Magical Thinking

"What's good for him is good for us all!"

I finally figured out why the government gave a bajillion dollars to Goldman Sachs instead of doing something sensible to help the economy.* (I'm ignoring the trite observation that the executive and legislative branches of our government do what they do because they've been bought and paid for by the banks they're bailing out.) It's actually a case of magical thinking, which is the confusion of causes and effects.

It's true (and not even totally bad) that every time something huge happens (like war or economic growth) banks and bankers make money. That's because large activities require the movement of money, banks facilitate that movement, and you don't muzzle the oxen while they're out threshing the grain. But, if A (any large economic or social phenomenon) causes B (the enrichment of bankers), it is not the case that B causes A. Our benighted leaders are under the impression that B is the necessary condition of A, when it is only a result. It is not even inevitable that bankers will get in a year more money than a thousand working people would make in a lifetime, only that they will make some money.

The president and congress believe that because the hubristic morons at banks took hundreds of millions of dollars during the good times, giving those same morons hundreds of millions of dollars now will bring the good times back. They are like the gambler who, remembering when he won big on a horse while wearing his pink shirt, wears that same pink shirt every time he goes to the track because he thinks it will help. I presume that most of these politicians were required to take some kind of elementary logic class while they were in law school. It is unfortunate that they figured logic, like geometry, is something that is never actually useful in real life.

*A sensible course of action might be to pay Americans to do something productive and necessary like rebuilding and improving the country's infrastructure– roads, bridges, electrical grid, fiber optic in rural areas, and public education (K-12 and state colleges). Communal infrastructure happens to be the proper responsibility of the government. It would also fix the actual problem in our economy– that nobody is buying anything because nobody has a job or money.

**Image credit: Honoré Daumier, "Gargantua," from www.histoire-image.org.