Strategy teaches that creating conflict is too costly to make long-term strategic success possible ([node:content/313-conflict-cost link]). We can see the dimensions of this problem in battle created in the current health care bill (aka Obamacare). If the health care bill "wins" this battle, the most likely losers in the next election are those supporting it. In this battle, we can see all the distorting aspects of conflict:

Creating more opposition (See David Harsanyi in Denver Post)

A reader writes:

I have read the book called the art of war, but I was un aware that they so many versions or interpretations of it. What are the advantages of studying at your school?

After re-reading Tom Paine’s Common Sense recently, it struck me that a paragraph-by-paragraph update of the original, as I have done with Sun Tzu's work, might be useful. This is the first chapter.

Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out. And a problem in our country today is apathy.

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." The Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

“[W]ith essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.” F.A. Hayek said, accepting the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics