Adam Smith who wrote a book called the Wealth Of Nations said that when an individual adds to his wealth, the nation is better off because the extra wealth that is created by the individual is added to the wealth of the whole nation. Someone later echoed this sentiment when he said something to the effect that what was good for General Motors was good for America. And the Chinese government is now saying that it is glorious for the whole nation when the individuals in it seek to get rich.
Adam Smith explained how this works. He said that things tend to even out in a community because the activities carried out by the individuals in it spread out to the entire community as if an invisible hand was going around doing the good work. Like it or not, history has proved these ideas to be sound because the nations that adopted them prospered while those that rejected them lagged behind both economically and in a few other ways.
But what is now becoming apparent is that the invisible hand has a finger and that finger is giving us a collective pain in the ass. The new reality is that the hand which at first seemed to stroke us with loving care has migrated to the wrong places, and the finger that used to adorn it has transformed into a hard shaft. So, how did it all happen without notice?
It happened because a law whose existence was never envisaged by Adam Smith began to make itself felt. It is Murphy’s Law which says that if something can go wrong it will go wrong. And that dreaded law hit the otherwise good work of the invisible hand despite the existence of an oversight mechanism that was supposed to oversee things and make sure nothing of the sort ever happened.
The trouble with the invisible hand is that it is invisible thus no direct detection of the way it works is ever possible. Rather, the work is detected by the influence that the hand exerts on the surroundings. This situation has led to some serious consequences which translated into the financial crisis the World is now experiencing. To better visualize this situation, I make the following analogy with a well known mechanical phenomenon.
The systems of an airplane can have one or two weaknesses leading to one or two benign failures without crashing the plane. However, what may happen at times is that a number of small failures can occur, apparently all at the same time, and result in the crash of the plane. Such development was given the name catastrophic failure.
Sometimes, the technicians and engineers in charge of safety will dismiss the signs that point to a weakness here or a weakness there in the hope that a catastrophic failure will not occur. But if the signs are ignored for too long, the odds will pile up against the systems and the catastrophe will occur as predicted by Murphy’s Law.
What happens will not be an act of God but a cascade of failures in the sense that one small thing will give way causing another small thing to give way and so on in sequence. And it will be the cumulative effect of the small failures, seemingly all happening at the same time as if by coincidence, that will ultimately cause the crash.
Something analogous to this happened to the financial crisis that started in the USA and spread to the rest of the World. Many people knew of the deficiencies in the system and several commentators warned about them well in advance of the crash. But the people in charge were lulled into rejecting the warnings with the promise that the American economy was resilient enough to withstand the strain; or they were intimidated into keeping their mouth shut under the threat of being denounced as unpatriotic if they don’t.
It now looks like the whole thing was a conspiracy of silence of some sort. Those who orchestrated it were the ones who engineered the status quo and fought to maintain it. They were the Neocons and their allies, the organized friends of Israel who advanced the argument that America can and should go it alone in the World. They repeated the refrain that America was powerful enough to need no one but a solitary ally, that entity they call Israel which they believe was destined to achieve glory by the grace and the will of the Almighty.
Practicing the Yiddish culture of insulting everyone that disagrees with them, that group of people succeeded in isolating the government of America from the rest of the World and from the American people themselves. This done, they methodically went about monopolizing the powers of governance and those of the media as if no one but their kind counted for something in what was quickly becoming a godforsaken place.
And when they secured all the powers in their hand, they engaged in a few more hair-raising activities. They took control of the means of information and used that to demagogue the nations they wished to antagonize. In this way, they managed to drive a wedge between America and those countries, most of whom had no dispute with America or were considered a friend. And when the Neocons and their allies succeeded in this task, they started to beat the drums of war and thus got America to attack some of those countries.
All the while the world watched the unfolding drama and many people shook their heads in dismay. They did so because they understood the consequences that will flow from the adoption of such behavior on the World stage. They knew all too well that the marketplace functions properly only when everybody has the correct information, and what they were witnessing gave them a bad feeling about the state of business in America.
When the friends of Israel took control of the flow of information, the dismayed people of the World anticipated that the marketplace of ideas and finance in America was going to be distorted. A few commented that the result will be the improper functioning of both the political and financial systems in that country. In fact, this came to pass as illustrated by the following three examples which are but a sample of a much larger picture.
The first example was that of the late Senator cum oil analyst Howard Metzenbaum who blamed OPEC for every gyration in the price of oil. The result of this sort of talk by him and by his kind was that he and his fellow speculators made the money, the American people paid the high price for the oil, and the Arabs were blamed for the whole thing. And this charade unfolded even as the Arabs were taking measures deemed detrimental to their own interest in order to stabilize the price of oil.
The second example is that of the Senator from New York, Charles Schumer who demagogued an Arab company, Dubai Ports World, following its attempt to buy a number of ports in America thus causing an ordinary, innocent commercial deal to sink before it could see the light of day. Apparently the Senator had a change of heart later on with regard to the Arabs investing in America but that’s another discussion.
The third example is that of an operation they called Abscam which stood for Arab scam. This was a sting operation designed by the friends of Israel and implemented automatically and without a minimum of thought by the FBI. The objective was to observe and perhaps to catch the American lawmakers who would sell their soul to Arab money as some lawmakers were already doing to Jewish money in a practice that came to be known as JewScam.
As for the Abscam operation, it turned out that no Arab ever tried to approach a single American lawmaker to buy his or her soul. No visible or invisible hand stroked anyone appropriately or inappropriately, or for that matter gave someone a pain in the ass. The Arabs, you see, are conditioned by temperament and by culture to leave this disgusting and cowardly habit to the Jewish organizations and to their allies, the friends of that glorious entity they call Israel.
It is now becoming clear that the invisible hand of Adam Smith will work properly only when it is left alone. You can learn to manipulate it and make it do other things but you cannot control it completely because it will remain invisible to you as much as it is to everyone else. What the hand will not escape, however, is Murphy’s law which will strike when you try to manipulate the hand. And when you least expect it, the law will make the hand hurt you as much as you will those you have in your crosshairs.
Finally, you need not have a special vision to see that what did America in this time around was the fact that the finger on that invisible hand speaks English with a Yiddish accent. How do you say ouch in Yiddish?