The Great Cycle of Human Stupidity
Humans are unpredictably predictable. When circumstances surrounding us are overwhelming and pressing, we try to change them. Sometimes aggressively (with revolutions) some other times more passively (quitting your job). Interestingly, this also applies to love life: after a long run of dating people with characteristic "X", the next person you look for is someone with the opposite characteristic, because you now know the disadvantages of that personal trait. The pendulum metaphor is at work. In societies, the metaphor applies to politics, and of course also to matters of economic policy. Totalitarian societies (like Pinochet's Chile or Franco's Spain) topple regimes looking for the longed freedom they did not have before. Societies that reach economic freedom (the U.S.A.) realize that opening their borders to trade allows other nations to get in and "steal" profits from domestic businesses via price undercutting and fierce competition and look to revert th...