Poor Bobo
I’m very much enjoying this new tradition of Krugman shredding whatever nonsense Bobo offers up in his previous column, and today’s implicit response to Brooks’s lament about how the dumb people won’t allow elites to save the country is the best one yet.
One thing to add to Krugman’s point is the same media elites who see the deficit as the greatest immediate threat to the country since Saddam’s balsa wood drones of terror viewed Al Gore — who advocated using the budget surplus to preserve entitlements and was the most prominent political figure to opposed the Iraq War when it mattered — with utter contempt.
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Bobo, the guy who used to write about how awesome real ‘Murkins were compared to those multi-racial eggheads on the coast?
He write: “The political culture encourages politicians and activists to imagine that the country’s problems would be solved if other people’s interests and values magically disappeared.”
and then goes on to praise the Ryan Plan, which bases its entire solution to the long-term deficit problem on hoping that old people’s demand for health care beyond the value of his vouchers will magically disappear.
You just don’t meet the same the same class of people at the Applebee’s salad bar and the Red Lobster where no entree costs more than $10 these days…
…old people’s demand for health care beyond the value of his vouchers will magically disappear.
Well, to be fair, it only takes a few years of under-funding RyanCare to cause the demands of seniors to
die offdry up.But if Krugman starts responding to Brooks regularly, then I might have to start wincing my way through Bobo’s columns again. The man put the word “solipsism” in his title and wasn’t referring to himself. I don’t think my stomach or my retinas can take that more than once or twice per year.
I’ll save everyone the trouble of reading Bobo’s columns, since here’s what they
consist of:
-A strawman argument against the point he wants to make.
-Why Liberals suck.
-Why Conservatives ROCK!
-And a summation of why he was right in the first place.
In a just world, newspapers would keep a scorecard of the pundits accuracy.
Krugman: 1,234
Dionne: 1,111
Brooks: 0
Krauthammer: 0
Kristol: -1,235
Watch out for that defamation suit from Krauthammer. He’s made a career off of trying to be every bit as crazy and wrong as Kristol.
And 10 times meaner and more hateful
I read Brooks’ column as saying that democratic decision making suffers from myopia, and we would benefit from observing traditional republican institutions.
Krugman responds:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the man on the street wildly supportive of Bush’s terrible policies when they were getting passed?
And also correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Krugman often lament the role of populistic myopia in pushing politicians to do the wrong thing?
I hate the both of them, but the idea that Krugman thinks the elite should step aside and let the public run the show seems ludicrous to me.
Krugman may not blame the public for this particular car wreck, but as far as I can tell, he has never been one to turn over the keys.
brad p., let me correct you, then: the bush tax cuts were not wildly popular.
let me also note, just in passing (life being short and all) that krugman isn’t arguing for turning all issues over to a plebiscite; what he’s arguing – as he has consistently argued – is that a lot of elite opinion in this country is a fatuous recitation of half-truths incompletely understood, and that said elites are astonishingly impervious to any sanctions of any sort for being consistently wrong.
this, it seems to me, is so obviously true that only the sort of fatuous elite that krugman regularly skewers could miss it, and this is why i continue to hold the belief that the era of the general-purpose pundit, completely unaware of policy details or empirical data, is coming to a close.
Fair enough.
I agree with that analysis.
a lot of elite opinion in this country is a fatuous recitation of half-truths incompletely understood
May I add that these half-truths fatuously recited clearly benefit the interests of our grossly overcompensated commentariat, along with their elite sponsors, while savaging the working classes and poor (i.e., the bottom 20% of the income distribution).
wildly supportive
No. At any rate, Krugman’s point is that public pressure certainly didn’t compel the Iraq War or massive upper-class tax cuts. They were top-down ideas, not public priorities.
The key line is in point two, about the Iraq war:
“In fact, it took a highly deceptive sales campaign to get Americans to support the invasion, and even so, voters were never as solidly behind the war as America’s political and pundit elite.”
The same is true about the tax cuts and financial deregulation. To the extent that any of these things enjoyed popular support it can fairly be said that the the general public was out-and-out lied to and manipulated. There are a number of things that Republicans do poorly– managing the economy springs to mind– but when it comes to spinning the debate they have it all over those of us on the progressive end of things.
Granted I was only 19 at the time and not the most reliable source for political commentary, but did the lies concerning Iraq ever seem that plausible to you or justify the war?
Perhaps I was saved from their lies by my proto-libertarianism, but I was calling bullshit back then.
Why do you think that is?
Because progressives are more inclined to be abashed at the sort of out-and-out lying that Republicans don’t blush at. Think of poor old Walter Mondale, for example, admitting that taxes were going to go up. St. Ronnie denied it, but he raised them all the same.
