This came in an email from a very good friend of mine who has has some great thoughts and solutions for issues of the times. I thought I'd share this one. Chris

"Just one of the many problems confronting President Trump is the unwieldy, unnecessary, overly expensive, excessively large, and totally unmanageable Federal Government. A “weeding out” so to speak, is what is needed, but how do you do that? The President should look to Ancient Rome for a start. In the days when Caesar ruled, he used a process called “decimation” to great effect. Today we understand that word to have a negative context, decimation is a bad thing. The word “deci” connotes the number 10. If one of Caesar’s Legions disappointed him in battle, he would order that the offending Legion be decimated. What did that mean? It meant that every tenth member of the offending Legion was executed; do you want to talk about effective?
Now I am not advocating that the President execute anyone. He should order the immediate decimation of the list of Federal Agencies, every tenth one to be removed. He similarly should order the decimation of Federal Programs; the Federal Budget; Federal Employees (this by attrition, essentially a freeze on hiring); Federal Projects; Federal Regulations; Foreign Aid; Dues to the United Nations; Federal Laws; Taxes; and so on. Once completed, he should simply do the same thing again, and again, until this “Swamp Thing” gets whittled down to size. How say you?"

True, but there is an endless supply of nitwits coming up the ranks to replace them.

We don't necessarily need to 'decimate' the ranks, as much as we simply need better people.

H&K-Guy

Caesar may have used it to reduce by 1/10th, leaving 9/10ths, but modern parlance has reversed it, to mean destroy all but 1/10th.

It might be that because Caesar didn't speak English, spoke Latin, and used those confound Roman numerals. It's easy to see how the misunderstanding might have occurred.

I would take this thought one further and say to the Federal employees your unit screws up then every tenth one of is fired and don't tell where you are going to start counting. Do it once and the quality of our Federal Government will increase a little till the second decimation is ordered. Let the new ones coming in know the policy. Chris

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
Caesar may have used it to reduce by 1/10th, leaving 9/10ths, but modern parlance has reversed it, to mean destroy all but 1/10th.

It might be that because Caesar didn't speak English, spoke Latin, and used those confound Roman numerals. It's easy to see how the misunderstanding might have occurred.

I think JALLEN is on to something! I've long thought that 90-95% of the Federal workforce should be fired and 90-95% of Federal programs shutdown. I thought of it as a "Pinkslip Revolution" - "Here's your pinkslip. Go get a real job adding value or starve to death. Your choice."

It would never happen, but a guy can dream...

Decimation in the Roman Army was extremely rare. I do not believe there any any records of Julius Caesar ever using decimation. Not only was every tenth man killed, but his nine comrades had to beat him to death. Caesar might have threatened it against Leg IX Hispania, but it would have been extremely bad for morale and would likely have made Caesar hated by his soldiers. But the record seems to indicate that Caesar was loved by his troops.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
Decimation in the Roman Army was extremely rare. I do not believe there any any records of Julius Caesar ever using decimation. Not only was every tenth man killed, but his nine comrades had to beat him to death. Caesar might have threatened it against Leg IX Hispania, but it would have been extremely bad for morale and would likely have made Caesar hated by his soldiers. But the record seems to indicate that Caesar was loved by his troops.

Don't assume the term "Caesar" refers to Julius only. There was a time when "Caesar" had become an office under the Emperor, Praetors, Consuls, etc., not merely a family name. There was also Augustus Caesar.

Some of those guys were pretty cut throat. I was reading earlier today where the Empire went through 6 Emperors in less than a year, two at a time.

The Federal Government is full of Caesars today, but they like to use the slavic pronunciation, Czar. It obfuscates their real intentions.

Your "10th" method is unnecessary. A "decimation" of it's own is already under way. 526 Veteran's Administration employees have been terminated since January 20. A list (without names) is on VA.gov. Duplicated agencies are being thinned and merged. There's been a hiring freeze, at least for some agencies, for months. Business type accountability procedures are being implemented quickly.

The tools for managing the federal government have always existed. As a matter of fact, the procedures are not that much different from the private sector.

It's interesting how everyone knows what Trump should do-and then we find out he's already doing it.