Archive for the ‘forest’ tag
Forest for the trees
For decades, the US Forest Service inadvertently screwed up the nation’s forests. It wasn’t out of malice or greed, just well-intentioned idiocy.
If you’re going to manage a wildlife area, there are times you let nature take its course. Lightning strikes cause small forest fires that clear away the underbrush and create fertile ground for regrowth. If you are overzealous in preventing fires, you create conditions that allow a small fire to get way out of control.
We do controlled burns these days for that very reason, to keep a small fire from becoming everyone else’s problem. On a small scale, destruction is actually good.
Why is it the well-intentioned people in our federal government can’t leave well-enough alone with the economy? A little loss is a good thing, when it weeds out the bad or otherwise intractable. It is healthy to start over from time to time, and it’s much better for all the creatures living in that environment if only small sections get burned out at once.
Our recent economic/financial collapse has no single cause, but rather a number of contributing and enabling factors. I have a pet theory that the popularization of 401-K plans has meant a great deal of wealth for people who never would have been part of the “investing class,” but came with an Unintended Consequence: the amount of money pumped into investment circles was not matched by a proportional degree of oversight. When you own just a few shares each of 200 different companies, you’re not likely to investigate the balance sheets of any of them.
The main enabler, though, is the government. Politicians love softening the blow to the average family, and boy do we sure love to avoid discomfort. Rather than take our lumps with some bad economic news, we instead allow our representatives to patch over this ‘bubble’ with something that inevitably becomes the next bubble.
Let the bubbles break! Now we’re stuck with three or four bubbles worth of correction, and its no wonder that so many people are out of work. Yet, instead of leaving well enough alone, we’re patching yet another bubble by practicing Stimulus.
Maybe we should let the White House Economic Brain Trust intern for a summer in a National Park.
