In any highly complex system, like a national economy, all sorts of unexpected or emergent behaviors may arise. Some have been identified by economists, although they don't look at them using the insights of systems theory so they are not particularly well understood. Some of these tend to be damping, self-regulating and promote stability, like Adam Smith's "invisible hand". Other behaviors introduce cyclical oscillations, like the boom-bust cycle that generates alternating bubbles and panics. Still others create runaway trends which lead to economic collapse through feedback loops.

Liberals make the mistake of trying to improve on this natural ecology by fiddling with it, constantly introducing changes to make it work better, thereby introducing new perturbing forces that propagate through the system and have to be compensated for elsewhere. The result is our old friend, unforeseen consequences.

Conservatives are wisely suspicious of making these changes, but they wind up doing them anyway through a different mechanism. They tend to say "hands off", but only as long as the system is working in their favor. They are all for change when things aren't working out for them. Of course, not all conservatives or commercial interests have equal effect on general system outcomes. Those with the most economic power and influence are not just little market cogs, they can actually introduce policies that make things happen. They do this by making choices on if, what, how, where, when and how much to invest and market, and they also do it by direct intervention, by managing public opinion and action directly through advertising, public relations, lobbying, buying politicians--we all know the litany. Unfortunately, these adjustments also cascade through the system, leading to unforeseen consequences. It is also natural that they tend to see these measures at forcing change in the environment as prudent attempts to allow it to regulate itself without interference. They actually believe this.

It would be tempting to say that evil capitalists gather around a table and conspire to move the economy in ways that benefit them at everyone elses expense; and there is no doubt that some of this happens, which is why we need some government regulation of business. But the process of capitalist meddling with the market is also to a very great extent an unconscious one, and very often not obvious even to those who are doing it. In other words, it is a natural emergent system behavior, not necessarily a Snively Whiplash twisting his moustache in the wings.

People tend to avoid actions which will cause them harm. It is natural and wholesome. But sometimes that harm is actually part of that invisible hand, or some other self-regulating process operating deep inside the economy. Look at what we can actually measure about this economy. What single statistic is it that jumps out at you? The worse things get, the more some people flourish. And that group that prospers more and more gets smaller and smaller. As the overall wealth of the nation diminishes, the remaining wealth is being pumped out of every level in the economy and migrating to the right of the histogram, a clear sign of runaway systemic instability and overall decline. Even those who disagree with this conclusion can suggest no alternative explanation for it.

The Gaussian distribution of wealth that characterizes a healthy economy, an economy that serves well as many of its participants as possible, what has been the pride and joy of America, is crumbling before our eyes. The wealth is sliding to the right. Perhaps that "1%", or power elite, or whatever you want to call them, is what is causing the dysfunction, but I see them more as a symptom of the disease, or perhaps an opportunistic infection taking advantage of an existing instability. It is misleading to dismiss them as a villainous conspiracy of sinister masterminds scheming away at the top.

Everyone, even those who are suffering economically in an absolute sense are proportionally better off now relative to those who have less than they do, and proportionally worse off than those who have more. Wealth is rushing up the histogram from lower levels. It is not so much the rich stealing from the poor as it is everyone stealing from someone poorer than they are. This is why everyone in the society tends to perceive of themselves as middle class and unable to abandon the increasingly mythical idea of upward mobility. They hope instead to identify with the interests of an idealized upper class. The inflection point in this function, the place where an individual feels he is better off today than he was yesterday, is becoming increasingly remote, higher and further to the right in the curve.

But even if the financial elite is not the cause of the problem, they certainly have no incentive to do anything to solve it. And they will do anything they can to conserve the present system rather than allow it to change in a way that might affect them negatively. Not only their business practices, but their public manipulations of society are all directed at combatting any attempt by governmental authorities to alter the system or any natural mechanism within the system itself that might promote a more stable, and equitable, distribution of resources.

And not surprisingly, consciously or unconsciously, they will bitterly resist any analysis of a problem which might reveal their role in it, or how they might tend to benefit from it at everyone elses expense.