Just tell me the boundaries, but don’t dictate where I go within those boundaries.

Protect the least of us from injustice at the hands of the powerful. Otherwise, the government should err on staying out of the game.

Nor am I advocating unilateral control on the part of a dictator.

I guess that in this strained analogy, I’m an advocate for the automobile – let everyone make their own microdecisions but obey the rules of the road.

Student pilots make this mistake all the time. The airplane starts to roll to the left, but they’re slow in sensing it, and slow to react to it, and consequently yank the stick to the right to bring it back to straight and level quickly. Except they crank too hard and too long, and the airplane goes past level and starts rolling to the right. Being slow to figure that out, when they do, they yank back to the left and start one more cycle, getting more out of control each time.

A skilled pilot will have learned to sense – even anticipate motion, and make little corrections all the time. They don’t get too far out of whack, and therefore don’t need big control inputs (the same kind of thing happens on ships by the way – I can tell you about a rookie helmsman on my Navy destroyer who made a whole bunch of folks seasick with his overcorrections).

That’s the way our economy has been run for a lot of years, by Dems and the GOP alike. Everyone wants to grab the wheel and make great big corrections, and they end up being late and overcorrecting. It’s the magnitude of the pendulum swings that kill us…

I think it works a lot better if the government stays out of the way as much as possible, letting the millions of economic enitities make micro-decisions that gradually cause the economy to evolve, just like happens in nature. That’s not to say government doesn’t have a role: it need to watch out for corruption and perversion. Monopolies aren’t good. Criminal behavior needs to be prosecuted.

But the second to last – I agree 100%. I think the stimulus is completely wrong-headed and frankly, is a great indication of just how it is that the mortgage lending crisis was allowed to happen – it was pushed to happen because of short-term gains that for only a very few will be longterm.

When you fool with nature, unexpected things happen. Nature is so complex and interwoven that it is all but impossible to predict how each organism will react to a change in environment (because the ants and the birds and the bears don’t sit down an strategize what to do next – they just survive or not).

There’s a town nearby called Croton where a company called Buckeye Eggs built an incredibly massive complex of egg farms – tens of millions of chickens. It didn’t take long for the chicken manure to start fouling streams and making the area nearly unbearable. And it was apparently irresistable to house flies. People would hang up a strip of flypaper in their kitchen and have it completely covered by day’s end.

So Buckeye Egg imported these little beetles that would eat fly eggs. Then people started waking up with beetles in their beds. Buckeye Egg has been shut down, but the flies and beetles remain.

Same kind of thing with this economic stimulus package. There was a very good essay in Time a week or so ago that said if we put $150 billion in the hands of consumers, it will just end up in Asia, because that’s where most of our consumer goods come from. I agree.

If we want to stimulate OUR economy, we have create jobs here, just like happened with the WPA, and later with Reagan’s military buildup. I’m sure all of us would appreciate the money getting spent on fixing all the potholes on the freeways in Ohio – although $150 billion may not be enough.

I’ve always found it interesting that folks who are economic liberals tend to support the notion of natural evolution, but want to control the economy like a god…