Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[TJ Parker]

What follows shortly afterwards is usually financial bankruptcy, moral decay and the fall of civilization.

there are not enough data points to evaluate that claim. certainly our own smaller instances of that - health insurance for the uninsurable or property insurance in florida for those who can't get it otherwise or no-fault or other auto insurance don't fit that bill.

the test of private charity is not to be based on what happens when everyone is happy and fat and can comforably choose between sending money to a starving child in africa and a starving cat in ensino. its when everyone is feeling pain and nobody wants to give a handout to those who need it, but possibly don't deserve it.

there are really good examples from game theory, which you might be familiar with, or if not even have seen in the movie aboug nash, "a beautiful mind". his discovery was that there are situations where everyone, acting in their own best interest, will drive a system to a worse, or at least less than optimal, solution. if a bank is wobbly, it makes sense to go and take your money out. but if everyone does this, you have a panic that causes a collapse. that collapse was completely unnecesaary. if you have some agent come in - and in this case, probably only the gov can do it - and guarantee your deposits, voila, panic averted. a very cheap solution that eliminates an otherwise very costly problem.

the free market is not always the most efficient solution. locally good strategies can have globally disasterous effects. look at the self-reinforcing nature of the housing bubble, as another example.

can government be trusted to have this role? dunno. i prefer to think that there are such people out there that can, for example, find a better solution to our current problems than "lets just let all the banks go under and deal with the consequences, even if it throws us into a new dark age, cuz those are the laws of nature." the laws of nature are that we get transcriptional errors in our DNA which eventually give us cancer and we die. we don't roll over and accept that in medicine and we shouldn't roll over and accept it when it comes to economics.

and now, for entertain purposes only, the obama-mccain dance-off:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/financial_crisis_humour/blog/2008/10/24/john_mccain_vs_barack_obama_danceoff