The Wolf and the Bear--Danger Discrimination Explained

Here's the interpretation for the parable of the Wolf and the Bear.

Are both the wolf and the bear dangerous? Yes. And the reason why has nothing to do with dog poop. (Finally!) The real question is, which one is the most imminent danger? Well, obviously the grizzly bear. She's right there in front of you, a mere one hundred inches away. (That's eight feet and four inches, or two meters fifty four centimeters, in case you were wondering.) And she's just as hungry as the wolf. She's also bigger.

In life, we must constantly discriminate between two dangers. To pick one random pathetic example that just happens to be the first one that came to mind (you might be able to suggest better ones): you must discriminate between the danger of getting in a car accident driving to work or the danger of wasting too much time and energy walking to work (with an increased chance of arriving late to boot). Clearly one of them here is a grizzly bear and one's a wolf, though they're both dangerous (the latter is at least a nonzero danger). I mean, people die every day driving to and from work. Yet we all drive to work, unless we work very closely, for that changes the balance of the dangers (and also adds in the danger of avoidable wear on the engine and use of gas that is unjustifiable, etc). It's a poor analogy,but you get the point, and luckily the mediocrity of the analogy does not compromise the correctness of the idea. (There will be a post on that sometime in the future.)

What was the political application I had in mind, forsooth?

Right now we need to discriminate between the dangers of having an under-regulated free-market economic system and the danger of having an overbearing, politically-extreme, and inefficient government. I can't deny that there has been instances of corporate greed and abuse in America's short history. It's a nonzero danger. But while we're contemplating the wolf a hundred or so yards away, what do we do about the grizzly bear right in our face? She's got big teeth. And halitosis.

Right now the danger of corporate greed and abuse is pretty small in today's economic/political/social climate. (This is relatively speaking, of course. Granted, that statement is based on purely anecdotal evidence, but I reassure you that I do my best to have my ear pressed to the ecoposo ground for as much of the day as I can stand, and feel fairly confident in making that statement. I just don't have numbers and charts to back it up. Then again, those are rather easy to manipulate, aren't they? Charts just don't mean what they used to, to quote a toothless guy I once heard in a gas station. Well, back to the main narrative.) The government, on the other hand, is stifling economic growth with over-regulation, burdensome spending, and is threatening to extend its shadow to corners of America that it has never touched before. Think back to the beginning of the economic crisis. A year before it all went down, if someone had told you that the U.S. government would soon be a significant shareholder in General Motors, what would you have said? Something incredulous, I imagine. (Luckily, they didn't have to change that ubiquitous GMC symbol--General and Government both start with the letter G.) Is the government starting to slowly relinquish its hold on GM? Yes, to be fair, it is starting. I can't rule out that it will relinquish completely--nor that it won't. But the point is that in one fell stroke Uncle Sam chopped down trees in the American forest that used to be sacrosanct, and there wasn't a lot done to stop him. I'm not even sure what could be done to stop a government when it is determined to do something--truly determined, even to the point to trample down the will of the people. (Besides revolution, of course, and I'm slow to play that card--much slower than, say, Thomas Jefferson.)

That last bit ended up being a little tangential, but the points are still valid. I may edit and re-post The Governmental Parasite onto here, which goes more in-depth into the relationship between the private and public sector. It is 100% amateurish and shot-from-the-hip, but the principles in it are 100% true despite the incompetence of the amateur apologist who cranked it out. It reaches at least a moderate depth (or so I'd like to think), and one day when I'll be a corporate lawyer with a minor in Econ I'll be able to do a more full treatise on the subject.

There is your interpretation of the Parable of the Bear and the Wolf--applicable to much more than just politics. Remember it the next time you hear panic-mongering.