I had the long version of this arrive in my email recently. When I got around to reading it, it made a LOT of sense. Especially THIS part:
Politicians’ “fixes” usually make things worse. Yet the media and the political class call for more government control. Do we really need a president to plan our lives? No. Most of life works best when YOU are in charge.
Imagine that you had never seen a skating rink, and I told you: “I’m going to have people strap blades to their feet and go out on ice—experts and beginners—fast movers and slow—all skating where they choose to go.” Your initial response would be, “That would create bedlam! We must have rules: signs, traffic cops (aka: a president), or skaters will smash into each other.” But of course, the existence of rinks demonstrates that there is another way to organize life: something called spontaneous order.
We need some predictable and understandable rules—like the rules you learn in kindergarten: don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff and keep your promises—but most of life is governed by spontaneous order. It regulates how we choose our jobs, hobbies, lovers, recreation and most of the best of our lives. It runs most of the economy. The Soviet Union taught us what happens if government tries to plan the economy: people starve.
Something similar happens when I try to “govern” the skating rink (I shout orders with a bullhorn). Skaters hate it. Some fall down. I suppose a politician would say I failed at “leading” the rink because I’m not smart enough, I don’t know enough about skating, so we need to elect a more expert leader. So I get Olympic gold medalist Brian Boitano to take the bullhorn. He does no better than I.
The moral: Intuition leads us to think that complex problems require centrally planned solutions, but political decision making is rarely the answer.
Imagine that you had never seen a skating rink, and I told you: “I’m going to have people strap blades to their feet and go out on ice—experts and beginners—fast movers and slow—all skating where they choose to go.”
Except that at all the skating rinks I’ve ever been to (and I figure skated for almost 12 years), even during “open skate” times where anyone can use the ice, there are rules. Slower skaters to the outside, no playing tag, everyone moves the same direction, there are rest periods announced over the intercom (for the management to Zamboni the ice), and if you’re going to do jumps or spins, do them in the very center of the rink. I don’t consider that “all skating where they choose to go.”
Something similar happens when I try to “govern” the skating rink (I shout orders with a bullhorn). Skaters hate it. Some fall down.
If someone was giving orders, someone who is supposed to be giving orders, then skaters will listen. They might be annoyed at being told to leave the rink (for example) but they’re not going to go nuts over it. If some fall down, it’s not going to be because they were given orders through a bullhorn, either.
Maybe it was just a bad example, but I don’t think who ever wrote this e-mail has actually ever seen people open skate, or tried to give orders through a bullhorn (or over the intercom) if they were supposed to be doing so. Of course people will get mad if someone who is not in charge starts telling them what to do, but that’s not the case being put forth in the e-mail.
I’m pretty sure most skaters would listen to Brian Boitano even if he wasn’t in charge, though.
That’s one heck of a generalisation, and I have doubts as to how accurate it is. I think it’s more a case of it’s just when things go really wrong that people notice them. All the stuff that goes smoothly and properly is taken for granted and ignored.
Yet the media and the political class call for more government control.
He’s making it sound as though all the politicians want Big Government, and all the regular people don’t. That’s just not so. That’s part of the reason why there are different political parties: some want more control by government, some want less. And the fact that plenty of people vote for the “more control” parties shows that plenty of people are really fond of the idea. The author is setting up a totally false and misleading dichotomy here.
Do we really need a president to plan our lives? No. Most of life works best when YOU are in charge.
Now he’s setting up another false picture. The President isn’t supposed to plan our lives. Nor has any U.S. President even tried. That sort of thing isn’t what the Federal government does. The Federal government is concerned with “the big picture”, its scope doesn’t shrink down to individual people’s lives very much. How many of the average people on the street would you trust to negotiate trade treaties with Iran? Or to coordinate with world-wide efforts to eliminate smallpox? Or to even pave a road from one state to another? Those sorts of things need some different level of coordination than an individual basis.
Imagine that you had never seen a skating rink, and I told you: “I’m going to have people strap blades to their feet and go out on ice—experts and beginners—fast movers and slow—all skating where they choose to go.” Your initial response would be, “That would create bedlam! We must have rules: signs, traffic cops (aka: a president), or skaters will smash into each other.” But of course, the existence of rinks demonstrates that there is another way to organize life: something called spontaneous order.
Of course, a skating rink is nothing like most of the rest of the world, and even on a skating rink there are often enough confrontations and accidents and disasters. In a skating rink, it’s pretty easy to have “spontaneous order” because everybody can see clearly what the situation is, what people are trying to do, and so on. On the level of an entire nation, though, that’s not the case.
And keep in mind that even on a skating rink people are going by certain rules. For one thing, they should be following the various local laws (they shouldn’t be engaged in things like murder, assault, rape, robbery, and so on). They’re following the rink’s rules, such as no playing curling right in the middle of all the skaters.
We need some predictable and understandable rules—like the rules you learn in kindergarten: don’t hit other people, don’t take their stuff and keep your promises
But then we need people to decide what those rules are, and to make sure that people will follow them. And predictable rules fall apart in unpredictable situations, or just situations where one individual person can’t really understand all that’s going on. After all, the author of this piece mentions kindergarten as being sort of an ideal. . .but how many kindergarten classes have no authority figure in charge? What do you think would happen if 300 million kindergarteners were told to all live together without supervision? The Lord of the Flies comes to mind. . .
but most of life is governed by spontaneous order. It regulates how we choose our jobs, hobbies, lovers, recreation and most of the best of our lives. It runs most of the economy.
Again, that’s all on a personal, individual level.
The Soviet Union taught us what happens if government tries to plan the economy: people starve.
No, it taught us what happens when government mismanages the economy (and everything else) by replacing science with Lenin. The American government has been planning the American economy for centuries. . .currently the US has so much food that farmers leave crops to rot in the field because it’s not worth harvesting them.
