Don’t Just Stand There, Do Something!
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During the months before the invasion of Iraq, I often heard or read the claim that we had to defer to the government, because they “knew more” than the rest of us, which meant that if they claimed a dire threat was on the horizon there really was a dire threat on the horizon. As it turned out, they knew scarcely more than the average well-informed citizen, and much of what they thought they knew was wrong. There was a broad, international consensus of supposed experts that did not doubt the severity of what turned out to be a non-existent threat, and this consensus held despite an acknowledged lack of reliable information. Indeed, the consensus thrived on the impossibility of proving a negative. Except for a relative handful of dissenters, who were either ignored or dismissed as cranks, the people in the relevant policy community acquiesced or kept quiet, and the average citizen looked at the near-unanimity of supposed experts acknowledging the severity of the threat and took it far more seriously than he would have ever done otherwise. Instead of asking who benefited from building up the threat, people were cowed into taking the threat for granted and accepting more or less unquestioningly government proposals for addressing it. To be part of the mainstream conversation, one had to admit first of all that the threat was real and serious, at which point the debate was really already over.
This strangely misplaced confidence in government expertise seems to have returned. This time people seem to be inclined to defer to government claims because the situation really is quite serious and the problem at hand is fairly complex, which makes it much easier to confess a lack of expertise, yield to expert opinion and say, “Well, we have to trust the government–the alternative is unthinkable!” If the last few years have shown anything, I would have thought they would have taught us to recognize this sort of browbeating as a means to shut down critical thought and skepticism. The people who sold a war of choice as a war of necessity are now telling us that yet another emergency measure is absolutely necessary, which makes me think that it is distinctly possible that it is not. The language of necessity in turn feeds the public’s fear that things must be so bad that they should not question the principle behind the emergency measure. They can, as half-hearted critics of the invasion did, quibble about means and process, and at this point that is all we are seeing from most members of Congress, but they are not supposed to doubt the necessity of acting and acting now.
At this point you might say, “But this is different, Larison. The danger in this crisis is very real and serious–something must be done, the government is proposing to do something, so we may as well do that.” It seems to me that this sort of response shows how similar the two cases are. There is an assumption that if something must be done, this translates into calling for the government to use its coercive apparatus to intervene. The logic is the same: unless you favor some kind of state action that will mainly benefit the state (in terms of power) and those connected to it (in terms of wealth), you want to stand by and do nothing at all. More to the point, there is a presumption that action, even foolish, excessive action, is preferable to inaction. In reality, however, taking precipitous action is almost always worse and yields all manner of unintended consequences that can be readily foreseen at the time. There is also a fundamental problem that this administration cannot be trusted with the power it already has, much less new emergency powers that it wants to acquire, but this is not simply a question of whether this administration can be trusted. In a few months, a new administration will begin, but I can already say with confidence that it should not be trusted with this kind of power, either, because concentrated and ultimately unaccountable power on this scale should never be granted to anyone in government.
P.S. A useful thing to remember in the days to come: whenever someone yells about an impending catastrophe, he is probably either trying to sell you something or trying to steal something from you. The mega-bailout is actually a case of trying to sell you on the idea that you should allow yourself to be robbed, so we should be even more wary.
Update: Donald Luskin makes a related point:
Yet there is ample room for doubt. The officials advocating this — Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke — are the same ones who, in similar haste, engineered interventions this year in the collapses of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and American International Group. With each intervention the banking crisis has gotten progressively more severe. Experts differ on this, but it is my professional judgment that these interventions actually made matters worse, because of the unintended consequences that were nearly impossible to forecast at the moment of decision. We simply cannot know what unintended consequences might be unleashed in the process of a massive acquisition of mortgage assets by the federal government.
Filed under: politics
7 Responses to “Don’t Just Stand There, Do Something!”
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Just so. Even if the situation is as dire as we are being led to believe, why would anyone who has been awake during the last 7 years could support this. Two of the most egregious sections of the proposal:
Sec. 8. Review.
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.
Sec. 2. Review:
(3) designating financial institutions as financial agents of the Government, and they shall perform all such reasonable duties related to this Act as financial agents of the Government as may be required of them;
No accountability at all, and the ability to designate any financial institution, healthy or unhealthy, not just as temporarily being in some type of receivership (which I think I could reluctantly support) while it’s assets are liquidated, but the de facto nationalization of whatever institution strikes the Secretary of the Treasury’s fancy on any given day. Even if Paulson or his successor actually had some type of God-like wisdom, this is a terrible horrible no good very bad deal.
[...] non-expert dissent.] No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTMLallowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> [...]
[...] Time to break out the pitch forks, folks. [...]
Pitchforks, hell, Gibbets. The nonreviewability provisions alone are terrifying. Did they actually believe this would pass?
‘Did they actually believe this would pass? ‘
Why wouldn’t they? Whoever votes against it faces the wrath of right wing radio and a radical and well funded conservative primary challenger in the next election.
“The logic is the same: unless you favor some kind of state action that will mainly benefit the state (in terms of power) and those connected to it (in terms of wealth), you want to stand by and do nothing at all.”
Daniel is sounding a lot like Bastiat lately!
“More to the point, there is a presumption that action, even foolish, excessive action, is preferable to inaction”
Didn’t you know Mr. Larison, that its always ‘better to be safe than sorry’? People are always prone to overreact rather than underreact. There is no fighting this impulse–even a call for restraint must be rhetorically dressed up as proactive to be persuasive. But you lose the argument anyway unless you cause people to reexamine what they assume to be “safe”.
“Safe” is now closely associated with government interventionism and socialism. Seizing the narrative from the establishment requires we make a convincing case that the “safe” option is actually the “sorry” option. The fact that reality is a choice between “sorry” and “sorry-er” doesn’t make our job easy.
People tend to overlook the negative consequences of government intervention when they identify/agree with the intention and the objective. The moral degeneracy of war is overlooked in a similar way. We musn’t get boxed into the rhetorical frame of government as implied rescuer. A reframing of the issue, i.e. “the government intervention itself is a crisis more damaging to our economy and standard of living than the problem it’s trying to alleviate. etc.” Should be pushed hard by those who know this to be the truth.
The socialists are really coming out of the woodwork (have you ever heard the government referred to as “The Sovereign” before now?), using a very effective sales technique: the Aggressive Assumption. Widely utilized by idealogues and telemarketers everywhere, it limits the parameters of “acceptable” dialogue, and guides the conversation toward a pre-conceieved conclusion. “Only a whacko would dispute the need for intervention! You’re not a whacko, are you? You’re not, you say? Well, its settled then.”
The only effective counter is to attack the assumption directly.
We should know by now that vindication alone doesn’t afford any consideration by an establishment hostile to anything that might upset the status quo.
If we are right about the nature of this crisis, and about our terrifying predictions for the country should this state of affairs continue, then we’re obligated as good citizens to kick down doors and bellow from the rooftops, metaphorically speaking.
[...] Such is the desperate refrain of the consensus-enforcing ideologue, and whether it’s Hilzoy or Presiden Bush or Bill O’Reilly who sings it, the desired effect is the same: to bury honest debate beneath a paralyzing fear of impending catastrophe; to demonize those who resist the impulsive rush to immediate action; to raise false dichotomies that stand in the way of sober analysis. That such ploys were, as Glenn Greenwald and Daniel Larison have pointed out, exactly the ones used to push us into war with Iraq, has either been forgotten or is of strange unimportance: the situation is dire and will only get worse, and so we must act decisively and do it now. Do what? Why this, of course! Why this? Because we must! Now fall in line; it’s time to be bipartisan. [...]