Presidents Are Symptoms

Government lags society.

Whether you deem this statement an observation, a prediction, or a conclusion, it is widely true. Fiscally, the Federal Reserve has a long history of being late in its adjustments, problems often get government money after they started resolving on their own, and military procurement suffers from “fighting the last war” tunnel vision. Technology opens up new areas of legal uncertainty that government can take years to address. Cultural shifts also often take years to filter into legislation.

When we consider this phenomenon using an economist’s perspective, it becomes obvious. Information needed to guide lawmakers and policy makers not only takes time to gather, it takes time to coalesce to the point of being gatherable. People get paid tons of money to guess what the economy will do next, what will be the next important new thing in culture, and what changes new technologies will bring, and most of them guess wrong. When you have hundreds of millions of individuals each processing the world around them and making personal decisions, the challenge in predicting where the “invisible hand” will lead a nation is enormous.

This is why capitalism far exceeds all forms of collectivist governance, technocracy, or top-down management - the time lag is insurmountable.