spinline.net: The Blog

So Drudge has linked to this story headlined “Local Woman Convicted of Drug Fraud Joins Obama at the Podium.” Obama had given some speech at the Rose Garden calling for Congress to extend unemployment benefits. He has a few unemployed people up there with him as props. Now it comes out that one of them, Leslie Macko, has some sort of drug conviction in her past, which is apparently supposed to be scandalous.

Well, who cares? I guess that’s a little embarrassing for Obama, but OK, shit happens. What really caught my eye was this snippet from his speech:

We need to extend unemployment compensation benefits for women like Leslie Macko, who lost her job at a fitness center last year, and has been looking for work ever since. Because she’s eligible for only a few more weeks of unemployment, she’s doing what she never thought she’d have to do. Not at this point, anyway. She’s turning to her father for financial support.

God forbid!

Seriously? Obama thinks that government benefits should be extended so that people don’t have to turn to their own families for help?

The “not at this point, anyway” is telling. See, once we hit a certain age, it just isn’t dignified to ask for help from Mom and Dad. The social stigma of taking government handouts has now sunk below that of turning to your own parents for support, I guess.

Given Obama’s base of support among the coastal urban under-40 set, it probably wasn’t a bad idea for him to say what he did.

At the Takimag podcast, Richard Spencer and Jack “The Southern Avenger” Hunter” seem pretty enthused about the Tea Party phenomenon. (Click the box to play.)

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But for a little perspective, see Kevin DeAnna’s post at Takimag, where he writes:

With all the tea parties, the infighting between the Alternative Right and the non-Alternative Right and all the other drama, the brutal reality is that Obama, the stimulus, and the managed social democracy that we are moving towards are all popular.

Well, that’s true. But the emergence of some kind of meaningful, articulate opposition to the regime has to be a good thing. If the American Right is now represented by the Tea Party movement rather than Sean Hannity telling us all how awesome Dick Cheney is, things are looking up.

See here for my earlier thoughts about the tea parties.

Good stuff on the economy over at the Lew Rockwell podcast.

This week you’ve got Gerald Celente…

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… and Michael Shedlock.

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UPDATE: that’s “depression” as in economic depression, of course.

Click on the boxes to play.

The economist Robert Murphy’s book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal is out. It’s an attempt to overturn the received wisdom about the Depression (i.e. Hoover espoused laissez-faire policies, World War II was responsible for the recovery, etc.) through an Austrian treatment.

This looks pretty good. Murray Rothbard wrote a classic work on the Depression, but I was frustrated by the fact that it ended its analysis with the end of Hoover’s term, when a Rothbardian take on the Roosevelt terms and the effect of World War II would have been so valuable. It also is pretty dense and dry in parts — not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s a scholarly treatise, after all. But Murphy’s book looks to be a less difficult treatment of the subject while still being analytically rigorous. It’s also gotten effusive reviews from Jeff Tucker and Robert Wenzel.

In case you missed it, I wrote an article at Doublethink touching on the same issues, which I had considered to be the last word on the subject, but apparently this Murphy guy thinks he has something more to add.

P.S. Who would have thought three years ago that a new book about the Great Depression would be so topical? How far we’ve fallen…

I’ve got a post up at Conservative Donnybrook about the tea parties, Krugman, Gingrich… Read it!

Via the Mises blog, it’s a video of John O’Sullivan interviewing Hayek!

F.A. Hayek Interviewed By John O’Sullivan from FEE on Vimeo.

One thing that strikes me is how good O’Sullivan is on TV. He’s like someone playing a BBC presenter on a Monty Python sketch, except that in this case nothing funny happens.

I am sure everyone is as euphoric as the Street is over today’s surprising bank profit announcement.

But go over to Mish, who wrote just this Tuesday:

Lies, coverups, distortions, and no transparency are the norm for the Treasury Department and the Fed, so it should come as no surprise that Bank Stress Test Results Delayed For Earnings.

The U.S. Treasury Department is planning to delay the release of any completed bank stress test results until after the first-quarter earnings season to avoid complicating stock market reaction, a source familiar with Treasury’s discussions said Tuesday.
…

It’s earnings season and banks are going to pretend they are making money (or losing less than they are), and the Treasury does not want to interrupt those lies with stress test results.

Furthermore, the one thing we know for sure is the longer the Treasury delays reporting and the less detailed information the Treasury provides, the worse the actual results, regardless of what is actually reported.

As long as I’m passing along stuff that’s up at mises.org, I should strongly encourage you all to stop everything and watch this fantastic Peter Schiff speech.

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Good stuff up at mises.org from the recent Austrian Scholars Conference.

First, you’ve got Dan McCarthy of AmConMag speaking about American exceptionalism and the Right.

Download Daniel McCarthy at ASC

And then there’s an interesting talk by the historian Marshall DeRosa on the constitutional implications of the bailout, specifically with regard to Article I, Section 10, precluding states from “impairing the Obligation of Contracts” — a power assumed to be denied to the Federal government as well. Needless to say, it’s basically a dead letter now.

Download Marshall DeRosa at ASC

And much more at Mises Media!

Is one in every 50 children really homeless?

See Kausfiles for the answer! (hint: no.)

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.

On the subject of bailouts and inflation, here’s a lively Taki’s Magazine podcast with Thomas Woods, Jack “The Southern Avenger” Hunter, and Takimag’s Richard Spencer. Woods has been making the rounds promoting his new book on the financial crisis, which, last I checked, was #1 in the economics category on Amazon.com.

I wrote a little piece on the Austrian theory of the business cycle for Doublethink Online. Check it out.

Since I’m no expert in Austrian economics, to say the least, I asked Jeffrey Tucker of the Mises Institute to read it over before it was published, which he graciously agreed to do, for which I am very grateful. What a nice guy!

Richard Spencer has a pretty good postmortem on the semi-defunct webzine Culture11.

I’m sad to see C11 go, as their heterogeneous collection of conservative-libertarian contributors seemed to promise to enliven the conversation beyond the intellectual cages in which such GOP organs as National Review lock themselves. But it never managed to find its voice.

Spencer suggests that C11 had its plug pulled by its funders Bill Bennett and Steve Forbes for other than financial reasons, speculating that they might have been a bit befuddled at the direction Culture11 had taken. Of course, if C11 had succeeded in cultivating an alternative rightist voice, the plug might have been pulled even sooner, I reckon.

Meanwhile, head to Conservative Donnybrook for my latest thoughts on the stimulus!

Look! It’s a graph of US real estate prices plotted to an animation of a roller coaster.

Unfortunately the data ends at the end of 2006. But I guess it’s pretty easy to imagine.