This may have to do with the perhaps naive liberal belief that people are smarter than they get credit for, and deserve the truth. Regrettably, the result is closer to Mencken’s definition of democracy: “the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
I never thought there was any even remotely reasonable justification for either the war or the economic policies, but then I am a dirty, evil socialist. as to spinning the debate, it is because, in large part owing to media consolidation, they own the media for the most part. This is aided and abetted by an extensive network of billionaire funded far-right propaganda mills posing as think tanks (Cato, AEI, etc.).
But… but I thought “librul” and “media” were two words for the same thing!
Because the right has spent the last four decades building up a disciplined message machine, and training its activists and public figures to work in a coordinated manner to use it, while the left has no such organization, and our activists and office holders are about as coordinated as a random number generator.
just for the historic record, bush actually claimed to favor using the surplus to preserve entitlements too. he simply used made-up numbers to achieve that, and when push came to shove, he was of course much more interested in tax cuts than in anything else, but bush too swore fealty to the “lockbox.”
I’m sure Krugman spends hours every day looking in the mirror repeating “No one here but us non-elitists!”
This is a little like Trump trying to criticize someone for their meglomania.
eyeroller: i was about to go back to work when your posting caught my eye.
the first rule of analogies is that they be analogous.
yours failed.
Krguman wasn’t criticizing elites for being elites. He was criticizing them for advancing disastrous policies.
At no point did he suggest that elites should step aside and abide by the will of the voting public either.
There aren’t many pundits with more unwavering faith in technocratic elites than Krugman, and it seems like Krugman is pretty obvious in his opinion that the problem was that the public was dominated by the wrong elites.
The problem is that you two libertarians are using a definition of “elitism” that is different from that of the rest of us.
To a libertarian, some guy earning $43,000 a year at the EPA issuing a Stop Work order to Exxon is elitism, because the government is telling someone in the private sector what to do. “Elite” is defined as “government” and its opposite is “the private sector,” no matter how insulated, powerful, wealthy, and connected anyone the private sector might be.
To the rest of us, that mid-level bureaucrat who is preventing Exxon from poisoning the town’s water isn’t the “elite” – he’s a representative of, an employee of, the people, standing up to the elite.
Further, to libertarians, the local town police officer stopping Exxon, because there was a plebiscite in which 90% of the town voted in favor of an anti-pollution law, would be an exercise in elitism. Because “The State!”
While Exxon going ahead, ignoring the will of the public, because it’s acting in its own unimpeded self-interest against the wishes of the broader public, would not be an exercise in elitist decision-making, specifically because the wishes of the broader public are not allowed to interfere with Exxon’s decision making.
When libertarians talk about “elitism,” it’s a black-is-white world. Elitism means the public’s will is allowed to check that of the wealthy and powerful, while allowing them to get their way regardless of what the little people think is the opposite of elitism.
This is a terrible contribution:
It misunderstands libertarian concepts of elitism.
It completely avoids the real critique libertarians make of “elitism”.
And it is so skewed in its wording that it can’t even be used to further discussion.
Brad, dear, I spent 7-1/2 years as a frequent commenter and debater on Reason’s Hit and Run blog.
I know libertarianism, and the arguments used to advance it.
I could give you a thousand words on the Great Cosmotarian Wars of 2008.
I could write a ten-page paper on Fusionism off the top of my head.
I know exactly what the libertarian definition of elitism is, and I know the rebuttals to it, and I know the counter-arguments from the libertarians, and I know the rebuttals to those.
I am the Jane Goodall of libertarians, and you primates’ habits are exactly as I described them.
I dearly hope this becomes another Internet Tradition!
And you are still going to stick by the statement that a libertarian would consider some government lackey an elite.
I’ve heard libertarians have many names for TSA screeners, but “Elites” is not one of them. Libertarians usually consider government to be an inept/self-interested tool of the elites, not the elites themselves.
Read this essay by Rothbard talking about “Power Elites”.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard66.html
No, I’m going to stick by the statement that a libertarian would consider an action by some government lackey to be, by definition, elitist. Since the mid-level lackey is acting under orders, it would be those giving him his orders that would constitute the elite. If I wasn’t clear enough, I apologize.
Libertarians sometimes consider government to be a tool of elites. When government takes certain actions that libertarians approve of – that is, taking a laissez-faire stance towards Exxon – they do not consider such an action to be elitist, even if done at the behest of the CEO of Exxon.
Which is my point: libertarians consider “elitist” and “government activist” to be synonymous, regardless of the actual motivation and thought behind the government action.
Do I have the option of being covered in glue, rolled around on the floor of an unsanitary hair salon, and locked in a room with a horny Kodiak bear?
Generally not very bright and totally delusional poo flinging monkeys?
There aren’t many pundits with more unwavering faith in technocratic elites than Krugman
Now, if you substitute Brad DeLong for Krugman, maybe. DeLong in 2006, and you would definitely be on the mark. But Krugman is pretty consistent in pointing out that our elites are failures.
Mal,
Krugman is, by libertarian definition, an elitist.
