Wow, Ross Douthat has replaced Bill Kristol as a token conservative at the Times. This is a big improvement. (That’s not sarcasm, it really is a big improvement.)
Personally I think they should have hired Paul Gottfried but I’ll take it.
FOX news this morning was full of good cheer about our latest victory over racism and its reporters were vibrating with good will (or else laughing gas) as they read Senator McCain’s concession remarks about how “we have overcome the prideful arrogance of bigotry.” So much for the neocons’ no longer even feigned dread of Obama’s presidency!
Now there is nothing unusual about the official Right’s movement toward the left being observed. Among neocons this shifting is standard procedure, as I learned from Daniel Bell, when he told me in a letter in 1986 about his tactics and those of his friends in the 1972 presidential race. Danny and Irving [Kristol, I guess] had “agreed” to take different sides in the Nixon-McGovern race, so that everyone in their group would come out on top. Neocons are always concerned about taking and keeping power, and if they like to foul other people’s nests as they move about, one has to be a fool or else in their pay not to observe this defining trait. In any case I don’t feel sorry for either the thoroughly compromised GOP or its adjunct conservative movement. Both deserved to have their nests fouled.
Paul Gottfried, please just come out and tell us how you feel about neocons. Stop pussyfooting around!
Jacob Weisberg has written an extraordinary piece at Slate placing the blame for the financial meltdown libertarians, and claiming that libertarianism is therefore discredited forever, end of story. Note I didn’t say that he was “arguing” for this proposition; he basically proclaims it to be self-evidently true in the second paragraph, by which time he is already comparing libertarians to Communist bitter-enders during the fall of the Soviet Union.
There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong.
Oh, thanks for summarizing! “To summarize, I’m right.” Why waste time having an actual debate over the causes of the in-progress financial collapse when there’s fun to be had sneering at these nerdy, doctrinaire libertoids and their nutty-yet-dangerous theories?
It seems that in Weisberg’s view, the financial crisis is, at its root, about the failure to regulate credit derivative markets. Weisberg places primary blame on three people: Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, and SEC chairman Christopher Cox. However, in the linked Washington Post piece about resistance to increased oversight of the derivatives market, Clinton’s treasury secretary Robert Rubin emerges as one of the chief head-in-the-sand villains. That’s funny, why was he never mentioned in Weisberg’s article? Oh, by the way, Rubin in 2004 wrote a paean to his own brilliance in managing the Clinton economy called “In an Uncertain World,” ghostwritten by one… Jacob Weisberg! So I guess that means Rubin, Rubinomics, and Jacob Weisberg are discredited forever!
Of course, it is correct to cast Greenspan as a malefactor in this story, but not because he was a deregulator — Weisberg ignores the fact that Greenspan was a powerful government official responsible for frequent and dramatic government interventions in the free market by pumping monetary stimulus into overdrive, thus enabling the dotcom and real estate boom/bust cycles. But curiously, the housing bubble is not mentioned at all in Weisberg’s article.
And ironically, it was the most doctrinaire libertarians imaginable, those of the Austrian school, who have been warning of the coming implosion of the housing market and impending financial crisis for years. See here, here, here, and here for examples. Has Jacob Weisberg, too, been sounding the alarm? I wonder if any such warnings can be found in Robert Rubin’s book.
However, the meme that lack of regulation killed the economy seems like it’s going to quickly solidify into the new conventional wisdom, which is bad news for — well, for the whole world, I guess. Murray Rothbard once wrote:
If government wishes to see a depression ended as quickly as possible, and the economy returned to normal prosperity, what course should it adopt? The first and clearest injunction is: don’t interfere with the market’s adjustment process. The more the government intervenes to delay the market’s adjustment, the longer and more grueling the depression will be, and the more difficult will be the road to complete recovery.
It’s clear that the government is now involved in an all-out effort to do the exact opposite of what Rothbard recommended. If he was right, things are going to get ugly.
(See also Schwenkler, Gregory, Woods, Douthat, Ponnuru, Miron.)
UPDATE: see my piece on Doublethink for more on bailouts, monetary policy, and depression.
Oliver Stone’s new movie is not as much fun as the previews — which leads me to think that the optimal format for a Bush biopic might be a music video — and most of the performances are pretty bad. In fact, watching it felt a little like sitting through a not-very-funny, two-hour-long “Saturday Night Live” sketch without Tina Fey.
Too bad. I’d been looking forward to seeing this; this trailer does make it look like a good bit of fun.
It reminds me of when one of the first trailers for Star Wars Episode One came out — the trailer was dramatic, exciting, suspenseful, crisply edited– everything that the turgid, boring, interminable stinker of a film was not. They should have let whoever cut the trailer edit the actual movie!
Michael Barone has a post up on Obama’s association with Bill Ayres and puts it into the context of Chicago’s unique politics. It’s worth a read.
A mundane but important detail of this story is that Obama chaired an Ayres-backed education reform group called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge which burned through $50 million but was ultimately judged a failure.
Michael Barone has a post up on Obama’s association with Bill Ayres and puts it into the context of Chicago’s unique politics. It’s worth a read.
A mundane but important detail of this story is that Obama chaired an Ayres-backed education reform group called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge which burned through $50 million but was ultimately judged a failure.
Welcome to my blog! My other home on the Web is Conservative Donnybrook, and I thought I’d copy a few of my favorite posts from there over here.
Thus, all posts that appear in this blog that are dated before this one were originally posted at the Donnybrook. I added them in here like 10 minutes ago, but then changed the post dates to when they were originally posted. Is that a breach of some kind of blogger ethics? Oh well.
