Grow Up.

I never fail to be blown away by unjustified arrogance. I watched a bunch of media pundits today on TV give John McCain a hard time because he admitted that he didn't understand the economy. They all laughed at him as if they did. It's that same schadenfreude that folks exhibited when then candidate Bush didn't know the name of the President of Pakistan. Like anybody else at that time knew.

So, let me say this. I'm an educated man. I've been lucky to attend LSE's Executive courses on Macro and micro economics. I've actually read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations from cover to cover and I'm not ashamed to admit that I don't think I understood it fully. I've got a lot a very smart friends who deal with major economics issues everyday and I spend most of my time trying to understand complex philosophical issues. What's really clear to me is that nobody really understands the economy. It's all a guess and it's all after the fact.

What do I mean by that? It's like fighting. I've been studying fighting for 31 years of my life. I've trained with the very best in the world. I've put together hand-to-hand programs from various forward leaning military units. Safe to say, I know quite a bit about fighting. But when it comes right down to it, I cannot predict how a fight will unfold nor do I have anything wise to say about how all fights will happen. Granted, once I see a person move, I can make some pretty accurate predictions of how he's going to fight but before he moves and engages me, I simply have no idea. And the thing about fighting is this, it doesn't matter how good you are, somebody can always have your number. Knowledge is not a guarantee of victory, though it can stack the deck in your favor.

Fact is, once you engage in a a fight, you simply don't know what going to happen. You cannot account for al the variables. It's beginning to be my impression that the economy is like that. Economists have lots of smart stuff to say after an event. It's meant to make them look smart. I, too, can dissect a fight after it happens in meticulous details and impress you with my perspicacity. What nobody wants to admit is that this 'Monday morning quarterbacking' is relatively useless in predicting the future.

Let me be clear here. The surest way to lose a fight is to have a plan you cannot veer from. There's a saying in the military; No plan survives first contact. The plan isn't important but absolutely nothing is more important than the act of planning. If you plan properly, you force yourself to look at your strengths and weakness and develop strong fundamentals. That allows you to enter a fight in a proper mind state reacting to each thing that comes up. In a streetfight, this is a relatively short span of time. In a longer sanctioned fight, it allows you to focus on strategy and tactics instead of basic responses.

Economically, we've forgotten fundamentals. We expect some grand strategy to allow us to grow unfettered and without consequence. That's ultimately the fatal flaw of our Country. We've forgotten consequences. We want to save everybody from having to deal with them. I'm speaking specifically of the sub-prime mess. Why should we use tax payers dollars to bail out people who foolishly entered into agreements they could not live up to? If we bail them out, how will they learn the lesson? Treating everybody like children will be our downfall. Children can't compete in a world of adults.