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You know that "Obama Generation"–
–the mass of energized young people that progressives are counting on to be Democrats’ base for the next 40 years?
Well, what happens when it’s 2010 and none of them have jobs?
Popularity: 1% [?]
It takes an especially artful kind of lunacy–
–to draw a libertarian lesson from the financial collapse, but Tyler Cowen does it with aplomb in his New York Times column yesterday. My attention came to this through Barry Ritholtz, who gives a calm and reasonable response to Cowen’s rather loopy argument; I think it’s worth looking at in more detail, though, if only because Cowen provides a curious and potentially important inversion of the usual conversation on financial regulation.
Basically, he argues (and it’s worth reading in full) that the too-big-to-fail approach to finance policymaking, i.e. bailouts, is problematic because it reinforces finance’s unhealthy dependency on government — the same dependency that got finance into this mess in the first place, as big boys like Goldman Sachs manipulated government connections and endless regulatory incentives. The real solution to the problem, Cowen says, is the reintroduction of “market discipline.”
Okay, now, think about that in the abstract for a minute. Let’s leave aside the historical question of whether the government passively or actively incentivized bad behavior in the past, and let’s leave aside the ideological question of whether the market can be relied upon to impose discipline.1 To reach Cowen’s conclusion, you have to reason in principle not only that government intervention in the market is inevitably going to mess up finance’s incentives — fair enough — but that that the government will inevitably be so co-opted, or so incompetent, that those incentive changes will encourage irresponsible and/or unsustainable behavior on the part of finance. Furthermore, you have to assume that absent those government interventions, the same finance companies that so cunningly manipulated the government will pleasantly take their lumps in the open market without ever engaging in said irresponsible and/or unsustainable business practices. Does this really sound plausible?
Popularity: 1% [?]
so… 1+ then?
The 9/12 protesters: real intellectual behemoths.
(A column about these jokers might follow in a couple days. Or i might take a nap. Stay tuned!)
Popularity: 1% [?]
Welcome back to politics
Did you enjoy your Labor Day weekend? I sure did. And maybe it’s the thousands of clams and clam accoutrements bouncing around in my enormously pleased stomach tonight, but I feel moved to reenter blogging with this simple reminder:
none of what has happened in politics since June matters even a little bit.
It’s a truism in election years that swing voters don’t pay attention to campaigns until after Labor Day. Summer is filled with too many family vacations, beach trips, late-afternoon stick-tossing games with the dog, and (around here anyway) clamboils, for your average non-politically-obsessed citizen to spend much energy on politics. Well, I maintain that the same holds true in off years; for all the rackets at “town halls” and the endless congressional posturing, nothing of political significance has happened this summer.
Think about it this way. The central question of our politics is health care, just like it …
Popularity: 1% [?]
"It sure does sell soap"
Entertain yourself with this story of town-hall lunatics ululating at Rep. Bob Inglis, a conservative Republican from South Carolina. These guys really cast a wide net, it seems. My favorite part — Inglis, recovering from his ordeal, tells a blogger:
The America that Glenn Beck seems to see is a place where we all should be fearful, thinking that our best days are behind us. It sure does sell soap, but it sure does a disservice to America.
The exhausted Congressman hit the nail on the head there, I think: it sells soap. This new hard-right that Beck and Palin and whoever are promoting really isn’t political, in the sense that dorks like us understand politics; it’s a cultural identity mixed with a brand name.
Evidently the guys who run the conservative show, facing blame for the failed economy and Bush administration, decided that the only way to sustain their ideology …
Popularity: 1% [?]
