In business, or in any endeavor that requires efficiency, any messing with the supply/demand curve generally sends the enterprise on a continuing downward trend.
Add layers of regulation to the farming sector, for example, and unavoidably in a market of competitors, some players will be situated to better weather the regulation. Other firms will not be long for this Earth without outside subsidy. Some of the unprepared firms will be unable to land the subsidies — perhaps a state legislator objects to a side business of tobacco crop — so those firms exit the market.
Shortages occur, prices skyrocket, and a socialist/Chris Dodd appears to announce that people are suffering, and this is the heartless, corporatized farming sector’s fault. This naturally requires more regulation. The tale ends with every firm sacrificing at least their efficiency, if not their existence. Even the firms that thought they might benefit from the elimination of their competitors — they would be producing more, and more efficiently, had they not been subjected to a Regulator.
In a nutshell, though not much more than a nutshell is needed as the “showstopper bugs” are so apparent and unmistakable, the above describes a built-in economic failure of statism. However, I’m more concerned today, in terms of timeliness, with the socio-political effects of centralized power.
Interestingly, they perfectly mirror the economic ripples.
Day One of catering to an irrational actor — here, the Kudlows/Bret Stephenses/GOP Establishment-types suggesting acquiescence to, say, amnesty out of a fear that the “Empathy Slander” of conservatives as heartless and racist is too leviathan — is Day One of decline.
And the rest is just commentary.
Scapegoated? One option. Fight back.
Philosophers much more accomplished than I, though it should be noted that they generally have terrible hair, have certainly delineated this before, yet I lose sleep over the fact that such wisdom fails to take. Again and again. We don’t have fantastic pre-Biblical records of markets and political policy, and obviously we have no records of pre-recorded history, but I feel comfortable assuming that Ogh the cave-king ran into the exact same socio-economic issues when bartering with the fine residents of Ur, and I bet his adviser, we’ll call him Chris Dodd, told him that all would be prosperous if he just demanded that his farmers and hunters just put him in control of divvying up the stuff, because those greedy b****es were ruining life for everyone.
I feel comfortable with that guess, since the pattern shows up with the Bible’s false prophets, then in the Koran, and also in every freaking society since the dawn of Anatomically Modern Man, visually appearing least pleasantly in the form of Howard Dean, and then on to Obama.
Really, human history is that simple. Humans have had one — one! — respite from tyranny. The statist, ignorant of human history and unaccepting of the inherent smallness of a man’s existence, keeps showing up to try it again, and he’s gonna need a scapegoat.
Again, the rest is commentary.
Look at the omnipresent demonization that occurs in every statist society. To institute control is to imply that some people are not behaving properly, and thus need to be controlled. This doesn’t require starting out with malevolent descriptions of the folks who need to be controlled — the Progressive statists are generally convinced they are seizing your property and liberty because they are wiser and can produce a better outcome with it — but it always ends with the demonization of the supposed malevolent bloc of citizens. Because the statist plans fail. So they need to pick a scapegoat to explain away the failure, and to prescribe a more “efficient” dose of statism. In our example, Ogh picked the farmers; most of humanity — for ease of historical records, most likely — went with the Jews or the blacks or the gays.
And then they gave the statism another go, and the society eventually collapsed.
The society catered to an irrational idea, and it fell. But the scapegoated folks who catered to the irrational fear of them? If any of them attempted to apologize, to go along to get along — they lost, too. One could stay closeted, or meet the statist halfway; it didn’t alter the eventual demise.
Appeasement fails in economics — all these companies that believe they can work with Obama, that think they can survive infringement upon their livelihoods by simply getting on the statist’s good side, they are still at Day One on the road to ruin. Similarly, scapegoats who think that a strategy of outreach, compromise, and catering to bigoted fears can somehow result in the desired outcome of a proper understanding of your humanity — well, ask the gays and the Jews how well the “closeting” tactic works.
You cannot cater to someone’s false caricature of your belief system or behavior in hopes that the bearer of the falsehoods will take a liking to you. Instead, he will believe himself validated — you really are the amoral player he thought you were — or, if a thug, he will smell blood.
Yet the bullied continue with the outreach, again and again, and I haven’t slept well in years.
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