30 March 2009

It has been my feeling since 2000 that things were getting out of control: too much money, too much expectation, too much living on credit.  I left the stock market at that time because of too much short term chasing of quarterly profits, something that resulted from mandating quarterly profit statements; I called it gambling then and I call it gambling now.

Of greater interest however is the part government has played in the entire process - and is continuing to play.  The minions of government, in all their natural egocentric arrogance, want to control and they think they can, better than anyone else.  But to what extent?  The control has become greater as time passed - it was already increasing before 2000; the justification was complexity and size - of the economy.  The extremes, as I have mentioned before, are government ownership of the means of production and lazaisse faire, of which lazaisse faire has been discredited.  What is left is the matter of how much control between where we are and government ownership.

Over the past month our government has moved in an unprecidented direction during a possibly unprecidented time.  I say possibly because I do not know enough to be able to determine how much this "crisis" is being used for gain of power and how much of it is real.  That is not to say that I question that the excess was real, that the fall was not inevitable, and that the result is not painful.  But I do question how much government helped cause it, and how lust for power is pushing current actions.

Government regulation is clearly necessary in a free-market system, but so is the freedom of those markets, because government does not have the capability to control the details.  That is despite what populists seem to believe even in light of the absolute and total failure of planned economies wherever tried.  Government has neither the knowledge nor the incentive necessary to make planned economy work - and anyone who has observed the government in action knows full well it also lacks something else: some of it is talent, but most of it is freedom of action; politics and the need for politicians to get elected to continue to pursue their careers will not permit them from interfering - detrimentally.

So whither next?   My distrust of egocentricity, arrogance and  power-hunger makes me dubious.  On the other hand my confidence in our Constitution-based republican system of representation and love of liberty gives me confidence that rejects believing normal sensation-based doom gloom prophecy.  It will be a test of liberty versus populist democracy.  Fareed Zacharia (The Future of Freedom) says we have too much of the latter at the expense of the former.  I guess we shall see; it will be a very interesting, if somewhat fearful time.