An Adam Smith two-fer

Not that Adam Smith -- this is the guy who used to be the CFO for medical supply company Vante. He got on board with the Chick-fil-A 'protests', videoed himself cussing out Rachel (the Chick-fil-A employee who handed him his free glass of water), the video went viral, his identity was discovered and he was fired. He recorded an apology -- note, he is still a jerk. Part one: From the above website:

UPDATE: On Thursday I got a takedown notice from YouTube Support for "violating privacy." Which I absolutely did not. I've never published any of this guy's personal information, just the YouTube handle he used to post this. It's not my fault he recorded his own face and put it up on YouTube. HE did that.

I was given 48 hours to "take action." In other words, to take down this video. Hey, if they want to take it down, they can take it down. It's their site. So if it disappears sometime Saturday, they can try to explain why.

Anyway. How about that Rachel, huh? I hope Chick-fil-A gives her a big raise and a promotion. What a terrific lady.

Here is the Apology Hat tip to Wizbang for the link. And it is fun how things cascade -- one of the commentors at Wizbang called this behaviour a Preference Cascade. I went to Google it and it is very relevant. From Glenn Harlan Reynolds writing at Tech Central Station back in 2002:

Patriotism and Preferences
Everyone seems to be amazed that the flags are still up, six months after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Have Americans suddenly become more patriotic?

Probably not. More likely, they always have been - they just didn't realize that it was okay to show it.

The muting of open patriotism after the Vietnam era may have been a case of what social scientists call "preference falsification": One in which social pressures cause people to express sentiments that differ from those they really feel. As social scientist Timur Kuran noted in his 1995 book Private Truths, Public Lies, there are all sorts of reasons, good and bad, that lead people not to show how they truly feel. People tend to read social signals about what is approved and what is disapproved behavior and, in general, to modify their conduct accordingly. Others then rely on this behavior to draw wrong conclusions about what people think, and allow those conclusions to shape their own actions.

Oh, not always - and there are always rebels (though often social "rebels" are really just conforming to a different standard). But when patriotism began to be treated as uncool, people who wanted to be cool, or at least to seem cool, stopped demonstrating patriotism, even if they felt it.

When this happened, other people were influenced by the example. In what's known as a "preference cascade," the vanishing of flags and other signs of patriotism from the homes, cars and businesses of the style-setters caused a lot of other people to go along with the trend, perhaps without even fully realizing it, a trend that only strengthened with the politicization of flag displays in several 1980s political campaigns.

The result was a situation in which a lot of people's behavior didn't really match their beliefs, but merely their beliefs about what was considered acceptable. Such situations are unstable, since a variety of shocks can cause people to realize the difference and to suddenly feel comfortable about closing the gap.

All well and good but the idea of the Preference (and Availability) Cascade was initially published (Kuran, Timur and Sunstein, Cass R. , �Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,� Stanford Law Review, 51 (April 1999): 683�768) in 1999 -- the co-Author was Cass Sunstein. This is the same Cass Sunstein that is being thrown under the bus by the Obama regime. From Breitbart:

Radical Obama Regulatory Chief Cass Sunstein Resigns
Cass Sunstein administered the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). Referred to as OIRA (Oh-eye-rah) in wonky academic circles, it is one of the most powerful behind-the-scenes jobs a person can have because it reviews nearly every regulation for an administrative state that continues to expand.

And on Friday, Sunstein resigned from this post and said he would go back to Harvard, signifying another moment in which a key Obama ally decided it was better to jump ship.

Sunstein once argued in a speech at Harvard that the government could be used to eliminate �practices such as ... meat eating,� argued hunting should be banned (�We ought to ban hunting ... that should be against the law ... it�s time now,� he said), and wrote in a 2004 book that animals should be able to sue in a court of law and have humans represents them as clients.

Few represented President Barack Obama�s academic aloofness and air of intellectual superiority more than Sunstein and Obama essentially asked the radical professor what job he would want in his administration.

That would explain why he was given enormous power to review the language of Obamacare. Sunstein also reviewed Dodd-Frank, which is destroying small banks, environmental regulations, new food rules -- such as changing the food pyramid to a plate -- and a variety of fuel efficiency standards. He was also in charge of E.P.A. regulations that created new standards for carbon emissions from various-sized plants, which burdened businesses and created more economic uncertainty for those trying to start businesses or build manufacturing plants at home.

In truth, Sunstein -- and OIRA -- reviewed nearly everything in the vast administrative state. His power is more significant in dealing with under-the-radar rules and regulations that often go unnoticed.

The New York Times aptly described Sunstein as someone who �came to Washington to test his theories of human behavior and economic efficiency in the laboratory of the federal government.�

The sooner we get people of Mr. Sunstein's ilk safely back in their academic playpens, the better. Time for some adult supervision in D.C.