I think the foundational element of proper economics, from which all else flows, is the insight that life is not linear. Simply because you have a vision of the world, and a plan to change it, does not mean that any and all action based upon these factors will work to achieve your aims.
For example, some people assume that because some people set as their aim getting rich, that they necessarily achieve it. In point of fact, business is littered with failures, and many eventual successes–the “rich”– have several business and even personal bankruptcies in their past. McDonalds nearly foundered on a number of occasions.
Effective action always depends on accurate understandings, and the simple fact is that life is not always linear, and that sometimes the more profound realities have to be inferred from experience, and not deduced accurately a priori, as many academics assume they can do.
Hayek made this distinction as action to and for. What you are actually accomplishing is your “action to”, and what you think you are doing is “action for”.
No matter what you may think of the law of gravity, it will not stop because you don’t like it. No matter what you think of the laws of economics, they will operate as they operate.
Yes, it is likely possible to reduce human beings to robotic beings in order to make human social orders linear, but what is the point of that? Leftism of this sort–and in the final analysis there is no other sort–is an anti-humanism: a committment to the mechanisation of humanity, and the death of unmanageable spontaneity.
Lao Tzu “uncarved block”, as I point out in my Goodness Sutra, might more accurately be translated “uncut forest”, where forests are random, but still orderly, on a chaotic pattern.
Leftism causes poverty. It causes injustice. It supports racism, in the form of reduced expectations. These points are inescapable.
As much as our President may want to pout, his policies are hurting the very people he claims he cares about. He doesn’t care: his every meal is catered, and he sleeps in perhaps the most secure home on the planet.