A Letter to the President

Dear Mr. President,

I write with hopes to persuade you to think about the state of government itself.  Perhaps, you love the way the government is run by each branch and each state.  I won’t point out one single flaw with the U.S. Federal and State government.  This letter is not to point obvious things.  When you shower, drink your tea or coffee, or make a single decision, I want you to ask yourself one single question, and before I get to that question, I want you to understand that everyone looks to you in the world, whether they should or should not.  You are the most important individual on the global stage, and hence bear the graying burden of responsibility for yourself, your representation of the government, and your people.  So with this all in mind, I want one question to be asked: Is this elegant?

When we all first learned Mr. Albert Einstein’s famous equation, E=MC², we learned the end formula, as you know.  Maybe you know how he derived the formula, maybe you don’t.   Mathematicians, scientists, physicists, and so many in the math and science fields can explain how Mr. Einstein came to his formula, and can explain what it means.   This is not a lesson in science or relativity or anything such.  The importance is when confronted with a long series of equations, ideas, calculations, and so much more, that make up a problem, it is of the utmost importance to simplify and reduce to the most elegant formula, equation, solution.  Precisely, what Mr. Einstein did with his mass-energy equivalence.

A word on the primary sense of the word: elegance can mean fancy, tasteful, etc.  However, Mr. President, if you have studied math or science, elegance means something vastly more substantial.  It means taking a challenging problem or theory and solving it cleverly and simply, such as the example with Mr. Einstein I referred to above.

Ronald Reagan said something like: a government big enough to take care of all the needs of its people is big enough to control them or something like that.  Rhetoric from political parties uses words like “big government,” “small government.”  This rhetoric gets us nowhere.  What I think is a better term, Mr. President, is, you guessed it, “An Elegant Government.”  If a government is to solve problems, cost, employment, the global state of affairs with certain countries, should NOT come into play FIRST.  Approaching the problem, the first question should be: What is the most elegant solution to this problem?  And if you, Sir, do not know the elegant solution, find the people who would know the most elegant solution.  And then solve it.

If you have followed me thus far, I thank you for your attention.  I want you to think about all the myriad ways theoretically and pragmatically the government works, from taxes, wars, to laws and bills.  If you have to walk out into the woods, and contemplate the state of the government itself, please do so, and I’m sure you know where this is leading.   Do you know with certainty that we have an elegant government?  Would you publish this state of government in a paper now and win the Nobel Prize for it, like Einstein and his formula?  If this answer is no, then what’s the question?  Not how to make the government bigger or smaller or, even, better, but the possibilities of its elegance.

The Constitution is Elegant, which is why we Americans have followed it.  It is paper, though.  Why should an elegant political document do most of the work, while the government does not all of it?  Why does it need to depend its reputation on Amendments and Amendments alone?

I am no mathematician.  I don’t do everything elegantly all the time.  But the burden of one of the most powerful countries does not rest on my shoulders.   It rests on yours and the many that surround you.   Don’t think bigger, smaller, better, efficient, or anything else, I say Mr. President, think elegant.