Also, the author is overlooking the little minor detail that the Soviet Union was started off with the very idea that the author is supporting. Funny how he overlooks that detail.
Something similar happens when I try to “govern” the skating rink (I shout orders with a bullhorn). Skaters hate it.
And how many of the skaters chose him as their leader? How many skaters acknowledged his authority to give orders? And did his orders have any relation to what people were actually trying to do?
I suppose a politician would say I failed at “leading” the rink because I’m not smart enough, I don’t know enough about skating, so we need to elect a more expert leader. So I get Olympic gold medalist Brian Boitano to take the bullhorn. He does no better than I.
Which shows that someone can only govern if they either have either the peoples’ mandate or else some means of enforcing their rule. Having a leader in a recreational ice rink is actually outside of the accepted rules and the accepted purpose of it all; the skaters are acting individually, without any sort of unified purpose and thus without any need to form more complex social structure. So of course nobody’s going to listen when some random guy wanders in and starts shouting at people to do whatever. On the other hand, if the people skating got together, decided that they wanted to do some sort of activity all working together, and chose one individual to direct them, then they probably would listen to that person’s orders and could very well accomplish what they’re trying to do better.
When everybody is just skating around as individuals, there is no need for directions. There’s nothing to direct. There is no specific group goal. Having a “leader” is extraneous.
If everybody is trying to do something like skate in a certain pattern where each person is forming part of some pattern, though, then there is need for directions. There is something there to direct. There is a specific group goal. So having a leader makes sense.
The moral: Intuition leads us to think that complex problems require centrally planned solutions, but political decision making is rarely the answer.
But the author here has been addressing only relatively simple problems, such as ice skating and individual decisions in life (yes, the latter can seem rather overwhelming to the individual, but on a wider scale they’re not much of anything). The author only looked at things that involve individual choices and decisions. And then the author jumps over to “complex problems” and simply states that the same methods used for individual actions will work for a society of 300 million. It doesn’t automatically work that way, though.
Besides which, the author is overlooking something. He was discussing, for example, how there is no need for centralised decision making in an individual’s minute-by-minute actions. But there is centralised authority in those actions: the individual is unilaterally making the decisions. The same goes for on the average recreational public ice rink: if the people on it are skating by themselves, then each one of them is unilaterally making all decisions for what he or she does. If they’re skating in pairs, then generally one of them is setting the pace. If it’s a parent with children, the parent is making decisions for the kids. In both personal life and on the ice rink, a centralised authority is often making rules and decisions. It just happens that that centralised authority had authority only over one person: himself. But it is still centralised authority with only one person in charge. The only difference between an individual and the most absolute dictatorship in history is the number of people under control. If anything, the individual is under more absolute control of a single person than has been the population of any nation. There is no dissent. The entire governed populace (all one person) works towards the common goal.
And “spontaneous order” won’t maintain highways, or keep the skies safe and orderly for airplanes, or provide disaster relief for areas hit by hurricanes and earthquakes, or provide for an adequate defence against invasion, or countless other things which we would not be happy to do without. Would you want to put all your money in a bank that isn’t insured by the FDIC? Or drive across a five-mile-long bridge that was built by whomever decided to build it and that wasn’t built to any particular standards? All of those things take planning and direction, they don’t happen spontaneously. The number of times people take their problems to civil court (or criminal court, for that matter) shows that “kindergarten rules” just won’t do in many occassions.
I’ve heard the ‘humans are naurally inclned to order’ thing before. Pure bull.
Humans may follow group direction, especially in cases like ice skating, where going *against* the flow actually presents a real chance of injury. However, human beings are selfish little bastards, and evntually, you’ll get someone who realizes it’s easier to get what they want by cheating and cutting corners. Add to that the desire for exerting dominance by leading the group, and you realize why such things only work for a short time, under certain circumstances. Ice skating rinks work. Communism doesn’t. Driving your car on the highway requires the same ‘spontaneous order’, yet you get people speeding and causing accidents left and right.
Ask yourself: What was the reason *he* was shouting the directions through a bullhorn?
I’ve heard the ‘humans are naurally inclned to order’ thing before. Pure bull.
Humans may follow group direction, especially in cases like ice skating, where going *against* the flow actually presents a real chance of injury. However, human beings are selfish little bastards, and evntually, you’ll get someone who realizes it’s easier to get what they want by cheating and cutting corners. Add to that the desire for exerting dominance by leading the group, and you realize why such things only work for a short time, under certain circumstances. Ice skating rinks work. Communism doesn’t. Driving your car on the highway requires the same ‘spontaneous order’, yet you get people speeding and causing accidents left and right.
Ask yourself: What was the reason *he* was shouting the directions through a bullhorn?
Yeah, it’s strange how people like this guy and Hayek (who named the whole “spontaneous order” idea) are so against Communism. They look at what most of the Communist countries became, which is basically totalitarian states, and point that out as the reason why there shouldn’t be anybody really governing things. But they’re looking at the results of Communism, when it’s no longer Communism. Communism is in part basically just what these people are advocating: no one person or group in charge, everybody just “naturally” does what needs to be done. Spontaneous order is one of the foundations of Communism. So those countries that they are pointing out as examples of what not to do are based on the very idea that they are supporting. And in each of those countries, actual Communism lasted about three seconds because it simply doesn’t work with human nature or large-scale social dynamics.
Spontaneous order only works so long as everybody goes along with it and knows what to do. Both of those conditions must be met. The more people you have in a group or the more complex the task, the less likely those conditions will be met, thus the less likely spontaneous order is to work.
Yes, an overly-intrusive and oppressive government is (usually) a bad thing. But a nation governed by self-governance is simply an unworkable thing. Human nature won’t let it last for any real length of time.
