After the Future

If Not Geithner, Who?

What can be realistically expected in a society as complex as ours run by elites, including most Democrats, who since Reagan, if not before, have lost any vestigial sense of what the common good is? What can be expected of a class of people who have got to the positions that they hold by caring about more than anything else their own narrowly defined careerist self interest? What can we expect from a class for which principle and service are just b.s. concepts one pays lip service to, and where savvy and being a player count for everything? Even if you are one of the few who cares about doing the right thing, who's there for you to work with?

Let's assume Obama wants to do the right thing, that he even knows what the right thing is regarding the financial meltdown--what is the set of people from which he can choose which actually understands how the system was built and how it works?  Who is he going to call upon if not people from Wall Street?  Left-leaning academics?  But what do they know about the real guts of how Wall Street works? And what makes any of us think that they wouldn't make a bigger mess of things with unintended consequences?

Do Nothing or Do Something

. . . and if something, what?

In my effort to understand what's going o I've been paying attention to  Simon Johnson, Jamie Galbraith, and Paul Krugman--all of whom think the Geithner plan doesn't go far enough. But I've also started reading Brad DeLong, a Berkeley econ professor and former Clinton Treasury official, who agrees that the Geithner plan as it stands now won't work, but is more positive about the Geithner approach because he sees it as the only politically feasible plan possible at the moment, and as such is a step in the right direction. 

In another post, he talks about the three main groups who will play an obstructionist role toward the Obama administration in its attempts to find a way to avert a complete melt-down:

. . . there are three groups of people who are trying to handcuff us with today's equivalents of the golden fetters that constrained economic policy and made the Great Depression so great. Each group is doing so for its own reasons:

• Out of ignorance: the modern-day Chicago School of economists, which is arguing against effective use of policies to manage aggregate demand because they have never read Metzler or Friedman (or Keynes), and never thought at all seriously about the transmission mechanisms by which changes in monetary policy (and fiscal policy) affect the price level in the long run and affect output, employment and demand in the short run.

• Out of malevolence: the Republican members of congress and all their intelletual enablers who would have fallen in line behind what are now the policies of the Obama administration had McCain won the election and had they been the policies of the McCain administration instead--but who are right now opposed because they think making Obama's presidency a failure is the road to electoral success in 2010 and 2012.

• Out of justice: avoiding depression requires supporting asset prices--which means that for many financiers the wages of overspeculation will be not bankruptcy but fortunes. People rebel against the fact that in a financial crisis the banking sector has got the rest of us by the plums, and that there is no effective way to make sure they get their justice without creating prolonged mass unemployment for the rest of us.

In a September article DeLong wrote that there are basically three choices: Do nothing, which will bring a Great Depression-like system crash and all the suffering that will come with it.  Bailout, which removes the negative consequences from the risktakers who got us in this mess, or nationalizaton, which has the most upside, but is politically radioactive.

I assume the first group of Ignorants are with the other two in supporting Do-Nothing (Friedman is excluded because he was not ignorant, and in the end he was an intelligent pragmatist who recognized government interventions were necessary in some circumstances.) The second group of Malevolents simply cannot be taken seriously, but the third should be because there is bedrock common sense in their attitude, which is well articulated by Purl Gurl, a responder to the DeLong article referenced above:

Best option is the “Do Nothing” option. Wall Street should be allowed to collapse. Our economy and our global economy should be allowed to collapse. We need a repeat of the Great Depression to cull the flock. America and our world need to be rid of Wall Street types and be rid of peoples who refuse to live a lifestyle within their means. Wall Street is not solely responsible; our politicians and our peoples are equally responsible.

Yes, I am advocating economic collapse leading to loss of jobs, loss of homes, families ending up on welfare, maybe homeless and on the streets. This breaks my heart because of innocent children who will be victimized by adults who made bad decisions and gave over to greed.

If I could protect children of our world, I would financially nuke our world.

All in our family were born to poverty on a rural Oklahoma farm, many decades back. We were born ignorant, could not attend school, never enjoyed money, literally, then we set about working our fingers to the bone to attain financial security. Yes, this economic crisis has reduced our family wealth quite significantly. Nonetheless, we are very comfortable; we enjoyed sense enough over the decades to stash away cash for rainy days. We have no debt, no credit card debt, no mortgages on our home nor our income properties. No debt at all. Reason for this is our family made a point to do without, to sacrifice, to work hard, to move ahead in life by living well within our means and ways; we hold ourselves financially responsible.

