Advice for my friends on the left. Worth every penny you paid for it.

[kirisutogomen]

If I were you, I'd restrain the urge to whip out the bullhorns and lead your comrades in an invigorating round of "YES WE DID". I'd hate to see you so soon forget the lesson of "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED"; you might want to think about the idea that maybe all that's happened is really the easiest, smallest step of the process, not the whole kit and additionally caboodle. Passing a law (overthrowing a government) is much much easier than actual reform (nation-building).

It's one of the most common political mistakes to think that passing a law is the solution to a problem. You really need to be a bit more careful about follow-through. Check to see if the law is doing what you thought it would. I especially suggest this because the just-signed law is in fact not going to do anything like what you think it's going to.

Comments

[shaggy-man.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you're arguing that because nothing ever turns out just the way one designs it to, one should never do anything. If you could correct me on that, perhaps we could go from there.

[treptoplax.livejournal.com]

I can't speak for psychohist, but... some problems are hard, and some are impossible - the universe is under no compulsion to accommodate us. Building a space rocket is a fine endeavor, but I wouldn't load a billion-dollar (or trillion dollar!) satellite into one until it that model has had a few successful launches - and perpetual motion machines never work at all.

We require environmental impact statements to pave a new parking lot while blithely ignoring second and third-order affects of vast social and economic engineering schemes... and the solution is always more of the same.

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

I'd certainly like to see a lot less government interference on economic issues. As treptoplax says, some problems can't actually be solved the way you think you'd like to solve them at first.

I'd also like to see solutions implemented incrementally. That way the departure from expectations is smaller and easier to correct.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

If I were to say, "It happens whenever the federal government passes laws that affect the economy: they write things that sound good, but end up working very differently than they think they will," it would be an empirical statement, not a Universal Truth.

It's entirely possible to do economic legislation well; we have a long and storied history of doing it badly. There things are hard, often very hard, but we have a lot of very smart people who think about this stuff a lot; if the experts were listened to, the laws would be better. But Congress is full of people who are either idiots or are acting like idiots.