Summary: Our era is driven by irrational actions by governments. Foreign interventions in the Middle East, with no rational hope of accomplishing any logical goals. Governments in Europe pursuing guarantee-to-fail tactics to maintain the broken European Monetary Union. Our quote of the day examines one response of governments to failure.
Walking away is sometimes the most rational decision when the impossibility of a policy becomes clear, but often State leaders did not get where they are today be being rational. So governments are not like Lord Keynes — when the facts change, they don’t necessarily change their minds. Sometimes they just change the facts.
— paraphrased from a report by Russell Napier of CLSA, 22 June 2012.
This is, of course, nothing new.
“The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.”
— Lord Salisbury, discussing Great Britain’s policy on the Eastern Question (1877)
