Reshuffling the Parties: A Proposal

Travelogue: Washington, D.C

The nation’s capital also qualifies as its strangest city. Beyond the ceremonial precincts, the arbitrary quirk of height restrictions results in a fabric that feels more European than American, as the well-behaved street wall rests in a consistent line behind a row of trees. L’Enfant may have been a French rationalist, but the over-wide avenues, suspiciously orderly foliage, and bizarre roundabouts-with-traffic-lights make the city feel more like nineteenth-century Barcelona with its cut-corner intersections, equally a pedestrian death-trap, than Paris. In a supreme gesture of irony the baroque diagonals, lacking the Sixtus or Haussman monuments, only render the landscape more confusing. Terrain this hilly really doesn’t serve for a vista anyway – especially when it gets urban security grafted onto it.

Past the street, it’s stranger still. So much of this town is itinerant – from sojourner media to short-term staffers – that the population (at least the part with choices,) skews young and glazed-over, yet strangely lacking in sartorial consciousness. The foreign well-to-do brush shoulders with the foreign here-to-stay in a mix that seems combustible to one from the land of segregation, yet apparently accepted as normal in this made-up, unreal zone of statelessness. Life seems to be a strange blur of metal detectors and inebriation.

No points at all for the convoluted pay-at-exit subway (if you run out of money, do you stay in the tunnel?) Huge points for what must be North America’s largest concentration of Ethiopian cuisine, and the beef isn’t bad either. For a town this size, I’d expect a little more of a party scene, but suburbia may be more the speed of most of the permanent residents.

Here is the modern city without the skyscraper, and it feels good.

Basic Thinking

It’s tempting to overreact to anything unpleasant: bee stings, poison ivy, childhood fears, bank fraud on a massive scale; that kind of thing. While it may be difficult to at the moment, it might be worthwhile to remember a few basic principles: Free enterprise depends on honest exchange of information between buyer and seller; gains of trade (in the neoclassical sense) are gains of differential ability, not deception or failure to deliver. Leverage is a very dangerous thing; that was much of the reason for the Great Depression, as one failure multiplied throughout the system as easily as profit had multiplied before. Regulation does not prevent fraud, fraud is already illegal; regulation simply puts speedbumps in the system that at best limit the speed and scope of fraud and at worst create playing fields for whole new kinds of corruption. The U.S. (and most Western European) economy has been considered “mixed” since the 1930s (as distinct from purely market); complexity and classification create opportunities for Rent Seeking behavior as surely as over reliance on word-of-mouth created railroad stock fraud in the nineteenth century.

For some previous thinking: Crisis as Cartoon, McCastles Built on Air, The Fraud Problem, A Snippet from Max Weber, Cash Flows - A Diagram