This has long been for me the image that symbolised the difference between the West and the rest of the world in terms of growing our economies: we understood, with various nuances, that you do not grow an economy by fiat; instead, you nurture it, you water it, you feed it, and let it bloom at its own rhythm. Those that simply try to pull on the leaves to get it to grow faster are doomed to fail.
Thus communism failed. Thus various forms of State socialism failed around the world. And thus the Bushworld is failing.
The West functions on trust and leverage. I trust others to do their job, and thus I can focus on my own, specialise, and trade my services/good with others without fear of (i) being unable to procure for my basic needs and (ii) being fairly compensated for my work. I don’t supervise others and their work because I know that the system generally enforces compliance and that most people do follow the rules.
there are two ways to fall out of the virtuous circle of cooperation and trust:
- If the others started to cheat, and the State failed to punish them, and I needed to make sure by myself that they actually did their job as promised, it would take me a lot of time and I would not do my own job properly. I’d have to worry about self-sufficiency again, or about enforcing individual trades much more closely;
- if I somehow wanted to get things moving faster, and started to impose quantitative objectives on others, and threatening violence if they did not deliver, it is unlikely that it would work for very long. Either the authorities would deservedly take me out, or my terrorised colleagues would suddenly lose all creativity and initiative and focus only on obeying the letter of my instructions.
That’s why the Soviet Gosplan was inefficient. Workers (and managers had no incentive to do their job well – they only had the incentive to fulfill the prescriptive obligations of the plan. If the plan said, “make x spoons, you’d make ultra thin spoons, to minimise metal use and sell the excess on the black market; if the plan then told you to produce spoons with a given thickness, you’d make them shorter; if it then told you you to make spoons of a given weight, you’d mke ultra-thick ones, and so forth…
As a general rule, people respond to incentives; and if the only incentive is the stick, your only goal will be to not be noticed, and do the bare minimum that will keep you out of trouble. The liberal Western system, for a large part, has been very different, by allowing people to experiment, to improvise, to be free and to benefit from the fruits of their work. a portion of the excess income was recaptured via taxes, but people could prosper and the State prospered behind them by taking a fraction of the wealth created after it was created, and not by trying to second guess (or impose) what would be created and capturing it beforehand.
This is a system where the State is essentially passive, at least in some sectors of the activity, and it simply provides a peaceful framework and stable rules for all. Wealth creation is elusive, spread around, hard to graps, but nevertheless real. It is not predetermined, planned or pre-ordained. In fact, as the example of the Gos plan shows, trying to preordain it makes it much smaller and much less likely. Thus my image of trying to pull on a plant. it’s much more smart to water it, wait, and harvest the fruits. But it requires patience and trust in (in this case) nature / the economic context.
This generally marks the difference between win-win situations (where you are happy to let the other get rich because you know you’ll eventually profit) and win-lose situations, where anything you let the other grab means something less for you.
Bushco are trying to bring us back to a win-lose world. They have decided that the only way the rich could get richer was by grabbing wealth from the middle classes, by capturing wealth instead of creating it. Thus the tax cuts, the budget cuts for the poor, the insouciance – they are just grabbing what’s there.
But they have the same attitude in their relationship to the rest of the world. Soft power is out. You cannot trust others, you cannot work on the basis of something so unquantifiable and measurable as goodwill, admiration and empathy; instead, you want coercion, certainty, obedience. “Let them hate us so long as they fear us”. it’s a very basic form of power, but it works. The only problem is that it gets you much less far than soft power, because people will stop doing what you want as soon as you stop forcing them.
Pull the plant, and it will grow… until it is torn out and dies.
Bushco are using the vast pool of American credit (monetary), admiration for the ideal USA (the land of liberty that can do no wrong), and goodwill accumulated over the past decades for a vulgar power grab. It is tearing down the fruit trees in a vain attempt to get more fruits.
It is doomed to failure, but it IS draining the resources, both material and immaterial of your country, and it is sending an ill wind across the world, by showing the worst possible example of greed, short sightedness and reliance on pure brute force.
Both your plants and your neighbors need that evil harvester to go away.