Friday, December 5, 2008

Government and economy: positive feedback cycle of stupidity

http://www.csupomona.edu/~seskandari/physiology/images/Figure_hodgkin_cycle.gif

From Yahoo News:
News of a rapidly weakening job market sent stocks sliding Friday as investors feared that the recession will be deeper and more prolonged than many have expected. The Dow Jones industrial average fell about 100 points.

The Labor Department's report that employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November was far worse than the 320,000 that economists forecast. The job losses were severe enough to add to expectations that the government will have to take even bigger steps to boost the economy.

Instead of realizing that it was precisely its “steps” that caused market depression (now necessary to get out of the false bubble created by the government), which in turn resulted in increased unemployment, the government will take “further” steps, which will make things even worse, prompt people to say “well, we need to take even more steps; wow, it’s really much worse than we expected” — and the positive feedback cycle of stupidity will repeat itself. One stupidity leads to a tragedy which leads to another stupidity, and so on.

Déjà vu?

* * *

The first step to break out of socialist mentality (with all its wonderful consequences) is to stop thinking that government should do something — in a positive sense — and realize that the government’s only role is to guard our rights and freedoms, not to improve welfare of the society, boost up economy, promote science and so on. Not (only) because this is what the Founding Fathers originally intended for the government, but mainly because protecting our rights and freedoms is the only area where government can do any sort of decent job — everywhere else, it will fail miserably, especially in comparison to what can be accomplished by private efforts.

Once you stop thinking that it’s government’s job to do something about it (whatever “it” is — with exception of violation of our rights) and start thinking of government as our guard — and nothing else — things will start making much more sense; causes, effects and correlations will line up nicely. And you will realize what monstrosity has been done to the United States (and some European states) throughout the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century.

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