Vern Wuensche for President

Achieving Results

The American people elect a President to make decisions that achieve good results. So if the person they elect has continually throughout his life made decisions where there was little room for error, it would be logical to believe that that person would make better decisions than if the experience were otherwise.

Although America's leader has many advisors to assist him in making decisions, the decisions are ultimately his own. And the decisions he is required to make are always difficult. All the easy decisions have already been made by others.

A decision by a President affects life and death, wealth and poverty. The person who occupies the White House must be able to weigh the value of freedom against the loss of a soldier's life. He must be able to weigh the short term versus the long-term effects of his decisions. He must have vision and in implementing this vision he must think strategically in order to be successful.

Different life experiences result in differing decision-making abilities. To properly weigh circumstances and make a decision to achieve a goal, one must deal with things as they really are. Not as imagery or artful presentations. Having the experience of using smoke, mirrors or manipulation to accomplish a goal is not helpful. Because reality will present itself anyway. And the results will always be real.

My life experience began with growing up on a farm. I observed the true nature of things at an early age. I planted seeds and they either sprouted and grew or they did not. I had a sow - a white Yorkshire. And she would have either a litter of five or as many as fourteen. I experienced the necessity of harvesting a crop quickly before it was destroyed by rain. No amount of smoke, mirrors or manipulation was going to stop that rain or change any of these realities. Talking would only be helpful to organize a process to solve a problem.

As was the case with many people of my generation I grew up without a lot of resources. So I learned to achieve results with what I had.

When I graduated from Elgin High School my goal was to go to the University of Texas the following fall. I had saved $400.00. And my parents could not afford to support me. And there was no possibility of a loan. But I entered The University of Texas anyway. And lived inexpensively. I was blessed that I lived on a farm. It helped a lot that I could bring vegetables and eggs from home to reduce expenses. Four years later I obtained a bachelor's degree in accounting. And then I entered The University of Texas Graduate School of Business, still living in a modest $40.00 per month garage apartment. One year later I graduated first in my class with a perfect grade average in receiving my MBA.

I later obtained my CPA certificate.

My later experience after I graduated from college was working as an accountant. From my perspective doing accounting was not simply processing good information. I viewed it as a way of keeping score on the management of the businesses I worked for. On their decision making. Was the business achieving its projected result? Or not? And if not why not? Good accounting information would always show the reason. And would allow for decision makers to adjust to obtain the desired result - if they were disciplined enough to do so. I watched and learned.

But the best real experience in learning how to achieve good results was founding, running, and surviving my own residential construction business for thirty-two years. Today in my industry my business is the third oldest in Houston Texas.

Being a business owner for thirty-two years was also perfect training for making decisions to serve others. Business owners are trained to take care of customers. Customers are the first thing a business owner thinks of in the morning, and the last thing he thinks about when he goes to bed that night. He must make consistently good decisions every day in taking care of these customers or he will no longer exist. A few bad decisions in a row and he will be gone. There is little room for error. As is testified by the fact that one third of all new businesses fail in the first two years. An even larger number do not make it past five. And lasting longer than that requires continual exceptional decision making. On the other hand, by contrast, in much larger organizations a few bad decisions may be costly but will seldom quickly cost a CEO his job. And if it does, the CEO probably will still be able to pay the mortgage on his house. For the business owner the stakes are higher. If his business fails he could lose his house and everything, as his resources are rarely very substantial. He must make good decisions.

Like my experience in farming, my experience in construction also dealt with reality. When I constructed a small starter home, a huge custom home, or a kitchen or bath all the parts had to fit, appear attractive to the customer, and also had to perform as expected by them. No amount of creative conversation was going to eliminate the reality of a wall that was out of plumb or a foundation that was out of level. Good levels do not lie. If a dishwasher did not work or a sink leaked no amount of smoke and mirrors was going to eliminate that reality. Because rhetoric cannot be used to correct these types of real problems, smart contractors do not even try. They make certain that their products do not have these kinds of problems in the first place. They are trained to turn out good products that are pleasing in appearance and function well. Their results are real.

It is different for those who today run our government at all levels. Talking about things instead of doing things is the norm. Talking only is the new reality. his can be blamed in large part on the substantial number of lawyers that are employed by the government. It is stunning when you consider how they monopolize our government. Of our three branches of government the members of our judicial branch are all lawyers. Half of the members of our legislative branch are lawyers. And when we fill the executive branch with a President who is a lawyer-which we last had with Bill Clinton-eighty percent of our three branches of government are composed of lawyers. This ignores the intent of James Madison, who authored our Constitution and in the first place created our three branches of government to provide a check and balance on each other. He said "government in the same hands results in tyranny". Today our government in which half are lawyers is in the same hands. Today lawyers represent one-half percent of our population and fifty percent of our government. Electing a lawyer as President will return it to days of Bill Clinton - eighty percent.

The proliferation of lawyers in our government is the primary cause of its failure to function well. By means of their daily experiences lawyers simply do not obtain the training in how to make good decisions.

