Wise investors learn to ignore the daily fluctuations and the daily stock market news. I am amused at the market reports at the end of the day explaining why the market went up or down. It would have been much more useful to have divulged this insight before the market opened.
Our skills at analysis translates poorly into skills at prediction; we can see all the influencing factors that just occurred, but are blind to influences ahead of us.
This goes double for political news. On the road, you quickly learn that for every ten minutes of new information there is another three hours of repetition and commentary. Most of these ground breaking, earth shattering, paradigm shifting stories end up becoming meaningless moments in the march of history. It is merely marketable noise feeding the co-dependent news junkies who use their outrage to project their self-worth to their bubble-mates.
Trying to get a handle on the political news and state of the union is a balance between the uninformed and the misinformed, between the misleading and the irrelevant. It is time consuming to get complete information and usually not worth the effort because most of the stories pass quickly into the dustbin.
The number of news sources serves more to feed our bias than inform us. I confess than I enjoy reading some analysts and pundits who place the current stories in the context of larger ideas of history and economics. Otherwise I prefer the history books and biographies than bring a larger perspective. I would much rather read about the distinctions between the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt than how inappropriate Jeff Sessions’ meeting with the Russian ambassador was.
Our leaders trend to the pragmatism of electoral politics than the fundamentals of a successful democracy and economy. When we ignore time honored principles in the selection of political solutions we end up creating the next problem rather than solving the last one. These pragmatic solutions usually either add or institutionalize entitlements that become harder to remove. The influence of the federal government expands though proxies into the local crevices of nonprofits, independent government contractors (oxymoron of the week), state and local government agencies, and tax dependents (home mortgage deductions). Restoring sound principles into government that has created so many dependents will be very difficult, though we must still try.
We can tolerate several missteps of any elected official, if their governing principles remain sound, but the news is focused only on the missteps.
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