He advocates for government involvement in the activity of private-sector actors. That is sufficient to meet their definition of elitism.
To libertarians, only government power makes one a member of the elite. The converse is also true – all government power is a demonstration of elitism.
Therefore, believing that government power should restrain the actions of private-sector actors is, by definition, elitism. Someone with government authority is bringing about outcomes different from those we would see in the absence of that government power. How dare he? Who does he think he is? You think you’re better’n me?
Krugman is, by libertarian definition, an elitist.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
Authorial intent is soooooooo 1950s.
Push.
Yes, but what he proposes is not just different “elites” (which is an ambiguous term, encompassing both people with technical expertise — like me in philosophy, or Krugman in economics, or DocAmazing in medicine, or DrDick in anthropology, or our hosts in political science — and those in corporate boardrooms, as in Domhoff’s Who Rules America) but also an end to dominance.
Having recourse to technical expertise doesn’t necessarily entail “dominance.” I don’t “dominate” my classroom, nor would Krugman necessarily “dominate the public” if suitable governing reforms would occur.
To put it in late Foucualtian terms, “power” (in either its sovereign, disciplinary, or governmentality forms) =/= “dominance” except in rare cases, where it ceases to be power.
Thank you for saving me the effort and saying it better than I would have. I would have liked a little Gramsci to go with the Foucault, however.
Your wish is my command: cultural hegemony, which can shape public opinion through a manifold of indirect means, does not come out of the barrel of a gun, though those may appear in times of exception decided by the sovereign (to bring in a little Schmitt).
Whoa.
OK, Adorno. Go!
I bow down before the master!
Blush.
But it’s just technical stuff directly in my area. You’ve shown excellent command of all sorts of anthropological domains.
Well given that my major theoretical interest is structural inequality and its evolution, I am expected to be more than merely conversant with this literature.
IIRC, Foucault distinguished power from dominance on the basis that power/resistance would circulate, while dominance remains the same. I’m not sure Krugman’s big on circulation if it means a nonzero chance of Republicans in government. (Not that I blame him — I have trouble seeing how the dominance/power distinction helps Foucault get out of his Nietzschean box, and I can’t say that’s Krugman’s fault.)
For the late Foucault, power is subjects acting on subjects, shaping their field of action or choice. Dominance is the removal of subjectivity, turning what had been a subject into a physical mass to be moved around.
Who does this really exclude? Certainly Coca-Cola is a subject acting on subjects, and arguably Stalin is a subject acting on subjects, notwithstanding some “engineer of the soul” rhetoric.
That word you keep using, “subject”? It does not mean what you think it means.
Seriously, if you want to figure out what Foucault is all about, you could follow the link I give below to my course on him. Or you could read Gary Gutting’s article on him at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
I’m not sure of the moral difference between these two, but let’s treat Krugman’s economic opinions to this:
I posit that modern liberal economists of Krugman’s ilk, have spent their entire careers conceptualizing humans from a position of dominance. Differing from other economists such as Mises and Veblen who treated economics as a method for studying and understanding human behavior (subjects treating subjects), Krugman, and untold conservative economists, have began treating economics as a manner of managing human behavior to produce desired results, (removing the subjectivity).
Perhaps I don’t quite understand, but attempting to use your framework doesn’t change my opinion.
Krugman, and untold conservative economists, have began treating economics as a manner of managing human behavior to produce desired results, (removing the subjectivity).
Exactly. Like the way he keeps minimizing the real human suffering involved in unemployment.
Do you actually read Krugman, because you keep arguing that Krugman is taking positions that are exactly the opposite of Krugman’s real, and well-known, positions. Why do you keep arguing with strawKrugmen?
I already knew that Krugman was good at vapid gesturing in search of his own policy preferences.
I do like the general gist of that article though: “Be afraid of the fear-mongers, if you are afraid of what they are afraid of, lots of suffering will occur.”
I read that the other day, but really had trouble making out the words through that dense fog of irony.
I do like the general gist of that article though: “Be afraid of the
fear-mongers, if you are afraid of what they are afraid of, lots of suffering will occur.”people whose policies brought us the Great Recession, because they will do it again.”Fixed.
“Fear-monger” was Krugman’s word. He is literally informing us to be afraid of fear-mongers.
Might there be a Godwin-equivalent law to referencing Foucualt in an arguement?
Why? He’s by all informed accounts one of the very best and most important philosophers of the 20th century. Even those who disagree with him respect his erudition, wit, and insight. (Almost all; we’re talking academics here.)
I thought most of his historical evidence had been shown to be incorrect? (and that really is a question, as I left academia a decade ago).
This is a good question, and it turns on what genre you consider his writings to be. The standard defense of the history in Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish (e.g. by Gary Gutting in the Cambridge Companion to Foucault) is that he’s providing illustrations of broad trends to make a point about the “episteme” of an era, rather than trying to write a history that would withstand the scrutiny of specialist. (BTW, even on that last account, the historical work in Birth of the Clinic has stood up better, even for specialists).
