There's a disconnect in the way we discuss cause and effect. Here's an example,
A man is driving a runaway train. He's determined to run that train way to fast for the upcoming curve. He refuses to listen to anybody. You are standing by the switch. You are told to throw the switch that will cause the train to go into a siding. The train will self destruct. The driver will be killed. Instead, you do nothing. The train continues down the path and flips on the curve, flies through the air and destroys a school. Hundreds of children are killed.
Who killed the children?
There is a school of thought that would say you did. You had the opportunity to stop the train. By shirking that moral responsibility your culpability is equivalent to the driver's.
I don't believe that primary fault lies with the person that fails to prevent a failure. Now, that doesn't mean I don't believe that there is no responsibility here. Just that the primary criminal is the driver not the signaler.
Pat Buchanan disagrees. Apparently, he's channeling Milton Friedman who also disagrees. In his column he says of the 29 crash: "A Fed-created bubble burst, causing margin calls..." etc. And later, quoting Friedman, "The Federal Reserve had the power and the knowledge to have stopped [the loss]. And there were people at the time who were... urging them to do that. So it was... clearly a mistake of policy that led to the Great Depression."
Let's see. It wasn't the rampant speculators. They bear no responsibility?
It's a similar line to connect 1923 French military intervention to Weimar currency devaluation to the wipeout of the German middle class to discrediting the democratic republic to Hitler's rise to power to World War II. Clearly, it's France's fault.
It's the corollary to the classic morally challenged business decisions: "Well, if I don't do it, somebody else will." That might even be true. But that doesn't excuse the action even a little bit.
As much as we'd like to blame France and excuse speculators, or that train driver, proximate cause must trump secondary permissions. If you do something morally, ethically or financially culpable, it's your fault. Not Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama, the janitor cleaning up the school or (sigh) France.
BTW: More on Ada Lovelace Day:
Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here. Here.
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