http://www.american.com/archive/2009/december-2009/capitalism-without-romance ...
Since regulators' and citizens' ideas are imposed on the whole system at once, they can't be put to the competitive test. If their ideas are good, we all gain; if they are bad, we all lose. The whole system crashed when the financial regulators' ideas turned out to be bad, but this is inevitable unless modern societies are so simple that solutions to social and economic problems are self-evident to a generalist voter, or even a specialist regulator. Just that assumption is, in truth, the hidden premise of both sides in most political debates. This is why politics gets so ugly: neither side can understand why their opponents oppose what self-evidently should be done to solve our problems, so both sides ascribe evil motives to the other. But the financial crisis has exposed this simplistic view of the world for what it is. Nobody can plausibly deny any more that modern societies are bafflingly complex and the solutions to modern problems difficult to discover. So the policies that seem to voters or regulators to be so obviously needed may turn out to be disastrous nostrums---unless regulators or citizens are infallible. That surely would be magical. But there is no more magic to politics than there is to capitalism. The question is how best to guard against human frailties: by putting all our eggs in one politically decided basket? Or by hedging our bets by setting fallible ideas into competition with each other? ______ Friedman is speaking Friday in Houston: Houston Property Rights Association will have a special speaker on Friday, February 19th. This will be historian *Jeffrey Friedman,* the founder/editor of /Critical Review/, a respected journal that speaks in defense of free enterprise and capitalism but approaches the topic from a different angle than most Republican and libertarian advocates. He is associated with Boston University and the University of Texas. It was standing room only the last time this gentleman spoke to HPRA so we will have this event in the restaurant's ballroom. _http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/index.html_ _http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/history.html_ _http://www.american.com/archive/2009/december-2009/capitalism-without-romance_ Price: $20. Make your plans now. *Please let me know if you plan to attend.* Location: Courtyard Restaurant, 1885 St. James Place Houston, TX Time: noon to 2 PM Barry Klein 713-224-4144 -- Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------- Constitution Society 2900 W Anderson Ln C-200-322, Austin, TX 78757 512/299-5001 www.constitution.org [email protected] ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
