better than “loquacious folly.”
- We may live in an age of succinct folly but the first part of Cicero’s dictum still applies.Silence involves listening, for one cannot argue without first listening to one’s opponent. As the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us, “The words of the wise are heard in silence, more than the cry of a prince among fools.” Thankfully, Solomon has not yet called and asked for his wisdom back.