There was good news on the economic front today.

Employment numbers were up, unemployment percentages were down. The Democrats were quick to take credit, the Republicans of course, said the numbers were insignificant or irrelevant, or both. The former say they saved the economy from the destruction brought about during the Bush years, and have prevented total disaster. The latter claim the problem would have resolved itself by now except for the meddling of the Democrats.

When election time rolls around, the Left will take credit for any improvement, the Right will blame them for any decline, and they probably won’t even be able to agree whether or not there is an improvement or a decline. The same situation will arise after the election, no matter who wins, and no matter what happens.

No matter how bad the economy is, it could always be worse, and no matter how good it is, it could still be better. Get my point yet? We can’t even agree on whether the economy is really good or bad, much less who is responsible for it. It will always be a judgement call. It doesn’t mean that the economy can’t be better or worse, or that one party’s policies are good or bad, the point is, we will never convince the other side. To this day, we are still arguing whether or not Roosevelt beat the Depression, or whether Hoover caused it. There is no way to unambiguously determine whether things are as bad or as good as they could be, or whose fault it is.

Does this mean it doesn’t really matter who is in charge? I don’t think so, some economic policies are no doubt better than others, but many of them probably don’t matter all that much. And what worked in the past may not work now, or tomorrow, or there may be other factors at play we are not even considering. Or maybe the middle road, or some combination is best. But it doesn’t matter anyway. There will never be any partisan agreement on what to do about the economy, or anything else for that matter. Political truth will be what is perceived by most people, and people are not historians. Besides, the winners write the history anyway, right?

So, should we do nothing at all, follow no policy, just go with the flow? Naw, that isn’t going to work either. We will do what we think is right, for whatever reasons we have convinced ourselves are right. I will, and you will. Shit will happen. Even if you are one of those exceptional people that can actually change history, you will never really know for sure whether or not what you accomplished is good or not, although I have no doubt you will have formed an opinion before you go. We have to play to win, otherwise we would be copping out. But we should never forget it is all a game, after all. Tomorrow it will all look very different.

Some things are just unknown, cannot be known. It’s like Uncertainty Principle, only worse because this is not physics. And its not because things are fundamentally unknowable, it’s because they are in principle undecidable. And when you think about it, aren’t those two statements equivalent? They will always be ambiguous, up for grabs, indeterminate. If the Kaiser had won the Great War, or the Nazis had won the Second, or if the Soviets had won the Cold War, the world would be very different now, we would all believe differently than we do now, and we would have no doubt we were right all along..

So if you think you’ve got it all figured out, why can’t you convince everybody else? In fact, why can’t you convince anyone else? You’ve barely managed to convince yourself.