The Dow is still rising. It rose another 125 points yesterday… hitting a new record high.
Gold is dawdling.
We’re still thinking about how so many smart people came to believe things that aren’t true. Krugman, Stiglitz, Friedman, Bernanke — all seem to have a simpleton’s view of how the world works. They believe they can manipulate the future and make it better. Not just for themselves, but for everyone. Where did such a silly idea come from?
Aristotelian logic came to dominate Western thought after the Renaissance. It was essentially a forerunner of positivism — which is supposedly based on objective conditions and scientific reasoning. “Give me the facts,” says the positivist, confidently. “Let me apply my rational brain to them. I will come up with a solution!”
This is fine, if you are building the Eiffel Tower or organizing the next church supper. But positivism falls apart when it is applied to schemes that go beyond the reach of the “herald’s cry.”
That’s what Aristotle said. He thought only a small community could work at all. Because only in a small community would all the people share more or less the same information and interests. In a large community, you can’t know things in the same direct, personal way. So it’s hard for people to work together in the same way.
In a large community, you have no idea who made your sausage or what they put in it. You have to rely on “facts” that are no longer verifiable by direct observation or personal acquaintance.
Instead, the central planners’ facts usually are nothing more than statistical mush, wishful thinking or theoretical claptrap — like Weapons of Mass Destruction, the unemployment rate and the Übermensch.
Large-scale planning fails because the facts upon which it is built are unreliable, frequently completely bogus.
And it fails because people don’t really want it.
Hidden Agenda
In a small community the planners and the people they are planning for are close enough to share the same goals. In a large community the planners are a small minority.
