"If This Goes On --"

"If This Goes On --"

I've found an entertaining site for speculative fiction fans like myself, called Paleofuture: The Future That Never Was." The host finds old stories and articles speculating about the future, then looks at what was easy to foresee and what snuck up on everyone. This entry caught my eye: it speculated that future governments would turn most issues into instant public referenda by publicizing the dispute and asking everyone to vote on it electronically at once. Somehow nothing like that seems to have happened. It amuses me to read, nevertheless, because the yearning behind the prediction is for something we already have in an important institution: the free market. The whole theory of the free market is that billions of individual decisions get made in real time every day, spread out to the individual consumers in the farthest corners of the nation and world. These decisions control the allocation of our scarce resources that have alternative uses, merely by setting prices that respond to supply and demand. It's inefficient, wasteful, and cold-blooded, and has only the advantage that it produces more widespread prosperity and avoids more misery than any other system ever tried.

Our government reflects the prevailing mindset of Americans, which is to pay lip service to the free market but not really to trust it very thoroughly. I'd be awfully surprised to see the government moving toward frequent plebiscites on any important issues if they could possibly avoid it. Robert Tracinski opines today on RealClearMarkets about how it can have happened that the current administration can have achieved an expense education without learning the first thing about how our economy works:

Consider Obama's background. He grew up among leftists, his childhood mentors were outright communists, and he then went off to academia, where he spent his formative years in an environment where business and profit-making are looked down upon as ugly, dirty, rapacious, immoral. Is it any mystery why he doesn't know about business or economics? Asking him to study the economics of the free market is like asking one of the old New England Puritans to thumb through a manual on sex education. Why immerse oneself in a subject that is so unseemly? Why make a study of how to be immoral?

Meanwhile, what I'm hoping for from the future is a better way to perform a certain exam that people of my age are all too familiar with. Preparation the day before involves drinking a very large quantity of a substance that tastes like melted jello infused with the flavor of old latex gloves, flavored with off-brand diet soda. I hope all your prayers and good thoughts will be with me as I await the results this afternoon.