URLs du Jour

2009-01-13

  • At Tech Central Station, Max Borders discusses the power of a particularly powerful metaphor to derange thought: that the economy is a "machine"—a complex one to be sure, but still a machine—that can be "fixed" if only the right geniuses with correct values are put in charge.
    But the whole idea of fixing, running, regulating, designing, or modeling an economy rests on the notion that, if the right smart guys are at the rheostats, the economy can be ordered by intelligent design. But the economy is no mechanism. There is no mission control. Government cannot swoop down like a deus ex machina to explain the inexplicable and fix the unfixable. Why? Because the knowledge required to grasp each of the billions of actions, transactions and interconnections would fry the neural circuitry of a thousand Ben Bernankes. This is what F. A. Hayek called the knowledge problem. Knowledge, Hayek reminded us, is not concentrated among a few central authorities but is dispersed around society. That's why bad unintended consequences follow government interventions like black swans.
    As Leonard Read pointed out long ago, the people who would impose their grand economic visions on us can't even make a pencil.

  • In related news: taxation is complicated enough so that the incoming Secretary of the Treasury can't avoid making a "common mistake" (which, um, only came to light once he was nominated). He's had to pay somewhere around $10K in interest on "mistakes". Fortunately, for him, "the IRS waived all penalties."

    Not surprisingly, ma belle Michelle is all over this.

  • I didn't like the movie Wanted. But Andrew Klavan really didn't like it:
    Film-wise, it's more or less okay, the first half an entertaining Matrix ripoff, the second half a lot of so-so CGI bang-bang. But idea-wise, it's pure fascism--although Angelina Jolie shows us her butt so maybe fascism's not as bad as we thought.
    I forgot to mention the butt thing. But doesn't she do that in every movie?