Yuval Levin explains why they’re implausible:
…no one around here, in either party and on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, has nearly the information, ability, or competence to pull off any kind of complex four-steps-ahead type maneuver, and the system works in a way that makes it pretty much impossible to seriously try. Most of the time, people are barely managing to keep their heads above water amidst the rush of events and to respond to the latest unexpected and ridiculous screwup.
I’ll always remember riding into work on the train day after day when I was a (very) junior staffer in Newt Gingrich’s Speaker’s Office in 1998 and reading in the paper about how the Republican leadership in Congress was setting traps for Bill Clinton and playing some ingenious chess game with the impeachment process, and then arriving at work and finding that no one had any idea how things had gotten where they had or what would happen next. It was much the same working in the White House: All the various conspiracy theories (good and bad) were utterly laughable. Governing is terribly complicated and the people doing it, while often very intelligent, could never hope to master anything close to the command of contingency necessary to carry off any kind of conspiracy. They often can’t even manage to meet their actual responsibilities adequately in the face of the indescribably intense entropy of government. (That’s, by the way, one more reason why they should not be given trillions of dollars to throw around).
This applies to space policy as well. And it’s particularly hard to get good policy in such an environment when it isn’t even perceived to be politically important. It also reminds me of a story that the late and deeply lamented Tom Rogers told me, from when he was working for the Johnson administration, and came to the realization that in Washington, no one is in charge, really. Some people have lofty titles, and big offices, and issue orders, and occasionally they’re followed, but mostly, as Yuval notes, it’s a highly entropic process, a sticky mess of friction and confusion. It’s the nature of a democracy, and please spare us from a strong man who will cut through it, because he’s likely to end up slicing vital things.
Governments can’t even manage a 5-year plan; why should we expect them to be capable of JUST AS PLANNED?
There’s also the old cliche that the security of a secret is inversely related to the square of the number of people who know it. During a full-out war in which the entire government, military, and population are morally committed, you can find exceptions to this… but when factions exist left and right, I’d suggest using the cube of the number of people who know it.
That’s one of my counter arguments to the Moon landing hoax theories. We barely kept the Glomar Explorer matter a secret, long enough to do anything, yet one has to believe that many times as many people could keep their part in faked Moon landings a secret for this long. (Even from the KGB, for whom exposing it would be the greatest propoganda coup of all time, yet the Soviets never even hinted that they had doubts).
You can say there are vast conspiracies.
You can say government is incompetent.
But you can’t have both.
Never assume conspiracy when stupidity will suffice
This applies to tasks like “fixing” the economy even more, since an economy with 300 million moving parts is far more complex than even the most amazing stupendous fiendish super plot.
When a politician tells you he (1) understands why the stock market, housing market, joblessness, et cetera does what it does, and (2) he knows how to change it without doing any unintended damage, he’s asking you to believe the most whomping huge insane conspirazoid theory there is.
The concept goes deeper than that. The statist mindset is a a shared form of social engineering madness based on bad engineering.
How can you solve a system that complex with such low CPU power (human brain) and such narrow communication channels? The answer is you can’t, so you use simplified algorithms and try to sell them to as many people as possible. The successful algorithms are those that get you elected, which unfortunately is responsible for the present non adiabatic mess.
“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
K, I surmise that collectivism is actually a pathological excess of a feature of normal human reasoning, something in the way that OCD is a pathological excess of a normal human behaviour (cleanliness), or paranoia is a pathological excess of normal caution.
See, what’s a little odd, sometimes, about the way people approach difficulties is that they often double down on bad bets, like addicted gamblers. I dabble in real estate, lose some money — and then decide that the solution is to go deeper into real estate, double my bet, really clean up. I discipline my kids, they rebel — and I decide the solution is to get really tough. And so on.
The way I put it, it sounds illogical, but it isn’t always. Sometimes early setbacks are just that; sometimes the right thing to do is to commit yoruself to your own personal “surge” and come out the other side victorious. It’s very hard to know in advance. So a certain tendency to double down on bad gambles makes sense.
Now suppose we feel, individually, and as heads of families, firms, and other small local organizations, that things are spinning out of our control, that we are unable to earn a profit, keep our valuable employees and stay ahead of our customers, rear our children to be proud and honest citizens, doing things we respect and understand. What then? Strangely enough, a certain double down on bad gamble mindset suggests we band together and attempt even greater control of what we understand even less. If we can’t govern our families and firms successfully — why, the solution might be to attempt to govern the entire nation at once! Maybe what doesn’t work for 3 or 300 will work for 300 million!
Sounds like lunacy, and I think it is. But there’s a strange kernel of normal — even adaptive — human behaviour lurking in it.