If by "a few", you mean "52", then you might be right.

if bush can somehow win tonight without having unveiled Osama, without the market making its end of the year uptick and without having realized oil going down to more natural levels then he can leverage that information to start building a new mandate, rather than just wasting it purely for reelection purposes.

I am amused by your love-hate affair with markets.

When they do what you want them to, then everybody else is supposed to fall to their knees and worship, whether the results are good for them or not.

But when they don't do what you want them to, you find excuses.

You don't really believe in markets, do you?

No, they're human, so deeply flawed. They just work better than any other option.

If they're deeply flawed, maybe we shouldn't just march in lockstep over the edge of every cliff they lead us to, then.

Harry:

Exactly, that's how Darwinism works--many make bad decisions but some don't--that's how you achieve efficiencies, though inefficiently. The problem arises in the systems you espouse, where statre bureaucrats make the decisionms for everyone. In those cases the entire populace is forced over the cliff.

I don't espouse any system. We're not smart enough to devise universal systems.

And if, as seems probable, both economies and societies are chaotic, in the mathematical sense, we cannot ever, in principle, get smart enough.

Governing or managing is akin to flying an airplane. You have to make constant adjustments. No one setting of the controls is 'best.'

Harry:

You've claimed innumerable times that the New Deal command economy was about to work before it was stopped..