Precisely because the planning and “muddling through” done by individuals pursuing their own ends in competitive markets are subject to ceaseless, detailed feed-back from other individuals pursuing their own ends – and because no individual plan in decentralized markets requires its maker to know the goo-gah-gillions of details that a central planner must know in order to succeed – it was perfectly consistent of Hayek to predict the failure of central plans made by officials who are oblivious to the impossibility of gathering and processing all the knowledge that must be gathered and processed centrally for central plans to work.

History’s revolutions and upheavals — whether the Nika rioting in Constantinople, the periodic uprising of the turba in Rome, the French upheavals, or the Bolshevik Revolution — are rarely fueled by the starving and despised, but by the subsidized and frustrated, who either see their umbilical cord threatened, or their comfort and subsidies static rather than expansive — or their own condition surpassed by that of an envied kulak class. Perceived relative inequality rather than absolute poverty is the engine of revolution. These are strange and dangerous times. An insolvent federal government, an exporting China and India, and an almost complete indifference to federal immigration, tax, and regulatory laws have all combined to create a well-entitled but increasingly angry population, one “empowered” and made more, not less, bitter by the last two years of governance in Washington.

As labor unions become increasingly marginalized, they have gotten radical to the point of parody. It seems like a good way to ensure their continuing irrelevance and likely extinction.

Times change. People say one thing when they are candidates for public office, quite another as officeholders with responsibility of governance. Obama as president naturally does not wish to be treated in the manner in which he once treated President Bush. Conservatives might resent Obama’s prior demagoguery at a critical period in our national security, as much as they are relieved that he seems to have grown up and repudiated it.

Uncle Sam’s willingness to deploy brute force to prevent the movement of industries to the lower-cost American south isn’t new. The most notorious instance of this nasty habit occurred in 1938 when, to strip away the cost advantage enjoyed by their rivals in lower-wage Georgia and the Carolinas, owners of textile mills in New England successfully lobbied Congress and FDR to enact America’s first national minimum-wage statute. Then as now, Uncle Sam – despite all his blah, blah, blah about ‘justice’ and being on the side of ‘working families’ – kept the wages of higher-paid Americans artificially high by keeping the wages of lower-paid Americans artificially low.

In many states with tight budgets, educational and other programs for children are being cut even as budgets for the elderly continue to increase. This is not a new political phenomenon or one that is hard to explain. The NY Times is reporting that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s new budget proposal will eliminate over 6,000 teaching jobs through layoffs and attrition. The Times goes on to say (apparently without any sense of irony), “But all of the news will not be bleak. The Bloomberg administration said that it would open 10 new senior centers, each serving 250 to 300 people. One of the centers will cater to the visually impaired, while another will be designed to serve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered older people.”

Infomercials are the closest phenomenon that the private-sector offers to politics. Fraudulent clowns, skilled at lying, promise gullible audiences something for nothing. The difference, of course – and it makes all the difference – is that no one is forced to buy (either figuratively or literally) whatever it is the infomercial clowns are selling. And those of us who don’t buy these clowns’ offerings aren’t forced nevertheless to suffer the consequences of the fact that large numbers of our fellow citizens do consistently, even eagerly, fall for the idiotic claims and promises and assurances offered by these greedy imposters posing as our friends.

What has been lost in the monthly data has been the structural changes in the US labor market — entire industries have vanished from these shores, and what has replaced them are leaner, technological more sophisticated industries that have lower labor requirements than the industries they replace. Adapting to that reality — rather than merely throwing money at the issue — seems to be a sophisticated, intelligent response beyond the capability of American policy makers. The painful reality that we have yet to face head on is that we have a lumpy uneven jobs recovery for specific, identifiable reasons. Higher educated, technically skilled workers remain in high demand; manual laborers have seen demand fall and wages follow. The policy making apparatus of the United States seems to consistently misunderstand the economic problems. Is it any wonder that our responses are misguided and inadequate?

The most successful organizing principle the world has ever known is a simple guarantee that we can buy and do things that have no point greater than the satisfaction of our own happiness.