Allowed to Fail

In my hum­ble opin­ion, we need to allow things in the fail­ure mode to fail. I am no expert econ­o­mist, but I do know the gen­eral dynam­ics of suc­cess and fail­ure. Fail­ure may be painful and embar­rass­ing, but that is what you have to have before you even­tu­ally suc­ceed in a greater way. Jet engine com­pa­nies put pro­peller engine com­pa­nies out of busi­ness. Prop­ping up the pro­peller plants (for­give the pun) would have only been toss­ing money into the wind. A bailout of an out­dated prod­uct would have done noth­ing more than fill ware­houses with engines that would never sell. Times change. All of the money in the world will not turn back the clock.
My favorite para­ble is the para­ble of the Prodi­gal Son. It is the story of the even­tual spir­i­tual suc­cess of a young man that is allowed to fail. It was risky, but it saved a per­son from him­self. Right now we, as a coun­try, are send­ing Prodi­gal Sons of all sorts money. To tem­porar­ily pre­vent the pain of a rel­a­tive few, we are inflict­ing pain on the many. The many will not notice this for a while, so the enabling action does not seem painful at all. Just wait. The pain is com­ing.
We have a dynamic econ­omy that shares its losses through insur­ance pre­mi­ums and the tax sys­tem. This coun­try works well, because it has bank­ruptcy pro­ce­dures. We are allowed to fail once in a while. That is healthy. How­ever, using other people’s money to tem­porar­ily avoid inevitable fail­ure is just delay­ing the cri­sis, and let­ting it get big­ger in the mean time. It is all too tempt­ing to be the cul­tural code­pen­dent to an addic­tive sys­tem of over-consumption and poor judg­ment.
Fail­ure is about admit­ting bad plans, then going on to cor­rect them. It is not about denial, blam­ing, and increas­ing the size of the debt or com­pound­ing the mis­takes. It takes a mature per­son to say, “this is not work­ing and it never will” — then let­ting the chips fall where they may. Col­lec­tive denial is no dif­fer­ent than indi­vid­ual denial. The sooner the sys­tem sobers up the bet­ter. True com­pas­sion demands respon­si­bil­ity.
I know suc­cess because I know fail­ure even more. I respect fail­ure. It is a nec­es­sary ingre­di­ent in life. Edi­son failed a thou­sand times before he suc­ceeded in cre­at­ing the light bulb. It would have been a stu­pid mis­take to sim­ply pour end­less amounts of money on exper­i­ment num­ber 886 or 924. He was a suc­cess because he learned from each fail­ure. Reward­ing fail­ure is insane. There is noth­ing noble about it. Finan­cial repen­tance beats denial and indulgence.