Why We Fight

“What we are seeing today, in Wisconsin and in Washington, in the fights over everything from government unions to Obamacare to the Ryan plan, is a pitched battle between those who fundamentally understand and accept the knowledge problem and those who do not,” Jonah Goldberg writes in the latest emailed edition of his G-File column (alas sadly not online, but available for subscription, here):

There was just something so schadenfreudtastic about punitive right-wing counter-gloating after the Left had spent days gloating over their unalloyed victory in Wisconsin. I won’t get into the tick-tock of it all (Michael Moore seemed a few shades from going full-on suicide bomber), though I threw my two cents in here and there, noting how Kloppenberg fell behind in the count when a surge of votes from cowboy poets in Wisconsin failed to materialize. Oh, and I may have asked if you can make cheese curds out of crow and whether or not the progs were going to have tailgating at their pity party. But I was barely a participant in the really grotesquely enjoyable riot of “nyah-nyahs.”

John Nolte (from over at Big Hollywood) captured the spirit of it all well when he signed off, “What does it say that I have to go to bed B4 I run out of taunts about what losers u are? Your misery is my muse, parasites.”

The Price of Elections
Of course, if Kloppenberg had won (and she still may — a recount is coming), the unions and their sympathizers would have claimed it was a monumental victory for the forces of progress and all that. We know that because that’s in fact what they did for a few days, until they found those extra 7,000 net votes for Prosser and the unions started to cry like they found their Christmas pony in the wood-chipper.

But if Klop had won, it would have been by the tiniest of margins, even though the Left threw their all into the fight. And although conservatives could have consoled themselves with the fact that the fight shouldn’t have been so hard for the Left to win, given that Madison is the Klingon homeworld of progressivism, it wouldn’t have mattered. They would have lost and the other side would have won.

There’s much to say about all of that, but what I find most interesting is the way a binary result conveys so much information. If the Dems win, that means public unions aren’t doomed, the Tea Party tide is receding, etc. If the GOP wins, then a whole slew of other conclusions become defensible.

All because less than 1 percent of voters voted one way instead of the other.

That’s because elections contain a vast amount information boiled down to a simple yes-or-no, X-or-Y question.

This is not a new insight, of course. We all know “elections matter.”

But I wish people could have the same reverence for prices. The price of a can of tuna — call it $3.79 — seems like a very simple thing, but it is in fact the simple-seeming face of something so massively complicated no single person can fully grasp everything that goes into it. It’s like the tiny antenna poking out of the earth in a nondescript field that is in fact the only visible protuberance of a massive subterranean city, or the inchworm that is really the tip of a leviathan’s tail.

The price of a can of tuna summarizes and synthesizes oil prices, shipping prices, the cost of aluminum, and the weather off the Sea of Japan. Bond markets and the consumer tastes and preferences of a billion or more people have their impact on the price, too, as do regulations, fish stocks, and a thousand other inputs. Each of these things depends on the prices of a billion other things, and yet, harmoniously, they work it all out. Friedrich Hayek called this process “catallaxy.” (Which, if you didn’t see it spelled, you might think was an adjective used to describe cars that look like Cadillacs but aren’t. “Man, that Lincoln Town Car is awfully cadillacsy.”)

Hayek never claimed that this process worked perfectly. He simply argued that it worked a hell of a lot better than state planning. That’s because people closest to ground, with a Fingerspitzengefuehl (you’ve been keeping up with your G-File vocab flash cards, right?) for what all the different variables are, would always be better at figuring out the right prices for things both bought and sold. Planners could never get the prices reliably right (their occasional guesses might work from time to time) because of this “knowledge problem.”

What we are seeing today, in Wisconsin and in Washington, in the fights over everything from government unions to Obamacare to the Ryan plan, is a pitched battle between those who fundamentally understand and accept the knowledge problem and those who do not.

As Scott Johnson noted at Power Line today, long before Obama’s hissy-fit this week when questioned about his drill nowhere, do nothing energy policy, the pricing of consumer goods has long been a dangerous topic when addressed by the president:

Let’s just say that Obama lacks the common touch. Even before our current hard times, you may recall, Obama was complaining about the high price of arugula. Before an Iowa farm audience in mid-2007 Obama lamented: “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.” Nobody knows the troubles he’s seen.

Oh to be a fly on the wall to hear Barack wax analytically on the fundamentality of catallaxy.