I happened to see an article about Brit Prime Minister Rishi Sunak "watering down" the UK's pedal-to-the-metal Charge of the Light Brigade towards Net Zero. So far so good. But the picture with the article had Sunak standing behind a podium that announced in all-caps:

LONG-TERM DECISIONS
FOR A BRIGHTER FUTURE

And do you know what I thought?

I thought: No, Rishi! Whenever a government starts thinking long-term it makes a mess of it. Hello Stalin; hello Mao. And there is a simple reason for that.

Politics is all about winning the next election. Government is all about ginning up the next war. After the election the politicians hand out the free stuff to their supporters, and after the war the government hands out a "Bonus" -- maybe -- to the surviving veterans. And then we all start over.

So to all you experts and scientists I suggest these two "real simple" rules.

Rule One: Humans do not have a clue about what is coming next.
Rule Two: Especially politicians and bureaucrats.

How yer doin', Fauci?

That is why humans need soothsayers and prophets and economic forecasters. And even then, they get it wrong, most of the time. For instance, here is my chart of fearless inflation predictions from the federal budget, courtesy of the Office of Management and Budget. See my US Inflation Analysis page.

You can see where the "transitory" inflation Narrative came from. The OMB bureaucrats forecast no inflation until the FY23 budget. And since then, the OMB scientists and experts keep forecasting that everything will be back to normal in a year, two years max.

It's odd, isn't it, that the climate experts and scientists can fearlessly project global temperatures far into the future while the experienced OMB chappies -- who have been around, fearlessly forecasting, since the invention of the Bureau of the Budget in 1921 -- can't even forecast next year's inflation in the little old US of A.

But LONG-TERM DECISIONS.

And did you climatistas ever think that maybe runaway climate change -- including, OMG, flash floods in New York City -- is God's way -- okay, Gaia's way -- of clearing His planet Earth of pesky Just Stop Oil activists for a fresh start?

Now, for those of you who think that, rather than experts, there are cunning Jews and "secret societies" controlling the world -- see this delightful account -- I have one question: you think that Klaus Schwab and the Bilderbergers and the Rosicrucian’s and the Illuminati are really that smart?

There's a delicious history of central banking incompetence over at the Epoch Times, starting with the founding of the Bank of England in 1694.

The boom-bust cycle was born, what we now call the “business cycle.”

And somehow our own dear Federal Reserve has just two throttle settings: Fight Inflation and Fight Recession.

But LONG-TERM DECISIONS.

I shouldn't be too hard on the central bankers. Rulers have been wrecking the credit system to finance their wars since time began. For instance, there was England's Edward III trying to finance the Hundred Years War with Italian bankers.

He borrowed 600,000 silver florins from the Peruzzi banking family and another 900,000 from the Bardi family. In 1345 Edward III defaulted on his payments, causing both banking families to go bankrupt.

If I were Italian PM Giorgia Meloni, I'd be demanding reparations from the Brits.

There have been some long-term decisions that worked at least in the medium-term. I am thinking of Commie Spy Harry Dexter White and Gay Icon John Maynard Keynes and their Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. It kept the pretense that the gold price was still $35 an ounce after a jolly old world war that involved pedal-to-the-metal-spending and credit expansion. Fortunately, their hall of mirrors didn't collapse until a convenient Republican, Richard Nixon, was president in 1971, so no objection from the Bilderbergers.

I don't want you to think that I have an irrational beef against all secret societies and conspiracies. I have a soft spot for the knightly orders that came out of the Crusades. The Teutonic Order did yeoman work in East Prussia and the Baltics. Without them, I doubt if my pal Kant could have revolutionized philosophy in Königsberg -- now Kaliningrad -- back in the late 18th century.

Talk about long-term! From Kant and his dictum that we cannot know things-in-themselves we get to the ridiculous idea that space and time are relative and that particles are waves and pretty soon Commie-adjacent Oppie is blowing up New Mexico. And the twin-slits effect and computers on a chip and Deep Thought and AI create far-right conspiracy sites broadcasting pictures of Rep. Jamaal Bowman accidentally setting off a fire-alarm in the Capitol and suggesting he did it a-purpose: the racists!

Don't doubt me on this. The Bilderbergers had it all planned out a hundred years ago.

Thank goodness Congress has passed and our President has signed a 45-day stop-gap spending bill. There's your real long-term decision-making.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.