Thanks. Some followup questions:
1) Is it fair to say that, generally speaking, his evidence became more questionable (for lack of a better term) as his career progressed?
2) If the historical evidence does not withstand the scrutiny of specialists, does that not draw his conclusions into doubt?
3) As a side issue that nobody but hv will care about, I would be remiss in not admitting that the Foucault-Chomsky debate on justice is one where Chomsky is clearly a Platonist, and I think that weakens my argument. I am very dissatisfied with Chomsky’s belief in ultimate justice.
Hi Mal, actually, he changed his MO as he went along, from “archaeologies” to “genealogies” to “investigations of political rationalities of governmentality.” It’s in the last rubric that his discussions contained in the lecture courses on “Security, Territory, Population,” and “Birth of Biopolitics” (which are mostly on neoliberalism of all things!) take place. But again, “illustrations” aren’t “evidence” so you have to determine what standard you want to hold him to. In any case, there are plenty of specialists who will say that Foucault got enough of the main trends right that he can be forgiven some broad brush strokes that cover over some details. In any case, I teach a course on Foucault; some of the lectures might interest you.
Thank you. I bookmarked it on the off chance that my five-year-old lets me re-visit social theory someday, rather than reading Winnie-the-Pooh to her.
I am a Marxist materialist who generally loathes postmodernism in all its flavors, but I actually like Foucault (though I do not always agree with him and wish his writing was not so dense and opaque) and have incorporated some of his insights.
Krugman has long operated from a preferred ideal of social organization, and the whole of his non-economic pursuits has been the partisan pursuing of his own personal goals. Even his economics struggle to be value free, supporting his rather elitist view of technocratic direction of the economy to spring up growth in rigid defined ways.
What reforms?
He certainly has no problem with an economy led by bankers and global corporations.
I can’t use Foucualtian terms, but when I speak of power (in social terms), I am speaking of the ability to subvert another to one’s own ends.
He certainly has no problem with an economy led by bankers
Which is why he called for their nationalization. Krugman is wily enough that he knew that Obama would choose to distance himself from Krugman, so that by calling for nationalization, he would ensure stealth bailouts.
I’m not sure why he keeps picking on poor Timmy Geithner (link deleted because of nasty, nasty spam filters), but I am sure that is all part of his plan to enhance Geithner’s influence.
Second link.
You do realize in that article about nationalization, he merely wanted to nationalize in order to get the influx in capital that the banks can’t actually get privately, right?
Krugman writes (in that article!):
I mean, quite plainly he states that the government cannot possibly pass on enough capital to the banks while they are private, so he suggests they be nationalized, shored up on government dollar, and then privatized again.
Yes, Brad, he wanted to preserve the banking system, because nuking it would lead to actual disaster, but at the same time he wanted to liquidate specific bankers. Is that hard to understand?
No, what’s hard to understand is what that has to do with my original assertion that “He certainly has no problem with an economy led by bankers,” which you seemed to be trying to refute.
Do you not think his avocation of a very large “preprivatization” (his words) program and his explicit agreement that “a privately held banking system is the correct way to go” seem to be decidedly pro-banker?
Well, if wiping out the executives and shareholders of every large bank count as being pro-banker, while agreeing that at some later point the banks will become returned to the market, then I suppose even I am decidedly pro-banker.
I know you like re-defining terms, but this seems a bit much.
Where do you get that? Krugman is pretty explicit on why he wants nationalization:
The only time in either of those articles that Krugman deals with management is this:
…and that doesn’t seem to be the damning call for replacing management as you seem to imply.
the government cannot possibly pass on enough capital to the banks while they are private, so he suggests they be nationalized, shored up on government dollar, and then privatized again.
Or rather, the government should not pass large amounts of capital to the banks without taking some kind of ownership stake, but it’s not a good idea for the government to retain that stake permanently, so as soon as possible the government should liquidate its stake and retrieve its capital. Like, you know, any other investor.
At some point you should read The Visible Hand, by Alfred Chandler, and then tell us to what point in the development of business organization you want the clock turned back and how you want to move forward from there.
Where do you get that? Krugman is pretty explicit on why he wants nationalization:
I got it from the part you quoted:
Also:
Brad, controlling banks really does imply changing executives. He is clear that this is a larger version on what the FDIC already does. When the FDIC takes over, they fire the executives. Always.
Ownership =/= management.
I hope that isn’t true, as many of the smaller banks (management included) are victims of the mismanagement of larger banks in this situation.
Ownership =/= management.
Again, he proposed things working like the FDIC. The FDIC fires executives.
I hope that isn’t true, as many of the smaller banks (management included) are victims of the mismanagement of larger banks in this situation.
And the ones that were not mismanaged are not in need of additional capital, pretty much by definition.
If I shoot you and take your car, yup, your car is till driving down the street.
Understand yet?
