spinline.net: The Blog

Hot Air’s got a great step-by-step exposition of Chris Dodd’s corruption. H/T RS McCain.

Thomas Woods’s “Meltdown” is going to make the New York Times Bestseller List. Holy cow!

I’ve been thinking about whether there is actually any hope for a genuinely free-market critique of statism and government interventionism breaking through into some kind of critical mass amidst our current travails.

In the 1930s, nobody seemed to notice the abject failure of the New Deal, which, instead of discrediting government economic “management” forever, served as the opening chapter in an era of a vastly enlarged centralized state that has continued to this day. And now who knows what we’re in for? Now, as before, laissez-faire is written off as utterly discredited. Is there any more hope for opposition now than there was during the Depression?

On the one hand, you’ve got Woods hitting the NYT Bestsellers with a full-throated Austrian-school manifesto. And there’s the Ron Paul phenomenon — with the hodgepodge character of the Paulite movement, there are some inherent centrifugal forces acting against its keeping any coherence, and the end of the presidential campaign inevitably led to some loss of momentum. But that’s counteracted by the newfound attention to Paul’s pronouncements in light of his dire predictions pretty much coming true, and the emergence of some promising Paul-affiliated follow-on organizations.

And we also have the Mises Institute, constantly churning out new freedom-minded scholarly work and popular polemics, and making a tremendous volume of scholarship available for free to all through its invaluable and heavily-trafficked Web site.

On the other hand, Henry Hazlitt wrote editorials for the New York Times during the 1930s. Can you imagine?

Austrian economics has never dominated the academy, but in the 1930s, F.A. Hayek had a prominent post — and a formidable reputation — at the London School of Economics.

But little laissez-faire outposts in the establishment did nothing to stop the onslaught of statism during the 1930s, and those lights didn’t last long before they were extinguished. Hayek was eclipsed by Keynes, and The New York Times is The New York Times. I guess that’s just the nature of establishments — they represent powerful interests by definition, and power inevitably seeks more power. There’s no room there for decentralizers.

I mean, look what happened to the conservative movement when it became inextricably wedded to the Republican party. From Goldwater to George W. Bush. “Extremism in the defense of libery is no vice” to TARP.

It seems that if there’s any prospect for meaningful opposition, it’s through the kind of new pathways being forged by today’s alternative Right.

So maybe there’s some hope after all.

Read it. Obamanomics satire!

Free sample:

WASHINGTON — President-Elect Barack Obama called on Congress to quickly pass a new fiscal stimulus package that would provide nearly $100,000 trazillion gaquillion frijillion in an effort to revive the U.S. economy, which some experts believe has entered a recession.

“Every economist I’ve ever heard of agrees what we need now is significantly more government investment to offset the negative effects of whatever it is that is happening,” Obama said at his Monday press conference. “Accordingly, I and my team of advisors have developed a comprehensive plan that will shore up our financial institutions, put jobless Americans back to work, allow everyone in a house to keep it no matter what, rescue any failing bank or business, provide a hot meal to anyone who is hungry, improve the well being of all citizens, and give a puppy or kitten to every child who wants one.”

From the NYT:

And yet, Mr. Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush “the football,” an allusion to the “nuclear football,” or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.

Obama’s transition team is adopting stringent rules for ex-lobbyists:

John D. Podesta, a co-chairman of the Obama transition, called the restraints “the strictest, the most far-reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history.”

Doesn’t that sound kind of familiar?

Bill Clinton, 1992: “Mine will be the most ethical administration in the history of the Republic.”

Pelosi, 2006: “The Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history.”

I don’t think history can take all this ethics!

South Park on the election.

Some thoughts on the Candidate from Wall Street, by me.

Well, I guess I should have something to say about yesterday’s big news, so here goes: I think it’s great that Adobe has hired image manipulation guru Shai Avidan and it would be cool if some of this technology made it into Photoshop and maybe even Web browsers sooner rather than later. Here’s a demo of his work:

And in other news, you probably heard that Barack Obama has won the presidency, which if you’ve been listening to various Republican hacks, represents the end of life as we know it on this planet. 

Jack Hunter’s take is in the video below. Some choice quotes:

Conservatives should not be the least bit upset that Obama won; they should rejoice.  The Republican party needed to get its ass kicked before anything might improve. …

Throughout this election, arguing over whether Barack Obama or John Mccain was better for America’s future was like arguing whether the Backstreet Boys or ‘N Sync would be better for the future of rock and roll. Eventually, fans of both groups grew up, realized they sucked, and made more substantive selections. It’s time for conservatives to grow up. 

