In my mind’s eye, I envision a street fair—one of those happy community gatherings at which sellers of handcrafted ceramics, funky clothing, herbal remedies, fresh vegetables, and edible delicacies congregate to display their wares for the strolling customers, who chat amiably with the stall-keepers and with one another. Suddenly, amid horrified shrieks and the roar of a giant engine, a truck plows through this placid setting, scattering twisted debris and broken bodies in its wake. Finally, after wreaking a hundred-yard swath of death and devastation, the truck stops, and the driver, Ben Bernanke, climbs down from the cab.“People, people,” he exhorts them in a calm, world-weary voice, “do not panic. I am here to assess the damage and make recommendations for reforms that will prevent a recurrence of this unfortunate and wholly unforeseen act of God.” Whereupon he proceeds to lay out his assessment and recommendations, always speaking in the same quiet, unemotional voice. The stunned and wounded survivors gaze at him in astonishment. “He’s a madman,” one cries out.
Undismayed by the swelling chorus of curses and the groans of the injured, the truck driver addresses the gathering crowd of stunned onlookers. “We must have a strategy that regulates the street-fair system as a whole . . . not just its individual components.” He then methodically lays out a series of recommendations for strengthening the construction materials of stalls and regulating their placement along the street, for ensuring that each transient merchant have an adequate capital cushion against such crises, for monitoring fruitmongers and hippy artists deemed “too big to fail,” to keep them from taking excessive risk. He proposes that the city council consider new ordinances to require that wooden crafts such a birdhouses be made sturdier and to establish a “limited system of insurance” to protect against customer runs on the most daring drug-paraphernalia sellers.
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