by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
Yet it still comes as a great surprise to everyone when ‘doing more of what’s failed spectacularly’ ends up collapsing the whole rotten structure.
Systems and nations are designed to fail without anyone even noticing: nobody set out to design the current broken system to fail at critical points, but now failure can’t be avoided because the incentive structure has locked in embedded processes that enrich self-serving cartels and insiders at the expense of the nation and its populace.
Nobody chose America’s insanely perverse healthcare system–it arose from a set of initial conditions that generated perverse incentives to do more of what’s failing and protect the processes that benefit cartels and insiders at the expense of everyone else.
In other words, the system that was intended to benefit all ends up benefiting the few at the expense of the many.