But no person or group of people has the power to impose their will on society. There are just too many chefs making the soup.
In other words, people have the power to try stuff in the same way generals have the authority to send troops into battle, but as Gen.
After
This is a hard lesson for people who put immense faith in government to do big, important things. The technocratic New Dealers were sure they were smart enough to allocate resources better than the market. To that end, in 1933, when millions of Americans were going hungry, the government slaughtered some 6 million pigs and threw away the meat in an effort to drive up pork prices. Secretary of Agriculture
"Only the merest quarter-turn of the heart separates us from a material abundance beyond the fondest dream of anyone present," he told a crowd in
Capitalism nauseates because we come into this world with programming for a "Stone Age conception of clan life" as economist
This wiring was perfectly adapted for a zero-sum world where resources were finite and political and economic transactions were essentially face-to-face and communal. But in a world where the price of a bag of rice from
When gas prices are "too high," many politicians blame oil companies for "gouging." When prices are low, these same politicians insist that oil companies shouldn't drill, build pipelines or open new refineries. That one result is correlated to the other is irrelevant to the need to aim anger at someone.
The need to blame is a core driver of conspiratorial thinking. When bad things happen, we look for beneficiaries and then reason backwards that they must have been responsible.
The idea that tens of thousands of businesses chose to needlessly keep wages low -- or even go out of business -- lest they lend aid and comfort to Obama is preposterous. Because what is true of politicians is also true of everybody else. No one is really in charge of anything, except for a few things in front of their noses and in their heads, and even then control is often an illusion.
There's nobody behind the curtain pulling the strings. We're all on the stage together, playing our parts.
Liberty-loving columnists delivered to your inbox. FOR FREE. Sign up for the daily JWR update. Just click here.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor-at-large of National Review Online.