Lost in the Details

I find that people, generally when they disagree with me but have no real argument, will tell me I’m “over-simplifying” everything. For example, if you and I were to get into an argument about socialism, the first question I’ll ask you is “What percentage of the economy do you think the government should be in control of?” You can tell me that you’d like them to provide housing for poor people, or loans for kids to go to school, or regulate monopolies. That’s all fine and dandy, but you really should have an answer to my question - it’s a pretty simple question!

See, something you learn in physics is to simplify a problem without losing sight of the details you want. Better said – you simplify things while being fully aware of the details you’re leaving out, and knowing that the solution to this simplified version of a complex problem doesn’t tell you complex details about the original.

Does anyone remember the video from middle school science, where they put a sealed plastic box on a scale? Inside the box, all kind of shit goes down – exploding fireworks, batteries turning fans, confetti flying around, waterfalls turning waterwheels, wind-up penguins waddling about. The scale never changes – nothing went in and out of the box. The logical continuation of this is that if I put something that weighs 1 lb in the box, the weight of the box will go up by 1 lb – no more, no less.

It is incredible how powerful these laws of conservation are! Someone can try and tell you what’s going on inside that box, but at every single moment, the amount of stuff in that box has to remain the same. If in reading their interpretation of the events within said box, and the mass of the box changes, they are flat-out-wrong. I don’t need to tell them what specific detail makes it wrong, or where exactly the calculations went astray. The interpretation is absolutely meaningless.

Politics is about spending money. Economics are obviously about money. Social issues in politics are about spending money – because social issues require the government to spend money to enforce them. We say marijuana is illegal – that law is only as good as the amount of tax dollars dumped into enforcing it.

News for you blossoming politicians out there – money follows conservation laws. The question “who’s paying for it” is one that does need to be answered. And these “painful” budget cuts that cities, states, governments are going through?

Every single dollar cut from that budget is a dollar someone else doesn’t have to pay. Every dollar you spend today on deficit is a dollar, plus interest, you can’t spend later.

It’s a zero sum game, folks. You do it now, or you do it later. Take a look at Spain, Greece, or England if you want to see what later looks like (Do you think that the British government *wanted* to stop paying for higher education??) I know I’ve avoided every single detail of what gets cut – we have thousands of people employed to take care of the details. I don’t need to understand the details to realize that the end result of the debt is worse than cutting any program –in the end, the debt makes the cuts anyway.


Note: If you read this and have developed a political opinion of me, you're entirely misplaced, because there aren't any political opinions in here - just reality. If you'd like to discuss politics, we can start with your answer to the question I pose in the first paragraph.