{"id":732,"date":"2026-06-29T08:37:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T08:37:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=732"},"modified":"2026-06-29T08:37:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T08:37:24","slug":"chess-in-the-henhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbaneconomynews.com\/?p=732","title":{"rendered":"Chess in the Henhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Chickens and their relations in the wild have the reputation of being the stupidest birds alive. I\u2019ve pitched pebbles at a spruce grouse perched on an open branch 15 feet from the ground, and his \u201cstrategy\u201d was to remain still, as if I could not see him. Had I been in possession of a rifle, I could have plugged him as easily as pressing a button.<\/p>\n

Read more It Is Everyone\u2019s Strait: Whether the Strait of Hormuz or the Taiwan Strait<\/a><\/p>\n

A few years ago, we got my son a gag gift for his birthday\u2014a sketch of two apes playing chess. The losing ape, a gorilla, looked at the board in dismay. He was the loser in the infamous Fool\u2019s Mate, the quickest way to lose, after two moves by each player. Fool\u2019s Mate is a matter of not understanding the board, leaving your king with no piece to interpose a kingside attack by the opposing queen, and with no square to retreat to. It\u2019s pretty stupid, but it\u2019s just a peculiar instance of not asking the obvious question: If I make this move, what might my opponent do?<\/p>\n

That is the key strategic question in human affairs. We are not talking about lifting up a rock with a lever. The rock has no will of its own. It does not foresee or evaluate. It takes no action. It sits, and if enough force is applied, it will move, and if not, it will not. And yet we have politicians so daft that they regard the body politic as a rock in a field. They do not ask, \u201cHow will people respond? What happens next on the board?\u201d Levy a stiff tax on businesses? It is not like turning a screw with a screwdriver\u2014that fine combination of lever, wedge, and inclined plane. It is like making a move on a chessboard. How does the opponent respond? Your queen takes the bishop. Do you not notice that there\u2019s a pawn right there, ready to take your queen? That\u2019s not to forecast events 10 moves hence. It is to see the most obvious reply in front of your nose. Overtax the business, the business leaves, and then you are left with nothing.<\/p>\n

Businessmen, whose job is to earn profits while providing something people want, cannot afford to pretend that there is no strategy in play. Only a fool would say, \u201cI will inevitably double my income by doubling my prices.\u201d If he does that, he may well find that he has cut his income in half by sending prospective customers to his competitors, or he may find that his business has collapsed. But he can indeed say, \u201cI think I will increase my income by cutting my prices,\u201d if doing so will make his business brisker. Special sales get people into the store, perhaps for the first time. The biggest department store in my county was known across a region of about 10,000 square miles as a place where you could get durable and handsome clothing, from T-shirts to suits, for the lowest prices around. That was the owner\u2019s main strategy for drawing people to the store, but when they got in, there were a lot of other things to buy, because the place was vast, and he made sure also that hunger and thirst wouldn\u2019t shorten your visit if you came with your children in tow: hence the soda fountain and the popcorn machine.<\/p>\n

Business is like government in this way: to do it well is to read human nature wisely. It is to anticipate moves and countermoves. But the businessman and everyone who works for him have a strong incentive to study the game dispassionately and to play well the moves that are ordered. Those who work in government have no such incentive, because they are padded and shielded from the consequences of their stupidity. True, they can be voted out of office, but people have short memories, incumbents can raise a lot of campaign money and can trade upon their names, and the stupidities of government policies often require, like cancer, some time to develop into an obvious monstrosity.<\/p>\n

By then, the voters themselves may have joined in the cry, not merely to excuse or overlook the monstrosity, but to rename it and hail it as something good. That large and growing splotch on your neck? It isn\u2019t melanoma. It\u2019s a beauty mark! So it has happened in our time to the collapse of marriage and family life. Had Lyndon Johnson and his fellow Democrats promoting the Great Society foreseen what we now suffer, in no small part as a consequence of the government\u2019s supplantation of the family and its perverse incentives for fatherlessness among the poor, they would have blanched\u2014for most of them were decent human beings. But the Vietnam War proved too great a distraction, and that war spawned among a large proportion of young people a reckless disregard for moral conventions generally, especially those having to do with sex, for I daresay the same young people would not have smiled to have their pockets picked or their purses snatched.<\/p>\n