Why should our family bailout Wall Street and Americans who are financially irresponsible?

Let the chips fall where they may. Our world needs culling.

Not sure how protecting the children follows from financially nuking the world, but I understand where she's coming from. There is something Babel-esque about the structure we have all participated in constructing to some degree. I understand the desire to send all the technology into the sun and return to a simpler more earth bound existence.  (That's a BSG reference.)  But whether the system deserves to be struck by a lightening bolt from the heavens, I leave to the heavens.  In the meanwhile we have to do what we can to fix it. And that leaves the other two options: Bailout or Nationalization. 

I'm convinced it will finally come down to Nationalization. And I think such a move can be justified in subsidiarist terms. The only arguments I've heard against it are from people in the three groups listed above. I think that in the long run the banks and whatever assets are worth saving should be sold back to the private sector in a new system that this strictly regulated in a neo-Glass Steagall like world in which these financial institutions will never be allowed to grow so large as to be not allowed to fail.

But I also agree with DeLong that it's not politically possible right now. And I hope that those who think that timing is of the essence are wrong, and that when it comes to nationalization, it won't be too late. But I'm feeling more open to the approach the Obama people are taking now than I was earlier in the week.  I think in the end it's not about whether people know what to do but about the politics and the timing.

Missing It and Battlestar Gallactica Farewell

I've not been writing because I've been busy with other things, and I am very much in this slack water mode.  It seems as though events outrace anything I or anyone else has to say about them with any hope of writing anything truly insightful or helpful. Almost everything I read seems idiotic or at best to be quasi interesting but "not it," instead "missing it" because our eyes haven't adjusted yet to enable us to see meaningful patterns.  And so, I suppose, I'm reluctant to write anything I know for sure is "not it". I'm not a professional blogger, and I don't have to write for my paycheck. I pity those who do. My basic assumption is that nobody knows what they're doing or what they're talking about because we're in a new situation nobody understands.

I know.  People have ideas and theories about what ought to be done, and there is a course of action that is in fact the best possible course of action, and maybe someone is proposing it. But the fact is that whatever might be the best thing to do, there's no political constituency to back it, because whoever knows what the best thing to do is has no political power. Most of us wouldn't recognize the best thing to do if we heard it especially if it would cause too much short term pain, And so we have our opinions and as with all opinions some are better than others, but no one really knows.  Even the guy who is proposing what would in fact turn out to be the best course of action doesn't know beforehand if it would work or not. Nobody knows anything for sure.

And so we can vent and shake our fists all we want, but it all comes down to the politics--who has the power and how will they use it. And the people with the power are the people who created or enabled the disaster in the first place.  In a radio interview I heard (I think) Joe Nocera describe their power as that of people who have rigged the system with ticking bombs, and they demand to be paid their exorbitant because they are the only ones who know how to disarm the bomb, and if you don't let them do it them handle this crisis the way only they know how to do it because they are the ones who set the bombs in the first place, they'll let the whole system collapse. So so then let's keep paying them billions, and they'll fix the problem, maybe. And so the rest of us keep paying because, even if they don't know how to disarm the bomb or don't want to, we don't know what else to do.

So sure, there's a part of me that wants Summers and Geithner fired and which would prefer someone like Joseph Stiglitz managing the crisis, but how does the guy with the explosives strapped to his chest respond to someone who will read him the riot act?  It's never about doing whatever might seem to be the right thing in the abstract--even if we know what that is--but about doing what's possible given the political realities.

***

Which is my segue into my sayonara to Battlestar Galactica.  The finale was for me a disappointment, but I want to give the writers credit for reaching for something even if they missed it. The show was more sure footed when it got us to identify with the good guys Roslin and Adama in their authoritarianism because we saw that the democratic process was being abused by the bad guys Zarek and Baltar. Neither side was unambiguously good or evil, but was Battlestar a clever right-wing propaganda vehicle for its taking the side of the benevolent dictators? Isn't that really how Cheney justifies his behavior?  "Hey, I'm just like Laura Roslin doing what I have to do for the common good. You may not like it, but you don't understand what's really going on. You have to trust me." 

And while most of us with any claim to good sense would never trust a guy like Cheney, we find ourselves trusting Roslin and Adama, and wishing even that they had taken care of Baltar when they had the chance. So what does that say about our commitment to democracy and the rule of law?  I don't think the goal was to make Cheney's argument, but rather to make us experience our own ambivalence about things we think superficially with certainty, and that a good thing.  We are most of us Lee Adama, caught in the middle wanting the best choices to be made, and committed to the process that often prevents them from being made. Or was it designed to be a challenge to our complacent assumptions about democracy? Are we to side with process and the rule of law or with the leader with dictatorial powers whom we believe has the common good as his/her primary motivator?

Battlestar was also interesting because of its metaphysical ambitions, but for me at least they were not realized, and the finale was a deep disappointment in that regard.  It just came off a contrived and not well thought through. (I fear I will have the same reaction to Lost, which is similarly ambitious.) I suspected from the moment the quest for earth theme was introduced that the fleet would find our earth thousands of years ago and that the writers would try to tie it in with theories that human civilization was brought to earth by aliens who also introduced monotheism through the Egyptians.  The writers knew that was the expectation, and that's why they upended it by the fleet's finding Earth 1 a nuclear wasteland. But they brought us to the green, unspoiled Earth II in the end.

And that's fine, so far as it goes, but in its other themes it was reaching for something that it really didn't know the answers for, and so the answers it gave were contrived and unsatisfactory. The business about resurrection was interesting, but while it made some sense with regard to the cylons in a reincarnational way, it didn't make much sense with regard to Kara Thrace. Why only her of all the people who died? I know, she's "special", but what kind of sense does it make to have a resurrection body and not know it, and then when she finally came to understand what had become of her, why didn't she explain it to Lee rather than just disappearing on him.  I know it's less dramatic, but it's also an easy way to deal with it. Just assert it no matter how little sense it makes and move on. It's better not to play with fire if you don't understand it.

And the Six and Baltar angels?  Let me get my eyes back down from where they're stuck toward the top of my skull. The whole nuclear destruction of Caprica and the other colonies was orchestrated by God through those two?  That was God's plan? So that, what, Hera could get to Earth II? 

Why should we care?  What sense in the end did that make? The assertion in the final minutes that she of all the people from the fleet who settled on Earth II was the mitochondrial Eve just seems silly. This was what the whole mission to find earth was designed to achieve? That earth evolution be directed by a species that is half human/half cylon? Why should it matter? What difference does that make since humans and cylons are in the end indistinguishable?

Who cares? Ask yourself what difference it would have made if fleet found its way to earth without Hera. Wouldn't one of the other women have been Eve? Couldn't Sharon and Helo or another human and cylon have babies on earth? Weren't they likely to? The whole idea that finding Hera was central to the human future made no sense unless every other human or cylon woman who landed would be infertile. Maybe there's something else intended here that I'm missing, but unless I am, I see no reason why anyone should have cared more about Hera than any other little girl in the fleet. 

I know, it's just TV, but this was supposed to be different and in its final episode it just seemed like TV.  I was hoping it could be more. I was hoping it could touch a mythopoetic chord that would resonate more deeply. It was satisfied with being merely clever. 

American Perestroika

I came across this comment I wrote last August.  Seems even more germane today:

Perhaps the best analogy for what I hope for Obama is that he could be a transformatiive figure, not like Reagan in reverse, but more like Gorbachev. MG had to become a trusted member of the Soviet system in order to advance to the position of power he eventually achieved, but he was a man for the moment. He rose to power when the time was ripe, and by the power of his personality and his formidable persuasiveness he was able to ease his nation into a non-violent dissolution of a very sick system.

The military industrial complex in this country is the analogue to the soviet system pre-1989. The question is whether it is now as rickety a structure as the soviet system was.

I don't know, but probably not, and if it isn't ready to collapse because of internal lack of faith in it, then it won't. But Obama has some of this "man for the moment" quality. So it's a question, really, whether the moment is ripe or not. For Obama or anybody can't do anything unless he has allies within the system who see how rotten it is and who would support an American perestroika. Gorbachev would have got nowhere if there was not internal support for his perestroika.

