Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, February 24, 2009 10:40:26 AM
Once again, our friends on the other side of the Atlantic prove more sensible than we so. (Though they seem to lose that sensibility when it comes to voting, and nationalizing health care). From the British site
NumberWatch, commenting on
the bank failures:
Recessions are generational phenomena. The new boys replace
those who have experience of it going wrong. They know the history, but the
inevitable and doomed cry is “This time it is different”. It is never
different. Though the details vary, a collective euphoria builds up and all
rationality is cast aside. Folly is a contagion. A long time ago we were taught
as schoolboys the first rule of banking – Don’t borrow short and lend long.
We did not really know what it meant. We do now.
Like the bath water, all the elements of society are
interconnected. We do not even begin to understand how. This provides the
reasoning behind the Conservative Principle – If it ain’t broke, don’t fix
it. It also explains the failure of the Socialist Illusion – Everything can be
planned. That is why whenever we visited the Soviet Empire we had to take items
like bath plugs with us. Nobody
understands how society works, though many academics claim to do so, despite the
fact that they clearly cancel each other out.
I really have little to add. He is right in one way, that lack of first hand experience does make it more likely a new generation will be bamboozled by the interventionist, Keynesian lies. Though he is wrong that recessions are generational in a very technical sense. As anyone who lived through both 1981 and the dot-com crash can attest. (I know the dot com crash was not an official recession, and neither was 2000-2001, but only because the Fed inflated enough to stave it off, giving us this much worse crash now.)
Still, his perspective is right, especially about
the impossibility of central planning, and the quote is amusing in itself. So it is my quote of the day. Not pithy, but still quite interesting.
POSTSCRIPT
It is interesting that the same piece also argues against the silliness of those who argue evolution "proves" or even "supports" atheism. While people on both sides are guilty of this error, the truth is quite different:
Those of the atheistic faith like to cite
Darwin
’s work as providing evidence of support. It does nothing of the sort, though
it does rather blow a hole in Genesis as perceived by those who fail to accept
it as an allegory.
Now, granted, if your faith relies on Genesis being 100% accurate, then, yes, evolutionary evidence could challenge your faith. But the fact that nature proceeds in an orderly way, in no way proves there is no G-d. (In my mind, the regularity of natural laws could be used to argue just the opposite, though it would provide no real formal proof in either direction.) G-d's existence is neither proved nor disproved by refuting a specific religion, especially not a specific view within a specific religion. So, disproving the literal reading of Genesis in not the same as refuting G-d's existence. (In fact, it doesn't even refute Judeo-Christian belief, or even belief in a revealed scripture, as G-d could easily have
spoken in allegory.)