Cowboy Confessional

Did Adam Smith prophesize Barack Obama?

Having recently stood over Smith’s grave while pondering his enduring observations on the mechanics of society and economy, I grew weary. In recent days I sensed an obnoxious divergence between Smith’s elegant understanding of how people prosper and how it takes authoritarian control to make them poor.

My buddy and stand-up philosopher Ralph Seifert coined the phrase “the fatal attraction to flawed ideas” to describe how political theorists refuse to abandon plans that are obvious flops. No sane person can call America’s ‘war on drugs’ a success. Nor would anyone assassinated this morning in Mexico by a cartel enforcer. Yet politicians – and to a lesser degree the public – still support failed attempts to control the supply of narcotics and jailing people who possess dope for recreational brain obliteration.

The essence of this insanity is the beauty of a perceived ‘perfect system.’ Many maniacal men look upon God’s gray world and have visions of how things ought to be, believing that government should be the anvil upon which their utopia is forged. What most people forget is that the metal being hammered is their neighbors.

It is this attachment to grandiose visions that drive policy in mere democracies. Where the tyranny of the majority exists, someone with a Grand Plan will attempt to establish it through government power. Flaws in the plan’s details or even in the fundamental vision are not impediments to the exercise of omnipotence. That is the nature of power and why it corrupts. People vested with power and who have a systematic approach to fixing perceived inequities and inefficiencies will grab the hammer of government and attempt to pond people into components that fulfill their perfect vision.

Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations wrote about such critters. A couple of hundred years back Smith saw in other countries what we have seen in European democracies, and what is tenaciously trying to entrench itself in America. Smith wrote:

The man of system … is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it … He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.

Charles Darwin and Adam Smith saw the same beauty in complex systems that by nature are self correcting. On the opposite extreme is Obama, infected with his own divine conceit of a grand design. Like all ‘fatal attractions to flawed ideas’ the Obama unified theory of social management will eventually collapse under its own structural infirmities. Sadly many people will suffer as part of an idealized system eerily reminiscent of Pol Pot’s. Like a pure breed dog that has genetic weaknesses, Obama’s inbred economy will suffer slowly and die young.

Give me a healthy mutt over a pure breed pooch any day.

Bookmark to: