The Horizon of Events Pt. 2

Some other thoughts came to me regarding the post below that I needed to add on to it.

It is very comforting to think that someone is in control of the greater forces that run rough shod over our lives. For the longest time, God was the heavy that filled in those blanks. It was during the Enlightenment when a number of geniuses (defined by Dilbert creator Scott Adams as mutants whose ideas, thanks to the printing press, stuck around long enough to raise the bar for the rest of us idiots) gave us the idea that God was not necesary and that our existences could be traced to impersonal forces and laws.

It was difficult for many people to come to grips with the idea that no one had his hands on the reins. When the car was invented, the mental image became worse, because at least the horse had a brain of its own.

If a problem has a human face, like your boss or some other brigand, it was thought that it would be amenable to human correction. That it why in the past two hundred years or so more attention has been paid to government as a way to step where God seems to have out for coffee.

There is a fundamental problem with government acting like God, there is never a smart mutant around when you need one. You end up with yet another idiot trying to keep all of the other idiots in line. It has been found that you can mitigate the problems created by the idiots in charge by putting many idiots together and make them agree on their idiocy in advance of any action.

The previous post comes into play in that economic effects of government actions happen well after your designated idiot representative has to be held accountable. The short run is that the idiot responsible for the way things are is probably long gone, especially if you consider term-limits. Some might claim that this would be a fundamental failure of democracy, and that some other sort of dictatorship would be preferable. The problem with that idea is that it solves the accountability problem by getting rid of the accountability.

Their are two ways that might get us around this problem. One, give the President terms of ten years. I know of no one who could physically survive that long, and by the time re election comes around, everyone would want a new face to look at. The better solution would be to realize that we have yet to hit the point of diminishing returns by way of reducing the role of government in the economy. Give the power to the people, and we will dig our way out of the mess on our own, thank you very much.