"Common sense," goes the old saying, "is not so common." Is this just cynicism? If so, why does it describe our political culture so well?

In governments across the nation, common sense is in short supply. Rise above the level of a dogcatcher, and, voilá, folly blooms. And not just in Washington, D.C. In the other Washington, too. And in Colorado. And in most other states, I bet.

Of course I realize the problem of a lack of common sense is not limited to politics. Everybody does something foolish, sometime. But when we are most prone to fail, there's one thing we can often count on: advice. Warnings. Alarmed shouts of "What the . . . ?"

Though the free advice industry rarely gets much praise, there's something I've noticed about a great deal of the advice I've heard: Much of it makes a lot of sense. Common sense.

Consider's today's most common advice: Eat a bit less. Exercise more. Save for "the unexpected." Don't sink all your investments into one stock or one commodity; diversify. Often, most of us would be better off if we followed good advice from friends and family.

But here's where it gets tricky. Though common sense can be found in abundance in much of the advice we get, it does not follow that our advisers are really capable of running our lives.

It doesn't even follow that, after our advisors were placed in charge, their advice would remain sound.

For instance, I'm confident that, after running my neighbor's life for a few months, the pearls of wisdom I had dispensed before would shrink to raisins of folly. Common sense in the advice biz isn't a fixed reservoir; it varies with power.

Fortunately, my neighbor doesn't take orders from me, nor I from him. But the idea isn't irrelevant. Perhaps one reason advice is generally good, as opposed to always off-base, is that the perspective one needs to come to good judgments is voided when being put in charge. Only a few people make good bosses. There's probably a reason for this.

It's worth a test. I wonder which social psychologist would be willing to take on the experiment. . . .

But maybe we don't need to test this at all. Maybe we have something already equivalent: government, politics.

You see, government is no longer in the limited service of fulfilling just a few duties. Governments are into everything these days. Governments mess about in the minutia of our lives; they often attempt to run our lives. And perhaps merely because of this fact, governments do a surprisingly bad job. Whatever reservoir of common sense a person has upon entering the government biz, it usually evaporates pretty quickly.

If you need evidence, a number of state governments have been providing it since the economic downturn of a few years ago.

During a downturn, jobs becomes scarcer, and new businesses don't spring up to meet new opportunities with the readiness we'd like. These two facts are almost the very definition of a "slump," or recession. So money gets tight, and people start pinching pennies, as we used to say.

So what's the reaction of our politicians? Spend more!

But the problem of an economic downturn is that the taxpayers who pay for government spending decrease in number, leaving those who remain to feel an even greater pinch.

Common sense tells consumers that, when jobs are less steady, the future less rosy, and the next job less easy to find, that's not the time to buy the big ticket items or make the long-term purchasing contracts. You cut back.

This should be especially the case for governments, which can quash a recovery all too easily, by raiding the already-attacked pocketbooks of the taxpayers. Continued...