Posted by
Andrews on Monday, December 22, 2008 11:00:11 PM
I know I say I don't like to go into too much detail about myself, but in this case a personal detail has some relevance. Recently I was diagnosed with a severe vitamin D deficiency. I think this is largely due to an earlier medication which caused severe photosensitivity. I have since stopped taking it, but I got in the habit of avoiding the sun, so likely I have simply been unable to produce enough vitamin D.
Regardless of the reason for my own deficiency, this diagnosis started me looking into vitamin D, deficiencies and related matter, and I discovered something interesting. You see, in the US, Australia and elsewhere, there has been a huge increase in vitamin D deficiency cases, largely as the result of medical efforts to reduce skin cancer. Because of the very successful efforts by medical professionals to convince people to bundle up and cover themselves with sun screen whenever they go outdoors, they have reduced the incidence of skin cancer, but at the price of a huge surge in vitamin D deficiency.
And that is where I tie this seemingly bizarre topic into my usual political themes. You see, doctors are experts, and usually quite adept at foreseeing the consequences of their actions. However, in this case, due to the prevalence of vitamin D supplementation, they assumed the skin cancer prevention campaign would have no ill effects. Yet, despite all their knowledge, all their expertise, they were completely wrong, and their plan, intended to do good, ended up creating another problem no one expected.
Now, the economy is a system many orders of complexity more complicated than the human body, and if anything less well understood. In fact, the economy, because it is so powerfully influenced by expectation and unpredictable choice, is also far less predictable than the human body. While there are aberrant cases where humans will react in unexpected ways to medications, the general response is predictable in almost all cases. The economy on the other hand, is predictable only in the most broad outlines. Increasing the money supply will cause prices to rise, but whether a specific price will rise, how much, when, none of that is predictable in any way.
However, we are trusting the management of the economy to a group of people even less knowledgeable than these doctors, politicians. By and large politicians have absolutely no training in economics. Most were attorneys, and not just attorneys, but attorneys who have spent almost all of their careers in politics. Very few have even held a private sector job, and those that have rarely held a position other than lawyer. They know less about the economy than most plumbers know about neurology. Yet they are being entrusted to micromanage this incredibly complex system, and we expect them to do it without side effects or unforeseen consequences.
This is what always amuses me when I bring up laissez-faire capitalism. Someone will inevitably call it anarchy and talk about the need for "controls". However, how is it to be controlled? Under laissez-faire, each bit of the economy is controlled, controlled by those with an interest in it. You control your economic transactions, I control mine. The alternative is to turn over all control to a small group of elected politicians. Now, I don't think even a group of 600 or so professional economists could manage the economy without making a mess of it, but 600 lawyers whose main skill is getting votes? Why should they produce better results than turning over control to the people who actually have an interest in the results, the buyers and sellers themselves?
But I didn't come here to argue about laissez-faire capitalism. Instead I simply want to ask, if doctors cannot foresee a perfectly likely negative outcome in a system as relatively simple as the human body, how do we expect politicians, without economic knowledge and motivated more by public opinion and vote seeking than any economic principles, to manage the immensely more complex economy without making far worse errors?