The End Is Near and It's Going to be Awesome.

Jonah Goldberg today reviews Keven Williamson new book, " The End Is Near and It's Going to Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure..."

This is a fabulous book even if you don't buy into his  somewhat optimistic (IMO) thesis that government as we know it is in a retreat that will be accelerated by the overwhelming level of public debt and unfunded government liabilities. He believes that once the disorder is behind us, we will seek new ways to organize and serve each other that are more grounded in the lessons learned from our current experience with government. -- much as the United States was founded on the lessons learned from living under powerful monarchies.

The basic economic point (which you would think obvious, but apparently isn't) is that the driver of nearly all material, technological and economic advancement is voluntary exchange. That when government seeks to substitute its alternative "wisdom" for that mechanism, it throws sand into the gears that drive that economic progress. As Goldberg puts it, "That’s be­cause politics is governed by the Deweyan fallacy that planners are smart enough to run other people’s lives and businesses. Mean­while, the realm of Nockian social power is fueled by the Hayekian insight that freedom fuels problem-solving." 

That's a complicated way of putting a brilliantly pithy insight: "Indi­vidual liberty yields the iPhone. Politics protects the post office." The fundamental reason this happens is not really so much that government planners are stupid; it is that voluntary exchange (i.e. free markets) quickly quashes bad ideas. When Apple marketed the Newton PDA, it failed. They didn't keep spending money trying to force people to use it; they learned, regrouped, and eventually brought out the iPhone. That does not happen in government. Government typically doubles down on its failures. The phrase  "The public will just have to learn to . . ." is well recognized in marketing circles as a death knell. In government it is simply SOP. If the square peg does not fit in the round whole, government insists that the hole change itself to accommodate the peg it wants to produce. Thus the Chevy Volt.