The blogs are going wild, the headlines are snappy, and late night comedians bristle with glee. First it’s a $165M payout to AIG executives, now it’s AIG’s $75M lobbying campaign and payout to the politicians who were supposed to vet them in the first place – and the majority of the beneficiaries were Democrats!
Far greater crimes have been committed in the financial meltdown, but this one is catching fire and it’s trying to burn the house down.
As if fanning the flame, Obama loosens the reigns on the Freedom of Information Act, publishes bailout beneficiaries, identifies stimulus projects, opens doors to Iran, health care, education, and forces earmarks front and center. He is taking political bullets from all corners, but so is everyone else – nobody is safe. Not even Rush Limbaugh; now neutralized and tossed in the surf like a beached whale. People flood to social media, traditional media fails. When everyone is to blame, the finger points backwards.
So the competitors are actually cooperating; with the right information everyone has the incentive to make the game fair (and the highest probability of surviving).
By far the most important job in any sport is a referee. The referee wears the black and white stripped shirt in order to contrast with visual information in the field of play. They blow a whistle in order to contrast with the audio information in the field of play. They stop the game if the rules are violated in order to contrast with the dynamics of play. If a violation is too close to call, they consult the slow motion replay. Both sides agree to play fair and to obey the referee or else they get thrown out of the game. Contrast is good.
Obama is relentlessly pushing as much information onto the playing field as he is pushing money. Could it be that information and money are related in some inherent way?
Innovation is the science of change and economics is the science of incentive. Information, knowledge, and innovation are profoundly related. High rates of change of information yield higher rates of change in knowledge inducing still higher rates of change of innovation.
There is nobody to blame except the truth.
What Obama is doing is irrelevant to a manufacturing economy because market forces are a sufficient vetting mechanism for product quality. It is also irrelevant to the knowledge economy because that is destined to be outsourced.
However, Obama’s actions are definitive for an innovation economy.
Not unlike the financial meltdown; the only ones who don’t see it coming are the ones who don’t want to. Are we competing with the truth?
