Even if all the King's horses and all the King's men try? That may seem like a silly satirical question, but it is not. In my book I start a chapter with another famous quote from Through the looking glass
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less."
"The question is ," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty "which is to be master - that's all."
And you see folks that is what we are experiencing right now; the question of who is to be master. But the underlying struggle is not transparent. Come look below the break and I'll tell you why that is so very true.
Let me ask you to stop and ask yourself a very important question: What do I really know about how economic systems really work? Take your time. I'd love to hear your answer in the comments below. Next I'll ask you to think about constructing an economic system from scratch. How would one go about this? Let me hear your thoughts on that one below as well. I'll be first. Let me explain my biases. I am not an economist. I am a systems scientist who uses complexity theory to try to understand real world complex systems. One example of which is an economy. But I am also, at the risk of being redundant, a holist. That is, I know that in the real world, complex wholes are more than and often different from the sum of their parts. The words in the last sentence all have well defined meanings. When combined in that particular way they have a very special meaning that is lost if they are taken out of context. The entities in complex systems that are of the nature of the things that arise from the particular way the parts are interacting and which are immediately destroyed when the system is broken down to subunits, or, eventually, its component parts, are what we call "functional components." In the economic world there are some rather obvious examples and they are very evident right now. Things like "trust", "confidence in the system", "fairness", "honesty" and many other concepts that are the invisible glue that hold the system together do not have counterparts in a machine. The difference is whether or not these things are functional parts of the system or merely feelings we can have about it without really affecting the system's operation.
If you have caught the drift of what these integral aspects of an economic system are then you know that my second question above is a trick question. The trick is that the system is not a machine. You can not put it together from scratch because it is very much more than the mere sum of its parts. Adam Smith knew this in a vaugue sort of way and he spoke of it in terms of an "invisible hand". Now that model, that image, is causally too simple. If there is one "invisible hand" there are many. The idea that such things are best left alone and not tampered with has some real merit if you really understand the natiure of complex realities. The problem is that conservatives, of all people, are never prone to look at a system's complexity when they can give a simple model. When that simple model become's their reality, we are forced into situations like the present one. We see them having the audacity to suddenly try to convince us that they can now replace their "invisible hand" and put humpty dumpty back together again!
So what can we do? Well, we can make sure there are constraints that forbid the system from doing things we believe to be undesireable or even harmful. These constraints must be watched carefully because none of us, even the best among us, has anywhere near the understanding of complex system behavior to set it up and let it run. That is, in fact, the role of government. When government stops playing that role the absence of a guiding "invisible hand" becomes both obvious and threatening.
I speak from another bias, but one which I can not separate out from the rest in any clean way. Because of my understanding of systems and their nature, I am also a Democratic Socialist. In my way of viewing the world, what socialism offers is a way of accepting the complex reality of an economic system and therefore a way of trying to design constraints that will allow the system to find a mode of operation that incorporates functional components like justice, fairness, responsibility, etc. The conservative mind fears this model with a passion. The conservative movement has succeeded in convincing even progressives that socialism has some strange inbuilt flaws that make it a threat to all of us. As a result we have all become conservatives with respect to the fundamental values we hold and their relationship to the economic system. So the issue becomes one of whether we will once again trust our values or we will subdue them out of fear of a boogey man. There is no one alive with the ability to "fix" the economy. We do have the power to set up constraints that make it as fair and usefully productive as possible with in humane constraints. Is it not time to think about how to do that?