Stanley Motts: This is Nothing!

As Dustin Hoffman uttered those words continuously during one catastrophe after another as they tried to Wag the Dog, so too the economy’s current unpleasantness is nothing compared with the more threatening peril of the 20th Century: Communism.

You’d think that something that was planned and studied would work better than something that is the poster child of chaos theory, capitalism in a free market economy, but that was not the case. Planned economies could not keep up no matter how much they tried to spin it. All those Orwellian movies of happy people marching and working happily along just didn’t work. The capitalist economies provide a higher standard of living to the masses that those masses in planned economies could only watch and wonder – and envy.

However, we should have told those masses longing to be free the flipside of freedom, the freedom to fail, or at least stumble badly. There can be no boom without bust. Planned economies remove the busts, but they removed the booms, also.

It’s what you make in the booms that more than offsets what you lose in the busts. To capitalists it’s the interest, profit, commission, vig, swag or whatever that makes it all worthwhile, and the freedom to pursue it, that no amount of centralized planning could ever keep up.

The planned economites look down the collective noses at this as plunder or booty and exploitation of the working class, but the free-market economites laugh and scoff as to say the working class is doing fine looking after itself, thank you very much.

Hoffman’s Stanley always knew his system would work, trivial problems not withstanding, and an economy that recently defeated an enemy that planned its demise will rise again as the sun rises in the east. And it will be a warmer day than when last it set – to wring out this analogy during this time of economization.