What Could Go Wrong?

right here in River City

I’m in Lisbon, Portugal, about to go to the National Tile Museum. On the flight here, after an hour of northern lights, I was privileged to view, from the Lufthanza A340 jet, what seemed like half the North Sea given over to offshore wind farms. What could go wrong?

Meanwhile, it turns out that the Bidenoids have maybe not quite solved the SVB problem, as the stock market took a dive yesterday. Apparently it is all the fault of the Trump administration backing off on the post-2008 Dodd-Frank credit market regulatory reforms. What could go wrong?

Then there’s the stupidity at Stanford Law School where the Assistant Dean and the DEI girlie are making a complete mess of the shoutdown of Appeals Court judge Stuart Kyle Duncan. Isn’t it odd that both Stanford officials are women? What could go wrong?

Then there’s a piece of the continuing saga of California’s AB5 attack on the gig economy. What could go wrong?

And San Francisco’s Reparations fiasco. And the Memphis, Tennessee, police killing of a black motorist: who could have foreseen that the mostly peaceful protests and police defunding could lead to underqualified, undertrained police scumbags beating up a suspect?

I mean? Who could have foreseen all this? It is utterly unexpected! Here we have the best and the brightest and the most evolved and the wisest and the wokest ruling class in history running the country and everything is going wrong! How come?

Earth to liberals: You Did It! Just about all the market and cultural interventions you have proudly legislated and regulated and administered over the past century are stupid interventions that Make Things Worse, and do not, cannot, protect against stupid people doing stupid things.

Example: the SVB guys, apparently, had recently bought a bunch of long-term Treasuries. But when short-term interest rates rise, then the long-term bonds go down in price. You mean your financial risk experts didn’t foresee that? This has nothing to do with regulators. This has to do with corporate morons not knowing their jobs.

Example: the ladies at the Stanford Law School allowing the disruption of Judge Duncan’s presentation by “activists.” If you ladies don’t understand that free speech is final and that “activists” need to learn that at their first lesson on the first day in grad school, then you know so little about your job that you should resign before you create irreparable damage at the University of Stanford.

My basic line is that human society, composed not least of the political, the religious, the cultural, the economic, the social, the sexual, the familial — to say nothing of the underlying physical, chemical, and biological — is far more complex than any of us can possibly understand.

As an example, I am thinking of the daffodils and tulips presently shooting up all over the Northern Hemisphere. Does anyone really know how that works? Does any human know how to legislate and regulate and police spring flower growth and bloom-ology?

Whatabout the family behind us in the plane from Frankfurt to Lissabon (that’s German for Lisbon)? With the baby conked out on the father’s lap, and the four-year-old girl excitedly looking out the window, and the exhausted mother in the middle. What do we really understand about human growth and childhood and parenting?

What I want us to learn about the current crisis is simply this. Stop thinking and acting, liberals, as if you know the answer to the question of “life, the universe, everything.” Most likely, fifty or a hundred years from now, experts will agree that the century of the welfare state was an example of the most foolish in charge of the most gullible in human history, and that just about everything that the best and brightest believed and legislated and imposed from on high Made Things Worse.

I think that the most important thing for any educated person to understand in the Spring of 2023 is that we humans know almost nothing about anything. And before we start on any top-down ordering-around we should step back and think: “what do we really understand about all this?” or this: “Who are we that we should tell our fellow humans what to think and how to live?”

If you ask me, things are going to get worse before they get better around here. So the few people with an open mind and a smidgeon of humility are going to go for a premium in the months to come.