Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What Ended The Depression

5 Comments

Megan McArdle says (correctly) that no one knows, and anyone who tells you that they do is lying or fooling themselves, but that what you were taught in school is almost certainly wrong. She also notes (again correctly) that there was a lot more to the New Deal than simply government spending (which likely didn’t have much stimulative effect), some of it good, much of it disastrous (particularly the artificial propping up of wages and prices by fiat).

One can’t run controlled experiments in economics, so we can never know for sure, but I’m inclined to at least go with economic theories that make sense and for which there is useful empirical evidence. Someone has to tell me what Hayek and von Mises got wrong to persuade me that Keynes is right. And most people who think that Keynes is right haven’t even read them.

[Update a few minutes later]

“Mr. Obama, give back my wallet.”

[Update a while later]

OK, so I’m not as impressed with David Brooks as the intelligentsia want me to be, but he does have some good thoughts occasionally:

The correct position is the one held by self-loathing intellectuals, like Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Burke, James Madison, Michael Oakeshott and others. These were pointy heads who understood the limits of what pointy heads can know. The phrase for this outlook is epistemological modesty, which would make a fine vanity license plate.

The idea is that the world is too complex for us to know, and therefore policies should be designed that take account of our ignorance.

What the world needs now is not love sweet love, but epistemological modesty. Particularly inside the Beltway. Unfortunately, the perverse nature of humanity is that often the less one knows about something, the more certain one is in his knowledge. They have never learned from the ancient Greeks that to admit the limits of your knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.

[Via Manzi, who reads David Brooks so I don’t have to]

[Late morning update]

Are we going to emulate Japan’s lost decade? It seems to be what they want to do, unfortunately.

[Bumped]

[Update a couple minutes later]

Renters are angry. They should be. They’ll probably join the tea party, too.

And here’s a novel concept: let housing prices find their clearing price. Can’t do that — it makes too much sense.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Shameless

Here’s a good round up of the corruption and collusion between Congress and the financial industry:

While Americans were asked to foot the bill—for generations—to bail out Wall Street executives from their sub-prime, mortgage-mad, derivatives driven, un-regulated market—politicians from all parties lined up to feed at the trough—knowing full well that it was these same companies’ bad business practices that placed our financial system at systemic risk.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, who is being paid by taxpayers to oversee these institutions, should return the money on principle or resign from the committee.

Don’t hold your breath.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

You Don’t Say…

12 Comments

What would we do without psychologists?

“This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses,” she told CNN.

Just the first? Obviously, this needs much more research. I hope that adequate billions from Porculus will fund this vital area of study. After all, we never before had any idea whatsoever that men might be attracted to semi-naked women.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Steyn has further thoughts.

Political Commentary

Forget Liberaltarianism

What is the common ground between libertarians and conservatives? Looks like a reasonable list to me.

[Update a while later]

OK, we can’t get away from it. Jonah Goldberg on the perverse irony of liberaltaranism:

It is a sign of how profoundly statist a moment we are in that there’s this tempestuous debate — in a teapot to be sure — over whether libertarians, historically the purest of the sane anti-statists, should leave the nominally anti-statist party (the Right) in order to join the proudly statist party (the Left), when just about everyone agrees the net result of such a defection would be to make the anti-statist party significantly more statist. The only debate is whethere libertarians would make the statist party even marginally less statist or whether they would be rolled. And so far, the shaky consensus seems to be that the libertarians would get little to nothing for their defection while the country would (by libertarian standards) lose a great deal.

Of course, I’ve been opposed to this for years.

Political Commentary

Time For A Tea Party?

16 Comments

This isn’t a scientific poll, but I think that there are a lot of angry people out there, particularly when the “stimulus” includes welfare and job retraining for millionaires, and Rasmussen reports that there aren’t very many people who approve the latest mortgage bailout. I know I’m one of them. Here’s an interview with the latter-day Samuel Adams (though I’m sure that there are many other Sons of Liberty, as there were then). I don’t really want to wait until July, though (though I understand that it’s kind of cold in Lake Michigan this time of year).

I think that there’s going to be a big backlash against this, and the polls would indicate it as well. As Jim Bennett notes:

The Ghost Shirt Democrats are doing their dance, but the vast herds of union-member Democrat-voting buffalo will never return to the plains, and [the] magic ghost shirts will not turn the ballots of angry voters into water [in] 2010 and 2012. Of course, the Republicans could still blow it, but even if they do, the Democrats have shown in a few short weeks that they have no idea how to govern the country, just to loot it. They will be replaced, if not by Republicans, then by somebody else.

We can only hope. And if the Republicans don’t get their act together, I hope that the answer is “somebody else.” I could use a real change, for the first time in my life, that results in less government, not more.

[Update a few minutes later]

Santelli/Kudlow 2010! (From comments)

We could do a lot worse, and always do.

[Update again a couple minutes later]

What are we going to demand? I haven’t really thought about it, but if we had the tea party today, I’d demand that Congress and the president rescind Porculus in toto, and come up with something that we are actually allowed to see and debate before anyone votes on it. Preferably in multiple bills, as the Founders intended.

[Update at 8 PM Pacific]

From my keyboard to their ears:

“I would like to say tonight that if the American people will let the Republicans back in charge, the 60% of this bill that won’t be spent until after the next election, we’ll cut it off and let it go to the Americans.”

Obviously, at this point, that’s the change that I’m waiting for. I might even vote Republican.

Political Commentary

Infrastructure Change!

6 Comments

Apparently, Barack Obama is Bush III:

The economic stimulus signed by President Barack Obama will spread billions of dollars across the country to spruce up aging roads and bridges. But there’s not a dime specifically dedicated to fixing leftover damage from Hurricane Katrina.

And there’s no outrage about it.

Democrats who routinely criticized President George W. Bush for not sending more money to the Gulf Coast appear to be giving Obama the benefit of the doubt in his first major spending initiative. Even the Gulf’s fiercest advocates say they’re happy with the stimulus package, and their states have enough money for now to address their needs.

I guess that Barack Obama hates black people.