How do we elect such poor decision-makers to office? As anyone who studies our warrior's rules at this site knows, politicians are our most fertile source of examples of defective strategy. This fact raises the question: how do these people get elected to office in the first place?

Strategy teaches that creating conflict is too costly to make long-term strategic success possible ([node:content/313-conflict-cost link]). We can see the dimensions of this problem in battle created in the current health care bill (aka Obamacare). If the health care bill "wins" this battle, the most likely losers in the next election are those supporting it. In this battle, we can see all the distorting aspects of conflict:

Creating more opposition (See David Harsanyi in Denver Post)

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." The Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

“[W]ith essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the important ones.” F.A. Hayek said, accepting the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics