Saturday, February 18, 2006

Intelligent Design of the Left

I've been forever noticing that while the left lampoons the right's devotion to the ID cause where creation and evolution is concerned in the biological world, they hold to Intelligent Design in the socio/economic world.

Indeed, it is the economics of the left, so affectionately espoused by Galbraith and his compatriots, that is secular Intelligent Design par excellence.
Consider quotes like this from the New York Times'’ Paul Krugman: "What's interesting about [the Bush Administration] is that there's no sign that anybody's actually thinking about, '‘well, how do we run this economy?'"’
The very idea of "“running"” an economy is predicated upon the notion that economies can be run and fine-tuned, much like a machine. But what Krugman and folks like Galbraith fail to understand is that the economy isn't a machine at all, but an ecosystem. And ecosystems aren't designed, they evolve.

Indeed. The more you try to tinker with the system for the benefit of those less fortunate, the more you are going to end up with what those poor unfortunate Russians faced for 70 years. The more you try to control the economic environment, the less room it has to innovate and adjust to conditions. There should always be boundaries set up around the economy (like anti-trust situations), but it should be left alone for the most part. President Bush really did just about all a President should do during the recession to lift the economy back to its feet. If anything more, he should have championed less government spending to keep the Federal government from sucking up so many taxpayer's (consumer's) dollars.
This doesn't mean that I'm all over a Darwinian view of the biological world, it has it's own scientific problems. But this person Gilbraith, along with Krugman, seem to misunderstand what American capitalism is all about and why it's been so successful.
And in the end it's directly contrary to what they believe about the rest of the world.
Hat tip to Joe Katzman.

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