NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE INGENUITY OF COMPLETE FOOLS

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. - Douglas Adams

Lord, what fools these mortals be. - Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dream

Mark Calabria at The Corner on "Making Financial Markets Fool-Resistant":

The ultimate way to make bank safety “fool-resistant” is to increase market discipline. One reason that allowing failure is such an important attribute of markets is that it helps eliminate “fools” from positions of responsibility. Many of the fools who thought they could bet their companies on ever-increasing house prices are not out of work.

Sadly, we are still stuck with many of the same failed regulators. The Dodd bill also fails in this regard: Instead of punishing agencies like the SEC or the Fed, Dodd expands their power, rewarding “foolishness.”

The problem, it seems to me, is that by its very nature, democracy must suffer fools [relatively] gladly; particularly those fools who happen to be elected by an imperfect populace.

Human nature is what it is--oftimes extremely foolish. There is no way to "foolproof" the markets and take away this reality. One of the nice things, though, about capitalism is that, unlike socialism or communism etc, it does not have to change human nature in order to work, and thus, it is fairly fool-resistant, compared to those economic systems that (as Calabria notes) actually reward foolish behavior, or even encourage it.

When the markets are allowed to work, without the continuous interference of fools, then those who are not foolish are rewarded, while those who are must take their lumps. Reality is frequently an ungentle teacher, but if you are capable of learning from it, the average human foolishness quotient will diminish under its tutelage.

When it comes to understanding human nature, the left and their do-gooder utopian fantasies get failing marksMarx. They have this persistent fantasy that human nature is 'perfectable'; and that by some "magical" means, i.e., by the implementation of their 'perfect' ideology, they will be able to make people behave in some 'perfect' fashion.

Sadly, such delusional hallucinations about human nature always end in misery, suffering and even death for large numbers of us imperfect homo sapiens . No matter how many times this happens, the die-hard Marxists, communists, socialists and all their variants and heirs keep trying force humans into some "ideal" state.

In the annals of human foolishness, the left's foolishness is beyond parody, but their ingenuity should never be underestimated.