What is true of action, we should see, is also and more powerfully true of principles of action. <\/em>And here our politicians, and especially certain kinds of them, those most prone to the passions of the day, are worse than poor players. They do not even suspect that the game exists. They cannot think of a system of interconnected laws, whereby if you change one, even one that seems minor or superfluous, the change will react organically upon the effects of the others. The Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in Obergefell vs. Hodges <\/em>did not extend marriage to a wider range of people, since every single American adult of sound mind and body already could get married. The ruling redefined marriage. And the Court\u2019s lawyers, who have no special conduit of wisdom regarding either moral philosophy or the pragmatic consequences of a law in dispute, did not bother to ask what the redefinition implied, logically or practically. The victims of their bad decision were invisible to them, not present in the specific place and moment of the decision. Similarly, false conservatives who shrugged and said, \u201cThis doesn\u2019t affect my <\/em>marriage,\u201d did not bother to consider how the abrogation of a fundamental principle of human existence\u2014the principle that men are for women, and women are for men\u2014would play out in the coming generations.<\/p>\n

Read more Morning Greatness: House Speaker Says Trump Will Receive Housing Bill Monday<\/a><\/p>\n

Sometimes what is called for is so daft, you cannot believe that someone could mean it sincerely, as when the recent winner (in fact, if not yet in law) of a congressional seat from Manhattan said that she believes there should be no policing there at all<\/em>. Thus does massive stupidity shield itself, and no one in office will dare call her out on it lest he be vilified as a misogynist. But the stupidity pleases the mob, the herd. To the extent that a people are democratic, they will be prone to the passions of the mob, but those passions seldom bring harm to the rich and powerful, simply because\u2014without civil war and blood in the streets\u2014the rich and powerful are rich and powerful, and mobs are cowardly. So the mobs will shout about eating the rich; but human nature being what it is, they will go after the easiest and most convenient targets. They will destroy small businesses in their own neighborhoods. And since people do not actually like having their shops smashed and set on fire, they will shut down or move away or not trouble themselves to build a shop there in the first place. Thievery impoverishes. It does so even when, or perhaps especially when, it comes with a warrant from the government or with the connivance of those whose job it is to preserve public order.<\/p>\n

You can pretend to be all about fair housing for people of modest means by compelling landlords to hold their rents down to a prescribed limit or, worse, by making it nearly impossible for a landlord to evict a bad tenant with a month\u2019s notice. But you cannot make people want to become landlords or continue to be landlords. You can pass a law that effectively puts me out of business. But you cannot compel me to stay in business to my loss.<\/p>\n

You can, all made up of pity and tenderheartedness, forbid corporal punishment in the schools\u2014and, given the irresponsibility of many teachers, I might agree with you. But you cannot make it so that no student deserves <\/em>to be spanked or even \u201cthrashed,\u201d as the mild-mannered and wise schoolmaster Dr. Thomas Arnold puts it, in Tom Brown\u2019s School Days<\/em>, a semi-autobiographical work about the school at Rugby. If you take away the punishment that hurts but brings no real harm to the body, and you then take away the possibility of expulsion or of being sent to a reformatory, then your tender heart will have made the classroom unbearable for the meekest of your students; you will have turned it over to the democracy of the bullies. Strange, how thick the calluses can be on the tender heart!<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve just passed a new law!\u201d your opponent at the chessboard squawks. \u201cIt\u2019s egalitarianism in action. Pawns will have the power of queens. Otherwise, it\u2019s not fair.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNor is it any game at all,\u201d you say, as you get up from the table, leave the henhouse, and try to find somebody rational to play with.<\/p>\n

Read more America\u2019s Universal Aspiration at 250<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chickens and their relations in the wild have the reputation of being the stupidest birds alive. 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