From One Wild Animal to Another

I've been down with a summer cold. Well, not literally down--I'm still doing the stuff I need to do--but I haven't felt like doing much that I don't have to do, including blogging. Maybe I'll get something of my own posted later today. In the meantime, I recommend this column by Lee Cary at American Thinker. It's a review of a book that has caught the attention of the White House, a book which analyzes the psychology of human economic behavior, describing people as animals that are driven by emotion rather than reason and the government as essentially a zookeeper whose job it is to keep the animals from running wild. According to the authors, capitalism doesn't work because people not only buy things that they need but also things that they think they need but really don't (silly, stupid people). That's where the government comes in. From the book: "Such a world of animal spirits give the government an opportunity to step in. Its role is to set the conditions in which our animal spirits can be harnessed creatively to serve the greater good. Government must set the rules of the game . . . . Indeed if we thought that people were totally rational, and that they acted almost entirely out of economic motives, we too would believe that government should play little role in the regulation of financial markets, and perhaps even in determining the level of aggregate demand."

What the authors seem to be missing here is that government is made up of people, people who are just as irrational--and sinful--as the rest of us. What makes them think those people will do any better than we will ourselves? They're not even making decisions about their own money, but that of others. Oh yes, I forgot: the government pigs are smarter than the rest of us. Welcome to Obama Farm--or would that be Obama Zoo?