Obama may or may not be that guy, even if the moment is right. But in my more optimistic moments I think that Obama's election might be part of a perfect storm of events that might combine to effect such a significant reorientation of this nation's government. It's more pipedream than anything else, for sure, but these hubristic systems always collapse sooner or later, and if we're lucky when it happens here, there will be a Lincoln or a Gorbachev, i.e., effective communicators who understand what the stakes are, to ease the transition.

From where I sit, it's hard to believe that things could get much worse, but it's more likely that the rot has to progress much further than it has in the American system for the timing for such an historic transformation to be realistic.

Gorbachev was not a revolutionary; he didn't come in to destroy the soviet system.  He wanted to revitalize it and liberate it from its torpor. In that way he is very much like Obama. Things did not work out the way MG thought they would, but he was a catalyst for changes that had to be allowed to happen. I think we're are in a parallel situation here.

But if the problem in Gorbachev's Soviet Union was that it suffered from an excess of top down control which had to be eased, the problem in the U.S. is different and in many ways harder to deal with.  All Gorbachev had to do was ease his control, and let a kind of natural process make the necessary adjustments, painful though they were. 

In Reagan's American the problem is an excess of un-control, and the promotion of a system in which the foxes get appointed to run the hen house.  I'm not sure there's a way to fix such a problem without the assertion of a lot of political will, and I'm not sure Obama and the Dems are ready for that.  But circumstances might develop in such a way as to force his/their hand.

I think it's unlikely that Obama will be able to control events. The best he can do is manage the coming chaos.  We're headed for white water, and the best we can hope for is that he will keep us from capsizing.

The Rich Are Different from You and Me

Because they have the resources to live in a bubble world of their own creation. Frank Rich today:

The once-lionized lifestyles of the rich and infamous were appallingly tacky. John Thain’s parchment trash can was merely the tip of the kitschy iceberg. The level of taste flaunted by America’s upper caste at the bubble’s height had less in common with the Medicis than, say, Uday and Qusay Hussein.

The cultural crash should have been a tip-off to the economic crash to come. Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh, money managers whose alleged $667 million fraud looted the endowments at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon, were fond of collecting Steiff stuffed animals, including an $80,000 teddy bear. Sir Robert Allen Stanford — a Texan who purchased that “Sir” by greasing palms in Antigua — poured some of his alleged $8 billion in ill-gotten gains into a castle, complete with moat, man-made cliff and pub. He later demolished it, no doubt out of boredom.

In a class apart is the genteel Walter Noel, whose family-staffed Fairfield Greenwich Group fed some $7 billion into Madoff’s maw. The Noels promoted themselves, their business and their countless homes by posing for Town & Country. Their firm took in at least $500 million in fees (since 2003 alone) for delivering sheep to the Madoff slaughterhouse. In exchange, Fairfield Greenwich claimed to apply “due diligence” to every portfolio transaction — though we now know Madoff didn’t actually trade a single stock or bond listed in his statements for at least the past 13 years.

Centralization and Subsidiarity

I was listening to something the other day, and the guy was making a point I had never considered.  Empires for the most part, whether ancient or modern, are not particularly intrusive regarding local cultures and customs. Empires more often than not live with local cultural pluralism so long as locals pay their taxes and fulfill their military obligations to the empire. The upside is that the local nation in effect outsources its military defense, and like Japan after WWII, it can direct all its energies into economic or cultural development. The downside is that the local nation loses a degree of sovereignty and control, especially when it comes to foreign policy, and it has to live with the humiliation of its military defeat. Honor and glory can only be found in the service of the empire, not in the service of one's own nation, unless it’s in an insurgency against the empire. But the key idea here is that the problem with empires is not that they are extraordinarily repressive; nation states are far worse in that regard.

Nationalists and fanatical ideologists suffer from a form of collective mental illness, and it's primarily the disease of the Right. It's rooted in our day in the disintegration of local cultures and customs destroyed mainly by the creative-destructive dynamics of modernity, not the least of which dynamisms is consumer capitalism. Modernity creates anomic, alienated, isolated, deracinated humans who suffer identity loss and who then seek to recover identity in a collective, which more often than not is the Nation, usually defined by language, religion, and nativist jingoism. People who don't feel a need for the Nation to define their identities tend to be more cosmopolitan and tolerant.  Empires tend toward cosmopolitanism; nation states toward jingoism and ideological fanaticism. More murder and mayhem has been done within states by its own citizens to its citizens than has ever been done by imperial aggression. Pol Pot, Suharto, and Stalin killed more of their own people than their external enemies.

