Friday, August 9, 2013

Even An Overflowing Crock Eventually Drips A Terse, Accurate Summary?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Russ Huntley writes: "And damn me, but isn't that a perfect description of cause and effect?"

Why we can kiss the US economy goodbye

Actually, it's an even better illustration & demonstration than it is description.

Why, it nearly mirrors reality!

Makes you wonder what their lobbyists finally looked at, to arrive at the suggestion & order for this particular editorial. The image finally loomed so large that they could no longer see the start of the triggering causality chains?

That's the built in beauty of all biological systems. If they stumble along long enough, they eventually mirror enough context data ... to see themselves in it.

What happens after that is a crap shoot. Depends on whether they recognize their own fingerprints, or just look only for someone else's.

Ask not on whom the crock drips?
  It drips on you? (And yours.)


3 comments:

Tom Hickey said...

But the post has no mention of why this came to pass. Just Obama, Obama, Obama, as if he were the guy at the controls. This has been the project since Jimmy Carter's push toward economic conservatism that amplified exponentially by Ronald Reagan, whose mentor was — Friedrich Hayek. This is not push toward "socialism" but as the author notes, "I’ve argued from day one that Obama’s goal was to create a two class society. The two classes are the super-rich (who are beholden to Obama for corporate welfare, bailouts, and government contracts), and the poor (who are beholden to Obama for checks to survive). " Sorry, bud, that began with Reagan, and the Democrats under Bill Clinton realized that to get campaign contributions that they had to not only go along but beat the GOP in raising funds from the people that donate the most — the ruling class.

Roger Erickson said...

Exactly, Tom.

You introduce any simple bias into any system ... and you soon get entrenched, stable, unpredictable if not unintended consequences.

Introduce 2 consistent biases ... and the situation only becomes more unpredictable and more entrenched.

Which 2 biases might be identified as starting all this? And resulting is our current mess?

#1 - A vulnerable representative-selection system: with political campaigns dependent upon private donations (a political office can still be BOUGHT - we gave that up for, say, military commands, for obvious reaons; why on earth keep it for political commanders?).

#2 - Wealth & resource disparity. Without any effort to maintain an agile, pass-through, economic system, we systematically sink into a less-agile rather [Central Planning] than a more agile [distributed decision] system.
[Almost all ekaryote species absolutely depend upon incredibly RECOMBINANT sexual recombination. What on earth makes us think that analogous but not similar recombinant demands remain at all levels of system evolution?]

Putting those two biases together is like the confluence of an open flame and gasoline.

Result, a system where all policy offices are bought even faster, by increasingly narrower subsets ... until we rapidly achieve a state where a very few parasites are in control of the host.

If they don't QUICKLY learn how to adaptively manage a host that is far beyond their capacity to understand and direct ... then we, as the host, are toast.

The Sovient Union already proved that Central Planning can't scale. What on earth makes capitalist lobbyists think their own lesson no longer holds?

Just how stupid is this electorate? Fix those 2 core biases, and maybe we might survive a few more generations.

Otherwise, cultural death is just another form of ignorant bliss.

Ryan Harris said...

The rhetorical use of lies, exaggerations, and politically convenient scapegoats weaken and invalidate an otherwise good argument. Valuable lessons for the left rags like Truthout and Alternet and even the Democracy Now type outlets that tend to destroy otherwise good content.