Ah, the joys of free choice

It’s kinda cool being human sometimes. Not only do we have opposable thumbs, but we also have what some people consider the god-given gift of free choice.

Oh sure, we have to wear clothes most of the time and create controlled climates in order to survive comfortably in a harsh, uncaring world, but we have other advantages not shared by the rest of the animal kingdom, not the least of which is the ability to record and learn from history.

For instance, in the art of war, military planners can look at battles that have gone before and learn tactics that can give them advantages on the battlefield in order to ensure a greater chance for success.

Unless of course, said military has far superior weaponry — thanks to centuries of scientific research and collective memory — and simply “shocks” and “awes” a technologically inferior enemy into temporary submission to declare “mission accomplished.”

The devil is in the details though, so in the aftermath of that sort of military action our commanders have the ability to turn to another playbook when the subsequent occupation turns into a quagmire, and our brilliant military leadership can then show us charts and graphs demonstrating how well the invasion is going. They can also orchestrate sham elections and talk about the occupied country “taking responsibility” for its own destiny.

Think “Vietnam-ization” here, and the Kabuki Theater of such geniuses as Robert McNamara, who later took his abilities to the Ford Motor Company.

It seems as if failing upwards is another quaint advantage afforded Homo Sapiens.

But free choice, personal responsibility and historical memory can extend to the areas of finance and economics as well.

For instance, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the financial industries of the U.S. became so large and incestuous that the entire world financial system collapsed, leading to a worldwide depression.

In an attempt to stanch the bleeding, our 32nd President Franklin Roosevelt enacted the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and created major banking reforms, some of which were designed to control speculation. It also prohibited banks from owning other financial businesses such as insurance companies (think Citigroup).

Roosevelt and many other observers of human nature thought free enterprise was fine, but when greed is allowed to go on unfettered, regulation helps to preserve a fair distribution of wealth. It’s also a matter of economic survival.

In more recent history, we can observe the “boom and bust” cycles of the economic bubbles that coincided with the final destruction of financial regulation thanks to 42nd President Bill Clinton, who was impeached for the wrong reason.

In 1999, Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall, after deregulating the communications industry in 1996.

The subsequent speculation exploded the tech market and led to a series of fiscal bombs, which became larger and more destructive as the financial industry gorged on empty profits and the agencies that remained to regulate them looked the other way.

A lot of people who should have known better claim that no one could have seen our fiscal collapse coming, but I don’t believe that. Those who predicted this collapse for years were marginalized, while the people who said we couldn’t have predicted it ignored history.

But like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, people in the “reality-based community” who warned of the folly of our fiscal irresponsibility were shouted down and called un-American or Chicken Littles by Pollyannas who insisted that the stock market would always go up, even if there were little burps.

But there is historical evidence to justify the nay-sayers, and now we have reality to match. It’s much like Intelligent Design butting up against the theory of evolution. Evolution has historical records in the form of fossils. End of discussion.

So maybe if we survive this economic meltdown we can learn from the past this time. Maybe we can learn that no entity should get “too big to fail”; maybe we can learn that it’s not a good idea for major financial industries to be deregulated to the point that we have no idea what’s really going on; maybe we can learn that personal responsibility is a two-way street and we cannot count on the good faith of greedy people to police themselves in the name of the common good.

I think history’s against me on that one, though.