Cato Knows Best

The staff, like the rest of the world, is concerned about the financial crisis.  We cats are too.  Anything that interrupts our food or sleep is a cause for alarm.  As an expert on all things I’ll offer my opinion on one of the points of human behavior that mystifies me and leads to small problems becoming large ones – Regulation.  Humans have a fascination for it.  As soon as anything new comes along someone thinks they should regulate it.  What humans don’t seem to get is that regulation, even well-meaning and generally intelligently done regulation creates greater risk than everyone acting on their own because if everyone does the same thing and it turns out to be the wrong thing a local problem becomes a world-wide disaster.

Let’s use cat food as an example. I have never understood tuna flavored cat food.  Who thinks cats catch tuna in the wild?  Ever see a cat go fishing?  Mouse flavored cat food, now that would sell to cats, but apparently not to humans, and since humans are the ones doing the buying it is tuna not mouse.  Maybe someone tried mouse flavored cat food and failed.  Anyway those individual failures present relatively little risk to society and that weeding out process provides a laboratory to determine what actually works. Tuna flavored cat food, for example. 

But when regulation determines the actions of society as a whole there is great “systemic risk”.  A failure that would otherwise affect only a small segment of society is catastrophic, and no experimentation has taken place to determine what actually works.  Regulators never change their policies and even if they wished to do so it would take forever.  Do this on a global scale and you have what we have now, a global disaster. The international policies that contributed to the problem were the Basel Accords, but that is for another day.

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As much as the Left whined about preventing “systemic risk” the entire Progressive program is focused on creating it because of the hubris that somehow the experts of the Progressive movement are not affected by the limited knowledge that affects everyone else so they want to set the rules for absolutely everything.  The Founders created a Federal Republic with a central government with specific limited powers in order to protect us from over-control by that government and in the process, perhaps without knowing it, limited “systemic risk”.  The last thing we need is only one flavor of cat food.