Not really. A plan to take it away from the current bankers, cleaning it up until its a safe, going concern, then giving it back to bankers doesn’t sound very analogous to your scenario.
Whoever the gvoernment gives/sells it back to will be, by definition, a banker, owning, as they do, a bank. Should the government make them stop being banks and turn them into something else? What, exactly?
A plan to take it away from the current bankers, cleaning it up until its a safe, going concern, then giving it back to bankers doesn’t sound very analogous to your scenario.
Okay, in Krugman’s scenario, mismanaged banks would have different owners and different managers. In Joe’s analogy, the car would have a different driver, and the original owner would no longer own the car, being dead and all.
Now do you get it?
Should the government make them stop being banks and turn them into something else? What, exactly?
Bakeries. Still starts with a B, and everybody likes cupcakes and muffins.
That is kinda my point. Krugman’s plan of “pre-privatization” is not getting rid of bad management, but absorbing the balance sheets of the bank, repairing them, issuing regulations to rationalize the market, and then turning the market back over to the scheming class that fucked the whole thing up in the first place.
The whole thing revolves around providing the financial elite with risk free profits in order to keep them lending without worrying about them chasing extremely risky and complex arbitrage opportunities.
Yes. You look at bankers as capable of being judged on their individual merits, while I am tending to look at the whole lot of them being a perpetuated parasitical class by way of their political privilege.
I hope that isn’t true, as many of the smaller banks (management included) are victims of the mismanagement of larger banks in this situation.
You look at bankers as capable of being judged on their individual merits, while I am tending to look at the whole lot of them being a perpetuated parasitical class by way of their political privilege.
So who am I talking to now, But Those are the Good Ones Brad, or Liquidation of the Bankers as a Class Brad? I have to say I like Liquidation of the Bankers as a Class Brad’s alliteration.
So who am I talking to now, But Those are the Good Ones Brad, or Liquidation of the Bankers as a Class Brad?
You are talking to Consistency is Everything Brad.
It is difficult to put libertarian class theory into typical popular terminology.
The problem is not with the occupation we would typically call a banker, but with the class that enjoys a monopoly on our money supply.
They enjoy the benefits of both charging rent prices on credit and capital and of spending and investing money before it has become diluted.
Smaller community banks are doubly screwed by facing regulations designed to control the privileges of the big banks, while enjoying very few of the privileges.
The government should not be operating from a standpoint of financial gain.
And why should it ever be reprivatized? We’ve already established that we don’t have the stomach for for-profit banking, consistently refusing to allow banks to suffer when they fail at what should be their comparative advantage: appropriate management of money?
No, Krugman thinks that the problem was that the elites were operating with the wrong incentives.
The Exxon engineers and managers and the Bush-era Minerals Management Service employees who went along with them, who are the elite of our society in terms of understanding the consequences of the operation of extractive agencies, didn’t harm the public because they didn’t know more about the damage they were doing. They harmed the public because they didn’t care about the damage they were doing.
You mean like huge deficits? You mean like the even huger deficits Krugman has been calling for for years?
In no way is Krugman (or folks akin to Krugman) completely to blame for our current economic state. They are not entirely innocent either. I’ll agree that “elites” got us into this mess, but I’ll never agree that Krugman belongs in some other category.
You mean like the
even huger deficitsbudget which balances over the course of the business cycle Krugman has been calling for for years?Fixed your inexplicable typo.
Running up huge deficits during periods of economic expansion is disastrous.
Running up huge deficits during the deepest recession in a lifetime is not disastrous.
You can agree or disagree with this argument, that the state of the economy changes the wisdom of deficit spending, but simply pretending not to know that the argument exists (or, heaven forbid, actually not knowing it exists while speaking publicly about economics) is quite foolish.
eye roller:
a correctly named comments thread poster.
MMT theorists hate Krugman. He is a classic Keynesian (for better or worse), but he does not argue what he imagines you argue. You are simply innumerate, illiterate, and have no idea what you are talking about.
To the Austrian fans, the world is divided into the 0.3% of economists who are Austrians, and an undifferentiated mass of “everyone else.”
Sort of like how libertarians divide the world into the 2% of the public that are libertarians, and an undifferentiated mass of “statists.”
The problem with our elites is that they aren’t elite. “Elite” is a technical term.
Bingo!
As much as I love Krugsy’s stuff, my favorite takedown of Bobo lately has been P.Z. Meyers’ review of The Social Animal. His evisceration of Brooks’ gambit for Deep Thinker status–describing how Bobo provides facile explanations for the actions of cardboard characters–fits pretty well with the output of Brooks’ day job.
This whole debate might be simpler if instead of using the word “elites” we give people a forced choice between “really smart, well educated people” and “billionaires and their enforcers.” With the occasional exception of a Greg Mankiw, there’s not too much overlap.
Krugman explicitly says the people can make stupid mistakes. He just says so can the technocrats. The Euro is clearly not a populist mistake, although I doubt anyone here wants to hand refugee policy over to the unmediated will of European electorates.
