Yesterday I paid $6.29 for a gallon of mid-grade gasoline then went to the grocery store to find whole aisles empty. I flashed back for a moment to my 1991 visit to the Soviet Union when you had to have a special government issued card to buy gas and people stood in lines many blocks long to go to stores that only had one item. Our economy is on the brink.

In the last episode of the HBO docudrama “Chernobyl” the trial of the reactor operators is concluded by the chief engineer of the immediate aftermath of the explosion explaining what happened. What one quickly learns is that we do not control nuclear reactors – we balance forces in them to counteract each other. It is called in science and engineering parlance “maintaining an equilibrium.” Many of our great engineering achievements are finding and maintaining equilibriums. That is how dams work, for example.

To control a thing means I can make that thing do whatever I want. But maintaining an equilibrium is a very different matter. In the case of a dam or a nuclear reactor, the thing we build is a device that permits us to balance a number of forces against each other and we must work in concert with those forces or else things get very unhappy very rapidly. That’s why dams break and disastrous floods ensue, and why “Chernobyl” has become a pseudonym for catastrophe. We press the equilibrium too far in one direction and one force overwhelms all the others,

An economy is not something that can be controlled. It involves forces as strong or stronger than the atom or moving water. An economy is an equilibrium of the highest order. In the worst of the covid days we tried to control that which could not be controlled. We thought that with enough motivation (fear) we could stuff the uncontrollable beast into a cage. But the best we could manage was to unbalance the forces and hence we are on the brink.

Now, the populace having declared covid in the past, we hear much talk of a “green economy.” This talk comes from people just stupid enough to think they can somehow capitalize on the “control” of the economy they thought they had during the pandemic to control even more. All they are doing is creating greater imbalance. The more imbalance they create, the closer we come to catastrophe.

What I know is this, if we totally break the equilibrium that is the American economy the results will make Chernobyl or the Johnstown flood look like a child breaking a toy.

Why is it stupid seems to always come in a package with hubris?

The post The Difference Between Maintaining an Equilibrium and Actual Control appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.