A Simple Observation about Simplicity

August 2, 2011

Comments

I am seeing people on my Facebook and Google+ feeds (amongst other places) making assertions about how the solutions to our problems are “simple.”

“It’s simple,” they will say, “just cut this and that and that other thing and you’re done!”

The problem of course, is that if governing were that simple we wouldn’t have a bunch of problems that seem intractable, we would instead have a bunch of solutions.

Now, granted, if one was absolute dictator, perhaps some of these solutions would be, in fact, simple to execute (although I would note that history demonstrates that being the absolute dictator is rarely what it is cracked up to be and even the fiercest of authoritarians still have to deal with politics and the basic forces of economics).

And, as I love to say about absolute dictator jobs: they’re great and all, but they are hard to come by.

(Ok, rant/pontificating over for now…)

4 responses to “A Simple Observation about Simplicity”

Sean Paul Kelley

August 2, 2011 at 4:25 pm

You confuse simplicity with ease. Many of the solutions are simple, often commonsensical, but they are in no way easy to come to.
An Interested Party

August 2, 2011 at 4:25 pm

If it were that simple, the people who are calling for all these cuts would name exactly what they would cut and how that could be done, with so many of the things that could be cut having such strong constituencies…instead, we hear empty rhetoric about closing the Department of Education or ending all foreign aid, as if doing either of those things would even make a dent in the budget…
Stormy Dragon

August 2, 2011 at 5:18 pm

“There is always an easy solution to every human problem–neat, plausible, and wrong.” — H. L. Mencken
gVOR08

August 3, 2011 at 1:13 pm

There are, by way of example, simple things we can do to create jobs. However, they also produce things like spending, taxes, and inflation that rich people hate, so we won’t do them. As a society we are either/both too dumb or too cheap to fix our economy.

And the irony is that a rising tide really does lift all boats. If rich people would allow us to do the right things, they would also get richer.