[vinceguidry]

The thing about politics and economics is that they build the effects of people breaking the rules right into their calculations. Econ has concepts like breakage, politics has straight-up watched thousands of political orders get upended by various people with various goals including "because fuck you, that's why". And they've quietly worked out ways to correct such perversions and keep everything reasonably smooth.

Nothing breaks the rules of either because failure is built right into the system, the stakes are too high to allow such systems to remain brittle. Capitalism is bigger than individuals, firms, collections of firms, entire industries, groups of industries trying to coerce the system. People once thought OPEC could bring down the global order. Never happened. People thought the very existence of nuclear weapons put humanity on a clear path to annihilation. Also didn't happen, but it was hairy for awhile.

[pavel_lishin]

Just because a system is built to withstand certain rule-breakage doesn't mean that those things are part of the system. Cars come with airbags and seatbelts, but driving into a concrete bollard is not recommended by the manufacturer or the DMV.

[vinceguidry]

Economies aren't cars, they're made of people. A person can respond intelligently to something breaking his economy, a car can't, it can only respond according to the way it was designed.