It is Like Riding a Bicycle

From Nik Faldo:

"The elimination of self reliance destroys civilization. Now explain why liberals insist on destroying not only the people they claim to help, but also everyone else.....including themselves. The only explanation I have is that liberalism is a mental illness. History, facts, evidence and data convince none of them. Their minds cannot grasp reality. Liberals are mentally ill. How do you explain it. Blog post answer please"

This is a quick off-the-cuff answer.

The human mind wants a simple control structure where every output will have one, and only one, input that controls it.  It desires that input be intuitively connected to the output.  It also desires that no "unintended consequences" ever occur regardless of the scope and duration of the input.

Riding a Bicycle

Your dad lied to you.

You turn a bicycle by leaning in the direction you wish to go and then using the handle bars to maintain your balance.  Think about it.  You don't steer with the handle bars.  You maintain your balance with the handle bars. Changing direction is an intended consequence of maintaining your balance.

The reason it is hard to teach a kid to ride a bike is two-fold.  The obvious difficulty is that balance and direction are coupled.  The other difficulty is that we get sucked into the "must be intuitive" trap.  Of course you steer with the handle bars....it is just like the steering wheel of a car.  Wrong.

Story Time:

I used to work in an automotive assembly plant.  Very expensive tools were used to position the doors, fenders and hood.  Many measurements were taken every hour to ensure that the product gaps and flushes were in specification.  Adjustments were constantly made to finesse the fits.

Every six months the tools were returned to nominal.  It took that long for the shim-packs (the method for adjusting the tools) to max out at 15 mm.  It became necessary to either replace the bolts with longer bolts or to reset everything to "nominal".

The reset to nominal, 5mm of shim pack, resulted in 2 days of painful running as adjustments were made to finesse the fits.....  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Every six months almost like clockwork.

The problem, in part, was that each door (and the hood) is a rigid, three dimensional object. One cannot change one measurement without impacting several others. They all tie together as a system.  The right rear door must be floated (high and low gap and flush) to best fit to the right, rear quarter and the seal margins must be in spec.  The right front door must be floated to best fit to the right rear door and the seal margins must be in spec.  The right fender must be fit to the right front door and fitted to the hood.  The hood must fit to the left fender, which fits to the left front door, which fits to the left rear quarter.  Then the ripples would bounce back in the other direction.

 Essentially, the engineers who wrote the control plan were attempting to control a highly coupled, multivariate problem with a piecewise, "intuitive", univariate approach.  These were smart engineers and it was implemented by card-carrying, journeymen skilled trades people.  It gave the illusion of working.  Almost.

A biological analogy would be when you throw your back out because you are wearing an old pair of shoes with one insole slightly more beat up than the other.  The pain is in your back.  The fix is in your shoe.

Liberals

"The rent is too damned high for working people.  Lower the rent."

OK, it is good to be compassionate.  But why is the rent high?  Because the bottom of the market is set by vendored payments...the welfare system.    And what happens if rents are artificially held down?  Landlords will abandon the properties to the four horsemen of entropy:  Rats, Rot, Leaks and Depreciation.

Two avenues are available to let the rent market find its organic equalibrium:
-Stop paying rent as part of the welfare program
-Keep your hands off the market

The Liberal sees the pain in the lower back and wants morphine injections.  That is the fast, intuitively pleasing fix.  Liberals demonstrate an inability to ask, "And then what happens?"  The desire for a univariate, uncoupled control matrix is confused with the existence of one. 

Sane people live in the world of "Is".  The insane live in the world of "Should".  So liberalism is insanity rather than mental illness.

The answer?

The stock solution in control theory is to create a new, synthetic system of N dimension that is decoupled...no off-diagonal terms in the control matrix.  The new system can be mapped to-and-from the system where we take measurements.  The math in the synthetic system is almost trivial...but it is not intuitively pleasing.

We do it in bike riding.  Our new control variable "turn" combines both "lean" and "turn handlebars" in a very specific ratio that also incorporates "travel speed" in the mapping.  Is is so far beneath our level of consciousness that we unwittingly lie to our children when we try to teach them to ride a bike.

Nik, I don't know if this is what you were looking for with your question.