Friday 3 October 2008

Pic of the day: Like Kana from Minami-ke Okawari, I can sometimes see the immediate future. This time it is pork!

Pork-filled bailout bill

I should probably comment on this, since it's one for the history books. The so-called "bailout bill" was passed. Now, that's a name about as objective as "death tax", but it already seems like this may be how history writes it, at least in the near future. And I am not sure there is a far future that we can even comprehend. The singularity is coming - the end of the current order of things - but it is still a ways off. We still have to make the current system work until then. And that's what is making this so hard. The amplitude of everything is increasing as more and more of the world is synchronized. We are going to see this more clearly over the next few weeks.

There is nothing I can do about it, of course. I'm just some guy. What I prefer to call myself is "conscientious observer". I observe, sometimes as things happen, sometimes after they happen, sometimes before. For instance, in my LiveJournal (which actually is current, more or less, but very different from this) I wrote: Obviously, this is a great day for those who bought up shares at the bottom. Not that they won't hit bottom again, but in the meantime the rich will have grown that much richer by selling them on top of the relief jubilation. It is actually a bit baffling that there are so many people who would react with a frenzy of buying, sending the stock exchange up at dizzying speed - only to send it even further down a few days later. Do they really have that much money to get rid of?

But today, about the bill. Do you think it was passed to protect the finance institutions on Wall Street? There was a 3-page draft from the administration to that effect. It was rejected out of hand. Then the various factions worked out a 100-page draft that included various other economic odds and ends vaguely related to the financial crisis, most famously provisions to bail out homeowners stuck with a bad mortgage too. Why should the rich have all the good money? Actually, that draft failed too, albeit with a fairly narrow margin. This is a 300-page draft, and it is studded with pork. That is to say, various goodies for the constituencies where the representatives are heading home when Congress now takes a break. I think the most famous is the paragraph about wooden toy arrows. But there is something for a lot of people in there. Here, have a link, for as long as it lasts.

The congressmen are not interested in saving the world. They are not even interested in saving the USA. They are interested in being re-elected from their own little constituency. And I am not at all sure this is a bad thing. I believe Socrates is quoted approximately like this: "If people truly had the capacity to do evil, then they would also have the capacity to do good." The opposite is of course also true. As long as our politicians are this fractured and nearsighted (and yes, they are like that here in Norway too) then they won't be able to do any breathtaking, spectacular harm either. Although they will certainly keep working on it, one little stupidity at a time. The great thing about democracy is that so many of the stupidities oppose each other and cancel each other out. That's why democracy is said (by Winston Churchill, I believe) to be "the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried."

The so-called "bailout bill" is probably not going to make much difference. But the fact that it eventually was passed, even studded hundreds of pages of pork, will do some good. It will help calm the panic for a little while. There will be more panic later, and more easing of it. This is a truly interesting time to live. May we all live in interesting times indeed.