For the record, I would vote for ‘N Sync.

Drudge is hyping some audio clips of a 2001 Obama interview with the headline “2001 OBAMA: TRAGEDY THAT ‘REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH’ NOT PURSUED BY SUPREME COURT.” Here’s the YouTube:

This is the Obama quote in question:

One of, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was that because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political, and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power that bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

So you can see that the Drudge headline is misleading, to say the least. The “tragedy,” according to Obama, is that the civil rights movement focused on the courts too much. The other included clips continue in this vein, with Obama arguing that the legislature, not the courts, is the most appropriate venue through which to enact a progressive agenda. Gosh, but this all sounds so familiar. Who else is it who is always making the same point? Let’s see…

Color me un-alarmed.

UPDATE: Over at Volokh.com, Orin Kerr and David Bernstein have more. Kerr writes:

Based on the audio posted, however, I find it hard to identify Obama’s normative take. When Obama says that he’s “not optimistic” about using the courts for major economic reform, and when he points out the practical and institutional problems of doing so, it’s not entirely clear whether he is (a) gently telling the caller why the courts won’t and shouldn’t do such things; (b) noting the difficulties of using the courts to engage in economic reform but not intending to express a normative view; or (c) suggesting that he would have wanted the Warren Court to have tried to take on such a project.

My best sense is that Obama was intending (a), as his point seems to be that the 60s reformers were too court-focused. But at the very least, it’s not at all clear that Obama had (c) in mind. It doesn’t help that only parts of the audio are posted: Given the obvious bias of the person who edited the audio, it’s probably a decent bet that the rest of the audio makes the comments seem more innocuous than they do in the excerpts. …

Full transcript of the Obama interview is here.

UPDATE 2: An Obama spokesman said, “In this seven year old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all.”

That’s a good PR sentence. It’s carefully phrased to sound like the equivalent of this: “Obama said that the courts should not get into the business of redistributing wealth at all,” which would not be true. But all it’s really saying is that Obama took no position on whether the courts should redistribute wealth, which is true. It’s almost lawyerly!

See my answer here. Spoiler alert: NO.

In other news, I haven’t been doing much blogging lately because I’ve been spending some time moving to a new host, which is a big hassle but totally worth it when your current host is PowWeb, The Most Horrible Web Host In The Universe^TM.

The NYT: “News Media Feel Limits to Georgia’s Democracy.”

Mr. Saakashvili, a telegenic New York-trained lawyer, came to power in 2004 after a wave of protests known as the Rose Revolution, promising to shed the authoritarianism of the past. But Lincoln A. Mitchell, a Georgia expert at Columbia University, contended that Mr. Saakashvili now presided over a “semiauthoritarian” state, while saying that it was the most democratic of the former Soviet states in the region.

“The reality is that the Saakashvili government is the fourth one-party state that Georgia has had during the last 20 years, going back to the Soviet period,” he said. “And nowhere has this been more apparent than in the restrictions on media freedom.”

… Some critics said the culture of censorship was particularly pronounced during the brief war with Russia in August. They accused the government of obfuscating reality to portray Georgia as both victim and victor.

Is it worth risking nuclear war with Russia to defend these guys? John McCain seems to think so. So be sure to vote for… well, Obama wants to risk nuclear war on behalf of this two-bit thugocracy too. Oh well.

Here’s more from last week’s AmConMag:

As soon as he seized power, Saakashvili’s regime unleashed an orgy of arrests of officials. In the name of that old Communist chestnut, an “anti-corruption campaign,” hundreds were rounded up. For months, Georgians were treated daily to live broadcasts of ministers, officials, and judges being bundled into police cars in the middle of the night. No doubt some Georgians relished the sight of the mighty falling, but many probably feared that one day they might get the 3 a.m. knock on the door themselves.

