Sunday, April 6, 2014

The Market For Common Sense

Belmont Club » The Market For Common Sense:



How come Kerry couldn’t see this coming? The real shocker is that, after everything that had gone before, the Obama administration actually expected this to work, just as Nicolas Maduro thinks that fingerprinting Venezuelan supermarket buyers will put food on the shelves. Pardon my skepticism, but it probably won’t. However, that’s beside the point. The real head scratcher is why they thought it would work at all?
One possible answer is that once a ruling elite buys into a paradigm then all solutions have to be found within the paradigm space.  It’s useless to argue ‘why doesn’t Venezuela leave the producers alone’ because that option is not on the table within the terms of their mental system. The only levers Venezuela actually has are the ones they allow themselves to consider. They have hired millions of bureaucrats to implement their price control system and that’s all they can do. To accept price controls are a failure is to accept they and all their useless functionaries are failures and to dismantle themselves.
That’s never going to happen while a single Venzuelan Boliver remains left to debase. Similarly the Obama administration’s foreign policy model cannot be fixed except within its own terms of reference. They know — like the Chavistas — that they’re always going to be re-elected, perhaps not only in spite of their failures but in some sense because of them. So this is not the end of the Mideast Peace Process. Rather, it can only the beginning.  Abbas and Putin know this for a dead cert: that Kerry will be back, so they’re going to bilk old JFK for all he’s worth.
Which only goes to show that perhaps Chavez was right after all. Perhaps there is no Law of Supply and Demand. If there were a homo economicus, if the rational actor of market theory really existed, then neither Obama nor Chavez would even be elected. Those who criticize president Obama’s lack of belief in American exceptionalism should look at the counterargument from his point of view. ‘If America is so exceptional then how come I am president?’ The real problem with believing in the Law of Supply and Demand is accounting for the existence of an apparently endless market for stupidity.



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