When people get ideological or nationalist fever, they start the liquidations.  When the British Empire collapsed, Hindus who lived relatively peaceably in India for centuries with Muslims go into ethnic cleansing mode. When the teetering Ottoman empire finally collapsed during WWI, the Greeks and other Balkan Christians kicked out all the Muslims, and then the Muslims who returned to Turkey in turn kicked out the Christians, and a million and a half Armenians wind up dead. Empires are brutal, and will ruthlessly suppress anyone who resists them militarily, but they are not into genocidal mass murder. Bismarck was the engineer of kulturkampf, not Franz Josef.That kind of thing is done by the locals to one another.

The power of the nation state is far more intrusive, meddling, and violent than the power of the typical empire. Imperial powers are not interested in micromanaging their local subjects. Empires are cosmopolitan; nation states are more likely to demand homogenization than far-flung empires. DeGaulle famously said, "How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?" Well, I guess it depends on what degree of micromanaging your idea of governing requires. If you're into top-down micromanaging according to an ideological or racist script, yeah, that kind of diversity and local chaos is a problem.

But empires are too big to care about local chaos so long as it doesn't threaten to undermine the basic framework for order they have established. Nationalists chafe at having to live within a framework that they cannot control, but such frameworks can exist while allowing for a lot of local freedom within them. And that's my point.  I'm not arguing for empire, but this discussion of the organizing impulses that animate empires as contrasted with nation states to which I was listening helped me to see that the greater the distance between the local communities and the power center, the more freedom enjoyed by the locals.

So there are different kinds of centralization, and some are better and others worse, and the better kind is the one more distanced from life as it's lived on the local level. And if we have to live with varying degrees of centralization, which is clearly our future, the argument we should be having does not lie in whether centralization is good or bad (markets vs. socialism) but about what kinds of centralization are better and worse. I would argue that the best kind of centralization is the one that provides a basic framework for order and peace, but which allows the maximum amount of freedom and diversity in the political and economic spheres at the local level where people live. We tend to think that centralization and homogenization go together, but homogenization is more the agenda of nation states than it is the impulse at the super state level.

So, no, I'm not making an argument for imperial aggression or for the desirability a la Niall Ferguson for a Pax Americana, but I am making an argument that certain kinds of centralization are more desirable than others, and that we should be clear which poses the greatest danger to individual freedoms. Those on the ideological right in this country are kissing cousins with the kind of nationalism that wants to homogenize and purge out what is in their view impure and un-American. This impulse is at the heart of movement conservatism, and, sure, not every movement conservative is a crazy as Ann Coulter,  Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh, but their careers depend on feeding off this kind of ideological, hyper-nationalist longing for lost identity.

Movement conservatism is more closely aligned with this nationalist impulse for homogeneity than it is aligned with the principled anti-statist desire to limit the scope of government. Quite the opposite. Movement conservatives don't have a problem with government intruding into the lives of people so long as it aligns with and enforces their particular homogenizing, jingoist vision of what it means to be a true American. Coulter wrote a book entitled Treason, and whether or not she's completely serious, she's playing on the widely held belief among movement conservatives that people with liberal, cosmopolitan attitudes are America-haters and traitors. Only movement conservatives are true Americans. Movement conservatives don't hate government; they hate a government that promotes cosmopolitan tolerance and respect for pluralism. They want to replace that with a government that promotes no such thing.

****

For years now I've been arguing that if Americans could embrace a subsidiarist model, it would reduce the polarization that structures the left/right debate about whether markets or the government should be the dominant influence in shaping social and economic policy. I’ve also argued that with the New Deal we began living with a subsidiarist model, even if most Americans wouldn't call it that.

But the whole Reaganite, right-wing backlash used cultural resentments and the confusion following the turmoil of the sixties and seventies as a way to de-legitimize New Deal subsidiarity (the Tom Frank argument), and the result finally is the social economic disaster we now have on our hands. And now Obama, as he tries to restore subsidiarity as a remedy for the mess perpetrated by Reaganites and their neo-Liberal collaborators (e.g., Bill Clinton and the DLC wing of the Democrat party), we find these ridiculous assertions about Obama being a socialist, because from the point of view of the Reaganite right, if you're not a market fundamentalist, you're a socialist--there's no middle ground.