This was all lapped up by Saakashvili’s cheerleaders in the Western media. The Georgian president has indeed achieved extraordinary success in presenting his fiefdom as a Jeffersonian paradise. This is partly due to Georgia’s use of operatives in Washington, such as John McCain’s foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, and a PR firm in Brussels. But more importantly, it is the result of a virulent form of Western self-delusion. Faced with seemingly intractable domestic problems, in which different political actors have to be balanced, Western states like to indulge in occasional but dangerous flights of foreign-policy escapism. We imagine that we can free subject peoples with our bombs. The image of a victim nation has now become an easy psychological trigger that can be applied indiscriminately to Bosnian Muslims, Iraqis, and now Georgians. These unknown peoples and nations are but a blank screen on which we project our fantasies. Our image of them says much more about us that it does about reality.

Daniel Larison with some sober thoughts on the financial crisis and the bailout, on which our wise and esteemed party leaders and president are purportedly nearing a deal. Silver lining: if a bailout agreement is reached before John McCain even arrives on the scene, then his ludicrous and embarassing stunt will look even stupider. (Update: whoops, I guess he got there in time to mug for the cameras, dang.)

Larison:

Something that I have noticed over the last decade or so is the insistence, usually but not always by Boomers, that such-and-such a crisis or threat is the greatest we have ever faced.  Put it down to generational self-absorption or self-importance, or put it down to wanting to outdo the experience of their parents, but at several points in the last decade there have been hysterical reactions on both sides of the political spectrum to events that some large part of the population deems the greatest, most important or worst thing to have ever happened.  The threat of jihadism, we have been regularly told, is greater than any threat we have faced before, which is objectively absurd.  Some of the more excitable antiwar activists have repeatedly said that the war in Iraq is the greatest blunder in U.S. history (not so–entry into WWI was), as if to invest the conflict and opposition to it with a kind of world-historical importance that it will remarkably probably not have in retrospect.  As with opposing jihadism without hysterics, it is possible to oppose the war and recognize it as deeply wrong without these theatrics.   Now we are in the midst of a financial crisis, and it is very serious, but it is as if one cannot recognize something to be serious and very worrisome without engaging in neocon-like hyperbole.  If there is a danger of economic contraction, it can’t just be like any old recession.  No, it must be a second Depression, and if you don’t accept this fearmongering you are not to be taken seriously.  When people are trying to scare you like this, it is because they are covering over some weakness in their argument.  They make it seem as if they are trying to get you to focus on real dangers, but they are more often distracting you from their abuses or errors.

Douthat writes of the McCain campaign’s paucity of ideas:

Writing in response to my suggestion that the McCain campaign has wanted for creativity, I think Rich Lowry makes a strong case that they’ve been quite tactically imaginative [...] What I had in mind, though, was ideological creativity – the sort of creativity, for instance, that might have provided stronger talking points for your new-minted veep nominee to trot out when the subject turns to, say, the state of the economy. The McCain camp has found exactly one good domestic-policy talking point to call their own – namely, offshore drilling – and that one was more or less forced on them by rising gas prices and pressure from right-wing talk radio. They have a potentially decent health care plan that they don’t want to talk about because they don’t know how to sell it, and a grab-bag of tax proposals that they don’t want to talk about because there’s not much for the middle class and the numbers don’t add up … and then, of course, they have earmarks. (ZZZzzzzz …) Which is why they’re spending most of their time trying to tear down Barack Obama – because the case against the Democratic nominee is the best case they really have.

But with Palinmania, the McCain campaign might not really have to make a case that’s any more compelling or coherent. She’s drawing in just the kind of middle-class heartland voters that a populist platform would target, but largely through identity politics rather than, you know, ideas or anything. I know that Douthat is a big Palin fan, and perhaps with good reason, but her inclusion on the McCain ticket might be the worst possible thing to happen to the kind of reformist conservatism he’s promoting. Palin is the GOP’s get-out-of-jail-free card, and lets them put off any confrontation with their own incompetence and intellectual bankruptcy for another day.

From Camille Paglia’s latest:

As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama’s efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin’ his g’s like there’s no tomorrow. It’s analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona.

Great minds think alike, right?

If there is anything that people can see through right away, and that is never appealing, it’s this kind of affected folksiness. It’s viscerally off-putting!

This is, I believe, the second installment of The Southern Avenger’s video series for Taki’s mag.

Voting for McCain because Palin is on the ticket would be like going to a Hannah Montana concert because Jimi Hendrix was on guitar. No matter how great Hendrix is, he would be obligated to play Montana’s crappy tunes.

Hey, The Right, Palin is nice and all, but at the end of the day you’re swooning over John freaking McCain. You’re a cheap date!