Everyone Has a Plan Until they Get Hit
Megan McArdle, reporting from an annual gabfest in Aspen:
The questions for [Austan] Goolsbee are much more hostile than they were last year. I don’t know whether to attribute this to the economy, or the fact that the disadvantages of Obama’s policies are now apparent. All policies sound better when they’re in white paper, and Obama’s rhetorical deftness made it particularly easy to make his proposals sound like all things to all people. Now deficits have to be paid for, climate change bills turn out to lack teeth for anyone except the Chinese, health care gets scored by the CBO rather than optimistic campaign members.
Quite so. Last year, Goolsbee was a smart outsider, pointing to deficiencies in the extant Bush administration’s policy outcomes. This year, he’s an insider presiding over a giant mess. While one aspires to the latter position, the former is more comfortable.
The post’s title, of course, refers to a quotation from the philosopher Michael Gerard Tyson. (Reported variants include, “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”) It may or may not have been inspired by of Helmuth von Moltke’s dictum “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
It doesn’t surprise me one bit. The world is always full of young toughs who brag about their bravado until the s— hits the fan. I can remember thinking I had all the answers too. Nothing like the real world to dissolve hubris.
Goolsbee has the answers as he is in on the plan, however if he revealed it in public he would be torn limb from limb by angry mobs. Read Alinsky. Obama is following the blueprint.
I don’t believe it’s quite as sinister as ZRIII suggests nor quite as you suggest, either, James.
I think that technocrats uniformly underestimate systemic inertia. They overestimate their own freedom of action and how much they can actually change things without realizing the amount of time that it will take or the amount of opposition they’ll encounter.
Or as I learned it as a young officer, everyone can bring the ship alongside the pier perfectly, when standing beneath the bridge wing. But move one deck up and it all gets so much more complicated. I blame the altitude.
I suspect Goolsbee to be just recently figuring out that what he was selling a few years ago has more in the way of holes in it, than he supposed. I also suspect some of the hostility is reaction to people at the conference who have also started to figure this out and are pressing the poor sot on the matter.
Not unlike Obama and the war on terror, he’s being forced by the reality of the situation to an understanding that his original assessment is a pail of dung, and he’s having problems selling stuff that smells quite so bad.
IN short, the plan has met reality, and the result is less than encouraging.
Wow… reality. What a concept!
Ya he is….
Anyone know why they took out this brilliant point?
IMRTHO this is not eve the worst of it. The bigger problem is that the government is bought and paid for by industry groups and their army of lobbyist. The solutions are not really difficult to envision the problem is that they must pass muster or even implement relative to the push back you get from those who stand to lose. and whether we are talking about the banks, the health care industry, or agribusiness they all have the cash to make sure that nothing happens that will threaten their ability to increase their share of the pie.
What I fail to understand is why anyone defends a system that has explicitly legalized bribery and influence peddling under the moronic rubric of money = speech.
A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison, letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822