So I caught the last ten minutes of the Diane Rehm show this morning while driving into the office. It was the standard end-of-the-week news roundup with a few pundits, one of whom was David Ignatius from The Washington Post.
On its ten-year anniversary, Diane was asking her guests whether there was any connection between the 9/11 attacks and the country’s current financial crisis. (I love the Diane Rehm show, but here is a simple answer to a stupid question: No.) David Ignatius took it upon himself to answer, and he said something like this (I am paraphrasing from memory):
I think what September 11th showed us is that our systems are not self-correcting. We had this sense that our political and economic systems could take care of themselves. That is what they are supposed to do; a disturbance comes along and they self-correct back into a stable state, back to equilibrium. It took us a long time to get past September 11th and now our financial system doesn’t seem to be doing what it is supposed to be doing, we’re not seeing that self-correction taking place.
Oh, fer gawd’s sake! Where to begin?
