Don’t Believe The Hype
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There is an argument that even if the Paulson plan is terrible (and it is!) there simply has to be some kind of bailout. This argument relies heavily on dire warnings of complete financial collapse and comparisons to the Depression. When you get down to it, this is economic apocalypticism, and it is not necessarily any more well-founded than any other kind of alarmism, whether it concerns terrorism (“existential threat”!), climate change (the world is ending!) or foreign threats (the new Hitler!). Economic 1929-ism today is no more persuasive than foreign policy 1938-ism. The federal response after the 1929 crash was consistently, awesomely wrong in the direction of reducing the money supply and intervening more in the economy. You cannot have the sort of prolonged economic contraction that took place in the 1930s without repeating all of the mistakes of Hoover and FDR.
Resistance to alarmism always provokes the same response. Skeptics and critics of alarmism are dismissed as trivial and silly people, unserious and unfit to participate with the great and the good in promoting their disastrous “solutions” to the problems they have hyped. We have seen this time and again from both sides of the spectrum. If you opposed the PATRIOT Act, you did not care if terrorists killed small children in their cribs; if you questioned the wisdom of the Kyoto Treaty’s provisions, you hated science and wanted the planet to be destroyed; if you doubted that a third-rate dictatorship on the other side of the world posed a threat to the United States, you loved despotism and genocide; above all, you were not one of the serious people who bought into the alarmism and thereby automatically disqualified any arguments you might make. The new story seems to be that if you do not think the government should save certain banks from their own mistakes, you are the political equivalent of Tyler Durden dreaming about obliterating the economic life of this country. I don’t know whether alarmists are simply overwhelmed by fear and blinded by assumptions that may well be badly mistaken, or if they earnestly, truly believe in their warnings, but we have already lost too much to political panics in the last decade. I am not inclined to believe the latest batch of alarmists who once again clamor for us to give them vast powers and ask as few questions as possible.
Filed under: politics
“Resistance to alarmism always provokes the same response. Skeptics and critics of alarmism are dismissed as trivial and silly people, unserious and unfit to participate with the great and the good in promoting their disastrous “solutions†to the problems they have hyped.”
No worries mate, the current crisis has had the effect of bringing forth a batch of our very own philosopher kings:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/opinion/23brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin
“It would assign nearly unlimited authority to a small coterie of policy makers. It does not rely on any system of checks and balances, but on the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge.”
More…
“If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.”
Well, I’m glad Brooks was at least honest enough to just get his cheerleading for an oligarchic rule by our corporate overlords out in the open: Progressive Corporatism is perhaps as apt a description of the governing philosophy of the current administration as any I have heard.
‘Progressive Corporatism is perhaps as apt a description of the governing philosophy of the current administration as any I have heard.’
Except that he’s probably using that term in order to lay blame for this fiasco at the feet of progressives (liberals). Progressive Corporatism is simply Liberal Fascism with the aid of a thesaurus.And Liberal Fascism is bunk.
Crisis always leads to these hysterical paranoia responses that grows government power. There is simply no way to radically alter things in American politics except through crisis. If you look at the composition of the Congress, and the control of the White House, for the last 80 years, you will find that even with one-party majorities the only time in which a radical alteration of American politics was successful was during a crisis. The New Deal, the Patriot Act, et. al.
Now we come back to the future not learning the lessons of history. I am very depressed and sad about this. Reagan moved us on a right trajectory because of Carter’s malaise. The days of the free market lasted from malaise until now. This truly is the reestablishment of liberalism and government intervention.
This bailout is the most ridiculous, unjust, and immoral proposal I have seen out of the government since the Iraq war. I really hope they some how delay this thing. Richard Shelby, Jim Bunning, and a few senators don’t seem on board. But I think it will pass through fast, giving us King Henry’s treasury, a massive bailout, a disgusting national debt, inflation, taxation, and corporatism.
People don’t understand. Truly principled people do not support the free market for reasons of “efficiency” or social engineering or stability. Principled people support the marketplace for moral reasons, for natural rights reasons, etc. When natural rights don’t matter, when stability trumps every other consideration, then you have a government which is essentially liberally interventionist on all fronts.
If you don’t support bailouts, then don’t support any bailout. If you support a bailout, there is no sense for you not to support other socialist and welfare state programs. So those who vote for this bill should be called out on what they are – socialists. Socialists for the rich maybe, but socialists nonetheless.
Arghh.