While the Euro’s a good example of technocratic hubris against popular wisdom, I’m not sure the American examples really work. It’s certainly true that there were technocratic backers of the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war, and it’s also true that the median voter doesn’t want to cut taxes for the rich and doesn’t much care about foreign policy at all, but it would be a real stretch to consider either of those initatives technocratic. Some technocrats went along with both of them, but the tax cut was about internal Republican politics and we still don’t really know why Bush decided to invade Iraq.
Krugman’s point is less about the exact percentage of technocrats involved in the American v. European elites that made those decisions; it’s about whether either of those elites will learn from their mistakes, given their insistence that it’s all the fault of greedy lazy voters and not at all the fault of the elites that actually made and advocated for those mistakes.
“it’s about whether either of those elites will learn from their mistakes”
Well, partly. It’s also about how those elites manage to continually avoid responsibility for their mistakes.
Everyone thinks the consequences of their mistakes are somebody else’s fault. Certainly, voters aren’t better than elites in that respect.
And when voters get to argue their case on the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal (and in the FOMC of the Fed’s Board of Governors, and the board of Goldman Sachs, and the US Senate, and so on), we can talk about those being symmetrical.
When the man in the street isn’t buying it, you just get a different man, and different street. The Stalinallee is traditional:
Berthold Brecht, ‘The Solution.
[...] Poor Bobo : Lawyers, Guns & Money [...]
Man, you folks ran that glibertarian off this thread faster than a speeding meme from wingnut central, with more power than a CEO appointing his own board of directors, and when he found out he really couldn’t leap tall buildings in a Roarkian single bound, well, I felt sorry for the guy.
You should stick around, Bobby P. We could be brothers!
Brad is a libertarian, but he’s our libertarian.
He also is generally well behaved and occasionally says something interesting and intelligent, even if he is a libertarian.
IOW, the court jester.
You’re going to have to fight The Donalde for that job. (Warning: He cheats.)
Unlike the Donalde, Brad has a sense of humor.
Don’t have much of a choice around here.
And a brain capable of formulating coherent thoughts, and a set of principles that he applies consistently.
I’m glad to hear you say that, as consistency is the goal. Consistency makes every detail a referendum on the whole.
If I am consistent, convincing someone of a single argument adds to the strength of all arguments consistent and coherent. Since my politics are radical, it is very important to maintain a high degree of coherency.
Rethreading to serve you better:
BKP:
The government should not be operating from a standpoint of financial gain.
How about from a standpoint of packing out what they packed in? Taking their original investment once the bank’s solvency no longer depends on it?
And why should it ever be reprivatized? We’ve already established that we don’t have the stomach for for-profit banking, consistently refusing to allow banks to suffer when they fail at what should be their comparative advantage: appropriate management of money?
So who should run them instead? Or should they be something other than banks? You keep not telling us your desired end state.
The government should not be operating from a standpoint of financial gain.
Wait: the same person who complained about the quality of the investment the government made in GM is now arguing that the government should not care about financial gain?
I think my head just exploded.
I think that you are aware that my problems with the GM bailout have far more to do with the moral hazards of bailing out corporations and locking our economic progress into automobile production.
There just seemed to be a lot of irrational exuberance on here about GM’s success.
I think that you are aware that my problems with the GM bailout have far more to do with the moral hazards of bailing out corporations and locking our economic progress into automobile production.
In that entire thread, all 203 comments, you did not use the phrase “moral hazard” once. Go ahead, search, I’ll wait…
So what did you talk about?
And the classic:
A comment directed at you just a week ago:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/05/i-blame-obama-and-the-uaw#comments
Dude, his preferred end-state is The Shire. No, seriously.
So take that as where he’s going, work back from there, and it’s pretty easy to understand the advocacy for a soft Year Zero solution w/r/t most modern institutions.
You spend a lot of your time here trolling me, do you realize this?
Brad, you just proposed a banking system that literally mirrors late-medieval European banking. The Shire is an idealized vision of late-medieval England. He’s not trolling you, he is using a reasonable, if mocking, shorthand that does accurately describe your vision of independent small producers and yeoman farmers.
You give HP far more credit than he deserves, as his continuous mocking about “The Shire” has nothing to do with my personal opinions on the banking system.
Perhaps I bring out the worst in him, but have you ever noticed him actually respond to me with substance or make any critique of my opinion that would even rise to the low quality of “You want to institute a medieval banking system”
But Brad, anybody who has enough historical knowledge to know how small-scale production and yeoman farming actually worked in the real world either 1) realizes that they like things like modern medicine and plumbing, which small-scale production sucks at, or 2) has the courage of their convictions, and lives off-grid where they do not comment on blogs. Anybody who thinks small-scale producers will actually deliver a technologically advanced society is deluding themselves.
