Posted on 11/10/2011 11:51:25 AM PST by ancientart
It happens occasionally even to the best chess players in the world. You're only eight or nine moves into the game, but somehow you've drifted into a position so bad that it looks like the loss is inevitable.
But before tipping the king, one last strategic gambit: Seek complications. You try an aggressive counterattack, a piece sacrifice or giving up the exchange for an extra tempo - anything that will make the situation more complicated and confusing. Maybe your opponent will lose his way and you can pull off a swindle, winning a game you should have lost.
And if you happen to be in a multigame match, all the better: Nothing disheartens an opponent as much as losing a game he should have won.
Across the political spectrum, Americans are fed up with our entrenched elites. From tea party activists to Occupy Wall Street protesters, we're getting the same message: time to reform the system and throw the rascals out - this time, for sure.
The trouble is that, more often than not, attempts at reform make things worse rather than better. In his "The Organic Machine" (an account of human attempts to control the Columbia River), Richard White gets to the heart of how governmental and private organizations thwart attempts at reform: not by keeping malfeasance secret, but by creating around themselves an environment of mind-numbing complexity.
“Boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for a skunk,” White says. “It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep.”
The massive sets of rules and regulations within which our business and governmental systems operate already prevent easy public scrutiny. And many past “reforms” (e.g., the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations and the Sarbanes-Oxley investor protection measures) have only made things worse, adding to that stinking complexity that protects our corporate and government swindlers so well.
In chess, the greatest champions - men like Paul Morphy, Jose Capablanca and Bobby Fisher - are those who can cut through complexity to get to the essence of a position. And in politics, too, real reform won't come from the smoke-and-mirrors tricksters, but from champions of simpler and more efficient government: from groups like the tea party.
The leftist meme is that tea partiers want to strip away the regulations that protect the public from corporate wrong doing, that the tea partiers want to give a blank check to the Enrons of the world. What tea partiers really want, though, is to trim back a complex bureaucratic system that they think is protecting corporate and government rip-off artists rather than the public.
Look closely at the way our current system of rules and regulations actually functions, and you'll see that they have a point - if you don't fall asleep first and if you can stand the smell.
Excellent analogy.
IOW
The housing bubble was inflated by the notion that the only reason some people don't own their own homes is because they haven't accumulated a down payment and because the mean old banks unreasonably refuse to loan them money.
It was government action to address this which eventually caused real estate prices to inflate at up to 24% per year, until finally there weren't enough buyers at these inflated prices to keep the cycle going.
After the crash, I attempted to get a loan on a condo, mainly because I didn't want to tie up the cash. My lender was only willing to loan if the unit could qualify for a Fannie Mae guarantee. The unit didn't, at least according to the lenders liars, so I didn't get the money.
Without Fannie Mae and other agencies guaranteeing loans to people who otherwise could not have gotten them, there would not have been a real estate bubble. The complication and bureacracy that is Fannie Mae interfered with what could have been a free market.
If I ran a bank and couldn't lose money even if I made bad loans, I would make plenty of bad loans, collecting origination fees on all of them.
“Somehow I don’t see that at all. You have to admit that we don’t need any more housing bubbles to burst under our butts. The only thing that I see is a large group that wants a constitutional government and less political skulduggery by politicians.”
I’m not sure how you could miss it.
Politicians will be scumbags as long as they can get away with it. People will cheat as long as they can get away with it. The dirty little secrete is we can’t stop them 90% of the time.
In the general election we get 2 choices, in the primary we get only a handful. How is it that we can be expected to choose & hold accountable a man on latterly hundreds of different issues. Sure George Bush was good at waging war, but he head little respect for monetary policy. Sure Obama can give good speeches, but he can’t run a goverment if his life depended upon it. Nether of them respected the Constitution.
Sure Ron Paul has a fantastic grasp of the Constitution, but he has a terrible grasp of foreign policy, and a weak grasp on domestic issues as well.
No matter whom we elect we will get it right only some of the time on some of the issues we focus on, we will get ti wrong all of the time on most of the other issues under the same officials care.
Because we are so limited on any one area of goverment, the politicians can prepositionally afford to be skimpy on some.
As for bad business bureaucracy, the problem there is quite obviously a result of the lack of competition which as we have discussed before is directly related to goverment regularly and tax interference invariably favoring the Large & established.
I can say that with confidence because consumers tend not to like the runaround and thus also tend to vote with their wallets to avoid it. A modern day example is the decline of Dell and the rise of apple being largely due to Apples superior support.
It is indeed true, that the Goverment created the housing bubble specifically fanny and Freddie. It is also true that the U.S. Goverment all but garrentes the success of the “national” banks.
The Federal reserve & FDIC basically let banks print money, the only thing that even remotely restrains banks under such conditions is the vast array of complicated regulations which of course rottenly fail, either out of some politicians desire to make money for his pet project(like buying votes) or out of some unforeseen exploit(hole).
Ultimately of course regardless of the specific cause of any specific leak it was always a vain effort to contain this kind of monster.
Our politician just like all other men don’t really have any desire to keep it fully contained nor do they have the ability given how almost everyone else wants a bit of it. Like the Ring of Power in Lord of the Rings it needs to be destroyed and for the same reason.
“Excellent analogy.”
Couldn’t agree more, precisely because we are expecting a population of humans to manage this goverment it must be simple enough that even the lowest common denominator among our population can understand its operations.
Otherwise deception by our political leaders becomes easy as cake, and management by election every 2 years even more of a hopeless task.
“TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, governments are instituted among men; deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
PERIOD. That is the limited scoped of the specified purpose intended for American governance.
Actually, I think there is a new force at work to restrain banks. That is the vast population that is motivated to continue the easy money policy which permits government to provide welfare services on long term credit.
We are witnessing the first battles between vested interests in continued government profligacy. The writing is on the wall that not everyone is going to be paid. It's going to get very ugly.
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