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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: alanrs who wrote (486794)	5/12/2012 9:10:55 AM
From: skinowski	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793990

The article is about a wing of OWS who are mostly unemployed and underemployed traders and other financial types, who formed a group in order to... improve government regulation. They are trying to fight the man ("Da Man") through bigger and better government. Once, many years ago (where does the time fly?) I participated in trying to put together a large group of doctors, a "practice without walls", as we called it. In the course of many meetings and discussions, they ended up designing an extremely clever and super complex organization... they worked out all the details, all the bells and whistles. There was a lot of elegant thinking involved, but - as young and inexperienced as I was - I saw that this cow won't fly. I tried to get them to abandon the concept, and do something lucid and simple, but the leadership was pushing ahead. I walked away. They started the group, and it survived for a number of years, as they kept working out more and more conflicts and bugs... but eventually they broke up, and the venture ended in a flurry of mutual accusations and several lawsuits. IMO, the intellectual Occupiers described in the article are making a somewhat similar mistake -- they are investing a lot of work and brainpower, but probably in the wrong direction. A political system can only be sound if 90% of people with an IQ of 90 can understand it. Anything else will deteriorate into another series of mutual adjustments between two sets of smart people -- those hired by Da Man, and those working for politicians. America's founders designed a very simple system. Unfortunately, we are losing it in an ocean of complexity.