"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Instinctive Blunders: Job Protection and Redistribution
"Man has some instinctive reactions to events that shake one's belief in genetically selected behaviour being favourable for the survival of the species. When caught by a storm in open country, his instinct is to seek cover under a tree, which is precisely the thing he must not do if he is weighing one outcome against the chance of a much worse one. Would he rather get wet or be struck by lightning? Experience over countless millennia should have taught him the way lightning mostly strikes, but apparently his instincts have not learnt the lesson. Likewise, when he is pushed, man's reaction is to push back. Though his best defence would be to pull the pusher on and use his very momentum to bring about his downfall. To say man learns this by taking judo lessons, if he learns it at all, is only part of the answer. Perhaps genetic selection of the behaviour best for survival should have taught him over countless millennia to use judo to defend himself. While the individual's instincts seem to lead him to blunder some of the time, government's "instincts" lead it to blunders much of the time. One very grave blunder it never avoids—a blunder denounced in this column more than once over the past few years—is to tighten the labour code and pile on ever more draconian job protection measures when unemployment is high and looks like staying high."
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