Subsidiarity defines that middle ground. A subsidiarist is against top-downism, but recognizes that some problems have a scale and complexity that cannot be handled at the local level or by unregulated markets, and that there are some things that are best handled at higher levels of organization. It's just common sense, and anybody who can take off his market fundamentalism goggles for even a moment can see it. It's a good thing that there is a FAA and that each city doesn't have its own rules and regulations regarding air traffic. It's a good thing that local communities organize and fund their own emergency and rescue operations, but it's also a good thing that there's a FEMA to step in to help when a major disaster overwhelms the capacity of locals to cope with it. It's a good thing that regional cultures and subcultures and religious groups are allowed to flourish without intrusion from central governments, but it's also a good thing that when the basic human rights of minorities within those subcultures are abused that the central government will protect them if the local government won't. It's a good thing that doctors and hospitals can make their own judgments about the care of their patients without the government telling them what to do, but it's a bad thing that insurance companies do.

I'm not going to put in my two cents for single-payer health care in this post. It's not without it's problems and limitations, but if you understood it, you'd see that it allows for the greatest amount of freedom for the most people. It's like the empire idea--a framework is setup by a central authority, and then there's a lot of freedom on the local level for doctors and patients to interact. But it's a moot point now.

Centralization is something we already live with as a necessity, and we will continue to live with it--to oppose it as a matter of principle is ridiculous. The point I want to make today is that the centralization of certain social functions is desirable in complex societies, and that the only solution to certain kinds of problems lies at higher levels of organization. We can debate which problems are best attacked that way as we go along. 

But because centralization is necessary, it does not mean that life on the local level needs to be homogenized or totalized by some would be Stalin, Mao, Castro, or name your socialist villain; it does not mean that every form of centralization is a movement toward creating the Big Brother monster who will try to control every aspect of our lives. Centralization cannot work unless the officials elected at the central level are held accountable and govern by consent according to subsidiarist principles. The question is not whether centralization is good, but what kind is good--what kind serves the common good, and what kind oversteps its rightful jurisdiction. It's not either/or.

We need to find the kind of balance that allows for flourishing subcultures within a larger framework that guarantees certain basic rights. As the decades pass, this kind of framework will be increasingly global. There will have to be a global fair labor and wage guidelines. There will have to be global regulation for financial markets. There will have to be global rules for pollution and energy use. There will have to be global adjudication of national disputes without resorting to the gang violence we accept today as war making. But despite our fears, centralization doesn't have to be dictatorial if we can understand it as primarily providing a framework, not imposing its homogenizing will.

Tyranny is more of a local phenomenon than the agenda of very large central governments, which have enough to deal with without micromanaging at the local level. I'm not saying that large centralizing governments don't overstep or can't overstep--we've seen egregious violations in the last decade--but real, existential tyranny and the violence that comes with it is more commonly experienced at the local levels--with bosses in the workplace, with oligarchical cliques in local communities, with abusive parents and spouses. Yes, we have to be vigilant that the central government not overstep. Yes, we must do everything we can to preserve a space of freedom immune from government control in which the dynamism, vitality, and creativity at the bottom is society's center of gravity. But I would argue that a certain coordinating and organizational function at the top, if envisioned and implemented correctly according to subsidiarist principles, would provide the basic frameworks that would enable people and subcultures at the bottom to flourish.

It's inevitable that we will have to live with greater degrees of centralization as the global system evolves, but the more remote the center is from the life lived on the local level, the more unlikely it will be intrusive. You can micromanage a relatively small nation state like France, Sweden, or Germany; but the larger and more culturally complex the area governed, the harder to micromanage, and the easier it is for locals to resist on issues that are not central to the functioning of the centralized system.

Tyranny in the world's experience of it over the centuries has been a relatively local phenomenon. Would-be Saurons need to be resisted, but even if they succeed in making life miserable for everyone subjected to their rule, they will ultimately fail. The idea here, then, is that fears about one-world government, etc., are grounded in projecting local tyrannies onto a global screen, and that such fears are unlikely to be realized. The two most ambitious recent attempts at totalitarianism centralization were unsustainable, and the larger and more complex the system, the less likely that any such regime could be imposed, or if imposed, sustained.