I do have an interesting anecdote about your banking idea. Now, the big problem in the Great Depression was a lack of currency. My father told me that, where he was, the local economy ran pretty much the same as it always did, because everybody in the town simply wrote each other checks, kept signing them over to one another, and never deposited any of them. This was, as you have gathered, a form of unlicensed private currency, and it did demonstrably work.
Now, what kind of economy did this work for? A community of about 100 people, all Mormon, mainly farmers, with no electricity, paved roads (my grandfather built the “road” to the nearest largish town), doctors (my grandmother knew about herbs, and grandpa was the Mormon patriarch, who spoke with God), or running water. Take Mormonism out of the picture, and add elves, and you would have a desert version of the Shire.
1. While I will admit that my preferred policies would lead to lower levels of production, I reject the idea that my preferred policies lead to nothing but small community level production. My aesthetic preference is for smaller, agricultural communities, but I generally base my policy preferences on the premise that government should not be in the business of encouraging huge, centrally-organized productive entities.
2. I stated that I would be amenable to a nationalized banking system, provided the primary regulations designed to keep the quasi-private banking system afloat are dismantled.
3. How much more efficient would their system have been if some entity would have been allowed to keep a central record of those balances, say a community bank that wasn’t outlawed by legal tender laws and bank licensing requirements? How much of a larger population could such a system have supported?
It sure sounds to me like your father’s community was undoubtedly limited by the rules instituted upon them by our banking establishment.
I generally base my policy preferences on the premise that government should not be in the business of encouraging huge, centrally-organized productive entities.
Fair enough, but capitalism encourages concentration and centralization. Government policies are epiphenomenal here.
How much more efficient would their system have been if some entity would have been allowed to keep a central record of those balances, say a community bank that wasn’t outlawed by legal tender laws and bank licensing requirements?
I keep my money, and my mortgage, with a cooperative bank. I suppose I should tell them that liberatian theory tells me that this is illegal.
It sure sounds to me like your father’s community was undoubtedly limited by the rules instituted upon them by our banking establishment.
Brad, they were limited by poverty, geographic isolation, and the fact that they were all batshit crazy. My point is that if you are willing to be those three things, you can bypass official banking completely.
If you are willing to be those three things, official banking is the LEAST of what you can bypass.
I suspect that system also worked in part because everyone believed it was temporary; eventually there would be some kind of reconciliation, and normal service (whatever that was) would be resumed, no?
If you are willing to be those three things, official banking is the LEAST of what you can bypass.
Believe it. Great-grandpa was those three things, and so I have two great-grandmas.
I suspect that system also worked in part because everyone believed it was temporary; eventually there would be some kind of reconciliation, and normal service (whatever that was) would be resumed, no?
Honestly hard to say. I heard this story some forty years after the fact, and did not realize it was an interesting economic parable until 15 years or so after that.
The way dad put it, was that things really were not bad during the Depression, because for them nothing really changed. I mean, when you are a subsistence farmer with no electricity, running water, or medical care, what is there to lose?
So I don’t see it working because people saw it as temporary, I think it worked because of an extraordinarily high level of social cohesion, based on common religion and social isolation.
I would posit that government policies are very causal, and that capitalism is epiphenomenal. (That is one of my favorite words from looking into cognitive philosophy)
But that doesn’t mean you have to be all or any of those three things.
I would posit that government policies are very causal, and that capitalism is epiphenomenal.
You will never cut it as a Marxist.
But that doesn’t mean you have to be all or any of those three things.
I suspect that, in order to bypass the modern banking system, you will need at least two of the three.
I suspect that if you have all three, the odds are good that official banking will bypass you. Win-win!
I would agree with this.
I can’t link to this paper enough. Its provocatively titled “Is Liberal Society a Parasite on Tradition”, but it is an excellent study on the relationship between traditional moral codes and governmental/market moral codes.
http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/6247/Bowles_paper.pdf
Note that when Bowles says “liberal society” he means “one characterized by extensive reliance on markets to allocate
economic goods and services, formal equality of political rights, the rule of law, public tolerance,
and attenuated ascriptive barriers to mobility (in contrast to societies loosely termed “traditional”
or more broadly “non-liberal”).”
Its long, but if you have the time, worth it.
Why is that?
The parasitic liberalism thesis, advanced in many variants over the past two centuries,
holds that the proper functioning of markets and other institutions endorsed by liberals depends
on family-based, religious and other traditional social norms that are endangered by these very
institutions.
Well, yes. See basically everything Max Weber ever wrote.
Why is that?
Well I was joking, but (vulgar) Marxism always assumes that all human activity is at root economic, and politics is always economics by other means. No Marxist would write that capitalism is epiphenomenal to political decisions.
Whether Marx himself believed that, or this is a caricature which can be largely blamed on Engels, is 1) a topic DrDick could answer better than I, and 2) belongs somewhere other than this far-too-nested thread.
Why is that?
The base is not the superstructure, and vice versa.
