Mr Redwood confesses that he thinks he can 'run the economy'

This is JR's post recent post to which I am referring.

http://www.johnredwoodsdiary.com/2011/01/21/the-game-of-managing-the-economy/

This is the first paragraph...

A government trying to manage an economy is rather like a child trying to play that game of placing a number of small ball bearings into a series of slots on an enclosed board. The game proceeds by nudging or shaking the board in different directions to try to tempt each ball into one of the slots. If you nudge too hard or in the wrong direction you dislodge some of the balls you have already placed in the right holes. Success depends on administering the right series of shocks in the right directions to complete the task. Too much force will wreck it. Too little will not achieve it. There may be some way of calculating the right forces, but in the real world it comes down to experience and judgement, to trial and error.


Now, there is nothing more terrifying in my world than a politician stating that the government 'manages the economy'. It is the confession of a latent leaning to 'central planning', which all us Austrians know is doomed to failure.

Generally I like Mr R (H-O-ism excepted) and anyone who cannot sing in Welsh cannot possibly be all bad. He runs an outfit called Evercore which does some of what I do in a similar way, so that's good. But this post somewhat riled me, and I was rather caustic in my comments.

A better anaology to my mind than JR's 'nudging the pinballs' is the motor racing 'tank slapper'. This is what happens when you get into a bit of skid and in trying to correct it you over compensate and swerve off in the opposite direction. Then you overcompensate again and again you swerve off, and so on until you spin right round and, bang!, you're in the barriers.

JR's, or any politicians attempts to 'nudge' the economy, always ends in tank slappers, and more often than not, in the crash-barriers too.