Let's compare the daily experiences a lawyer has with those that business people have as it affects how both learn to make decisions:

Lawyers profit by being inefficient and by increasing the complexity and ambiguity of anything they deal with because through their hourly billing the longer it takes to do something the more money they make. They love a complicated and inefficient bureaucratic process.

Businessmen profit by making the process of anything they deal with simpler and more efficient because for a product to be profitable it must be efficiently produced.

Lawyers profit by cultivating and prolonging conflict among their clients. The more conflict the better as resolving conflict takes more time and is profitable to them.

Businessmen profit by realizing the synergy of people working together as a team toward a common purpose.

Lawyers profit by never admitting error in a courtroom because doing so could be fatal to their case.

Businessmen profit by admitting error as soon as they find it because they know that any decision they make will be supplanted by a better one, so admitting error and moving on is a natural part of what they do.

Lawyers profit by getting any transaction under the control of a court so that they can then use the power of the state and their ability to manipulate words to achieve their preferred result.

Businessmen profit by keeping any transaction out of the control of a court as they know that the cost to use a lawyer will often be more than the amount in dispute. Even if they win they lose.

Lawyers profit in a case whether their customer wins or loses the case as they with the exception of very large cases are paid by the hour.

Businessmen profit only by satisfying a customer. Any manipulation of a customer with words may have the short term benefit of making the sale but may result in a later dissatisfied customer. And of course the purpose of any business is to obtain and retain a customer.

What result would you expect from a government controlled by people having a lawyer's type of training and experience? What we have today: Congress is an inefficient and complex body where conflict is the norm, few will admit error, and hearings are held constantly, putting people on the record to find out who is at fault. Rather than focusing on getting something done.

The ability to get something done is missing when it comes to how most government operations are structured. This structure often guarantees failure. The failure of FEMA during the Katrina debacle is a simple result of the requirement that all decisions be made at the top-like forcing something through the small neck of a bottle. If government was structured as most successful businesses are, it would have its decisions made at a more local level where the problems originate, and these decisions could be easily monitored for quality with today's technology. An even better thing would be to let state and local governments run things and get out of the business of doing the many things which according to the Tenth Amendment to our Constitution it should not be doing in the first place.

To address the problems I observed as well as to respond to the dishonest legal assaults I had experienced over the thirty-two years I have been in business, I founded Legal Reform Now! Through its web page at legalreform-now.org we laid out the problems in detail and provided solutions. We did this to begin to try to correct things. As a legal reform group it is today top ranked on all the major search engines.

To give a reality to what I had learned through research I recently authored a book Overcoming Legal Abuse as an American Entrepreneur in which I set forth personal experiences to illustrate the problems in our judicial system. In it I provided some solutions to the problems I encountered.

I have been trained throughout my life to do things in a way that is opposite from the way our government does them. I survived a Texas Great Depression in Houston in 1986 when oil dropped to ten dollars a barrel and tax laws were changed which made much local real estate worthless. I drove 1000 miles per week for a year managing one remodeling job in each of Houston, Austin, and Dallas to survive. I survived the regular assaults of a legal system and its players for thirty-two years where its bureaucracy did not work and lawyers and judges were often dishonest. I did so with few resources. I survived with my own skills and agility. I did the same as two tough Presidents did before me.

The last small businessman elected President was Harry Truman in 1948. He had owned a haberdashery-a clothing shop-which failed. He understood his role as the final decision maker. He had a sign on this desk that said "The Buck Stops Here".

During his presidency one decision stands out. The decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It is said that President Truman made the decision to drop the bomb and then went to bed and slept all night. He had good values. He was wise. And he knew how to make decisions. He weighed the costs. On the one hand hundreds of thousands of Japanese would lose their lives in the blast and aftermath. But on the other hand as the war continued and we invaded Japan, millions of Japanese defending the homeland would die as would over a million American soldiers. Because he had learned to make decisions, making this one was really not that difficult. So long as he had discipline. And did not let his emotions get in the way. Emotions that would get in the way of killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese with almost anyone else. It was a short term versus long term decision. Most would defer the decision until it was too late and then the inevitable millions would die. But he was a disciplined decision maker. He dropped the bomb and he achieved the result of ending World War II.

The next President will face similar tough decisions with Iran, North Korea and the Middle East. He must be strong. He must not flinch when our enemies use our value of human life against us when they purposely put their own civilians in harms way to create causalities in order to break our will. Breaking our will cannot be allowed. Decisions must be properly made. Security of the American people is a President's first priority.

Another tough President who was a great decision maker was Ronald Reagan. From the beginning of his presidency he pictured a world without Communism. A dozen years later and it was gone. He never wavered in his decision because he had a clear picture of America as something special. To Ronald Reagan America was that shining city on a hill. The hope of all humans on this planet we call earth.

Today we Americans like Ronald Reagan should picture a world that has America and other shining cities scattered across the globe. A world where humans can peacefully raise their families and help their neighbors and contribute to the greater good. In a world where there is more and more freedom there will be fewer and fewer of those who wish to take it away. And as a beacon to this world we Americans have a bedrock belief that our faith and our unquenchable desire for freedom will over time bring this about.

May God continue to bless and protect America.