Friday, April 9, 2010

Doing What Comes Naturally - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest

Doing What Comes Naturally - Walter Russell Mead's Blog - The American Interest: "My guess is that Malthusian panics are part of humanity’s coping mechanism. The problems to which Malthusians point are almost always real problems, but the solutions they advocate are usually not the way out. Malthusians classically go for big interventionist fixes, when humanity’s most efficient method of solving problems is to nibble them to death rather than swallow them whole. Billions of people change their behavior; innovators perceive the economic rewards of addressing a growing problem and little by little, bite by bite, we nibble the problem down to size."

Bigger government has never solved anything and has usually made it worse. Look at Easter Island, some people want to know what the man who cut down the last tree was thinking. I would like to know what policy was in place that made doing that the logical thing to do even when common sense was screaming to not do that.

Bureaucracy does not encourage flexible thinking, they must follow established procedures. That the procedures don't work is not their problem, They just need more money and power to do the same thing bigger and more aggressively. Which still doesn't work.

What can we do? We need to clean our own houses, make sure we are making sensible decisions without the tax burdens/advantages and other market distortions that the government causes.