Two things, and these may be misdirected:
1. There has never been a conscious attempt to install capitalism and let it do its thing. Capitalism has and always will be a half-assed step down from mercantilism. Capitalism is epiphemeral because it is the product of wealthy/powerful groups shifting laws to maintain their position as traditional norms broke down.
2. I forgot what this was going to be.
There has never been a conscious attempt to install capitalism and let it do its thing.
Well, no. There has never been a conscious attempt to install any economic system other than, arguable, communism. But there has always been underlying material economic activity, and that activity imposes structure on other areas of life.
Capitalism has and always will be a half-assed step down from mercantilism.
No, mercantilism was a transition phase from feudalism to capitalism. Not sure what “half-asses step down” means in this context.
Capitalism is epiphemeral because it is the product of wealthy/powerful groups shifting laws to maintain their position as traditional norms broke down.
And those bourgeois laws are merely the class struggle by other means.
And capitalism isn’t a cause of those social relations, but a symptom, a spontaneous ordering.
At least in my opinion.
Actually, Brad, I spend relatively little of my time here dealing with you, and certainly far less time mocking you than I think you deserve. I use the shorthand because, y’know, YOU’VE DESCRIBED WHAT YOUR IDEOLOGICAL END POINT IS, and it’s The Shire.
All of the other stuff you think about economics, such as it is, boils down to you thinking that a small freeholder agrarian society is the desired endpoint. But then you don’t do the work to really think about what a small freeholder agrarian society looks like when it’s not a utopian counterfactual.
I stated that my preference was for agrarian rural society. From the very beginning, this “shire” business has been a trollish insult. I put up with it from others because they couch it in actual debate. For example, Mal has quite appropriately responded to my point about banking by relating it to this “shire” business and I recognize the critique.
You, on the other hand, responded with no analysis, just a trollish post about me directed at someone else. Hell, you even posted it before I got a chance to address the question directed at me.
You never engage me with any intent to discuss, you always engage by playing to the third wall by saying something derogatory about my opinions, typing in all caps, and then looking for high-fives from everybody else.
There’s no point to it, and you should let the more capable address my points from here on.
Oops. “fourth wall”.
Thank you,
If good policy makes good financial sense, then obviously there isn’t a problem. But as I see it, government serves as a huge insurance company and a force for our moral desires when it becomes evident economic forces aren’t serving them.
When the government starts searching for profits, it kinda defeats its own purpose.
I personally support eliminating all of the primary regulations (legal tender laws or licenses, for example) that support our current banking system. I would be amenable to a nationalized (but optional because of a removal of legal tender laws) banking system if the privileges are withdrawn from our current financial leaders.
You want unlicensed banking and no legal tender laws? You actually want to recreate a late medieval banking system?
Sure. Just show me a late-medieval society we can apply it to.
And capitalism isn’t a cause of those social relations, but a symptom, a spontaneous ordering.
Taking the Marx discussion down-thread, to avoid horrid nesting issues. It has been a good fifteen years since I gave this lecture, so I will ask for corrections and additions.
For Marx, what was essential was that humans, like all animals, needed to produce what they needed from nature. Now, say, bumblebees have their productive systems hardwired by genetics. Humans do not. Different societies find different ways to produce their needs.
Now, productive techniques impose themselves onto social organization in different ways. A hunter-gatherer society will, by its very nature, have low unequality, low material goods, and low social density, for example. These social relations have been determined by the productive system.
Now let us introduce the plow. This is a radically different means of production. It requires a non-mobile population. Humans cease being migratory animals. Because food is now stored, it must be guarded. We now have a nascent military. The guards have a non-equal relation to the people working the fields. There is more stuff, there are more people, and there will be more inequality. These changes are required by the change in the means of production.
Now, this bears on your society of small-scale producers. Small-scale production is simply incapable of supporting the population density that modern technology requires. Now, an idealized vision of small-scale production is usually one of two visions: either the American frontier, while forgetting the slaughter and dispossession of Mexicans and natives, or late medieval England, while forgetting about the Enclosure Acts. And that is the best small-scale production has to offer. More typical is unfree labor performed by serfs tied to the land. Genuine small-scale production creates a society in which most people are hideously unfree almost all of the time.
I’m unsatisfied with my summary, but hope DrDick or others will add to it.
I will offer more when I have time, but returning to when I said “Capitalism has and always will be a half-assed step down from mercantilism”, I think it I can explain it better within the context you have provided. (Thank you for that, BTW)
First off, the “down” is an arbitrary direction. For some reason (and it is probably a pretty strong psychological tell), I associate this sort of reform with moving down.
Now, when I say “half-assed”, I basically mean that it lags behind the other advancements in “productive techniques”. Put plainly, capitalism is not a very representative model of how this society found a way to produce its needs. Rather it is a representative model of how this society found a way to produce its needs within the context of a residual economic/legal mercantilist framework.
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