Another Aspect of the Dynamic Climate

Most of the climate that affects our lives is not the natural climate, but the climate of society. Strategically, however, the same rules apply. Though this climate exists in the movement of ideas, emotions, and decisions of people, not in the movement of air, water, and energy, the social climate is as dynamic, uncontrollable, and unpredictable as the natural climate. Like the natural climate, it swings from one extreme to another. You see these swings most clearly in every free market. You cannot legislate this human climate any more than you can legislate the natural climate. People do what it is in their best interests to do on an individual, day to day basis. And you cannot predict the course of human creativity. Unlike most zero-sum, static thinking, strategy is based on the idea that people are inherently creative and we do not know what is possible. The human climate is powered by human creativity and intelligence just like the natural climate is powered by the sun. You cannot fight the ground or the climate. You must use the shape of the ground and the changes of climate instead of fighting them. For example, I am against the "war on drugs" because it attempts to fight the whole economic incentive. It is self-defeating by design. The better you are at catching drugs at the border, the more the prices go up and the more incentive there find ways to bring more drugs into the market. My solution is to make drug taking as unattractive a possible by turning drug dealing over to the government. The combination of government coercion, suppressing competition, and government inefficiency, will make drug user pay a heavy price, one way or another, for their addiction. Many government programs are well-intentioned but clearly doomed to fail. People insist upon them they want to believe in the fairy tale of government power. They will not even let these programs die after wasting millions of dollars and damaging millions of lives because they want to believe. This is the power of misplaced faith. The latest cause of those with misplaced faith is global warming. By this, I don't mean the "global warming" of measurable fact but "global warming" as a social cause that requires government regulation of everyone's freedoms. We can already see the clear failure of the Kyoto protocols but the need to believe doesn't ask about the nature of that failure, but instead points to it as proof that government needs to do more. The point aptly made here in this Washington Post column by Robert J. Samuelson regarding is the same as mine, that every such program is doomed to be a failure because what it seeks to control cannot be controlled. A hundred years from now, we will not be looking back wringing out hands about the fact that this generation didn't do a better job of regulating carbon dioxide emissions. After all, despite all our problems today, what problems do we look back a hundred years ago and say they could have foreseen and prevented? Not a one of them.