Who Is IOZ?: To Swig, to Quail

Monday, May 17, 2010

Shockingly, shockingly, I say, I agree with Ross Douthat.

10 comments:

Mr.Fundamental said...: Yes, they don't like hearing it and find it difficult to say.; 12:08 PM
Anonymous said...: .
Well, an assrape wouldn't be a full power-trip, if the assraper wouldn't demonstrate to the assraped a thorough understanding of assraping's wrongness.
.
So if there are deluded blogreaders who think "if they only knew". They know, and they'll do what they please. And we will like it.
.; 12:27 PM
George Jones said...: yeah, what the fuck? Brooks last week, now Douthat? Last days, mang.; 12:52 PM
Rowan said...: Douthat has his flaws, but he's really not that bad. He has an unfortunate tendency to try and take a perfectly good small argument and make it bigger and more meaningful, but it just ends up stupid. Still, I don't feel dumber for having read him, which is usually the case with Brooks and Friedman.; 2:11 PM
Enron said...: Yeah man, is Douthat losing his mind?; 2:41 PM
Cüneyt said...: What is going on here?; 3:04 PM
David said...: He succeeds here because he left out his usual liberal v. conservative nonsense.; 3:28 PM
Anonymous said...: Douche-Hat's article is confused nonsense. He leaves out that liberal "populism" is perfectly in line with greater centralization. The so-called "populist" rage over the 2008 financial crisis isn't coming from the Tea Parties (who don't really have a shared position about the cause of the "crisis"), but from liberals who want to see an expansion of governmental regulation to punish the financial industry. Liberal populists actually want a consolidation of governmental power, so that it can be used to protect The People from The Corporations.

DH implies that the intertwining of "public interest" and "private interest" that led to the 2008 "panic" was between government and big business (and that they are exacerbating this problem by intertwining even more!). But the banks weren't too big to fail because the government was too involved, they were too big to fail because the whole goddamn economy would come crashing down with them. Most people argue that this was because of too little regulatory power centralized in government hands, not too much.; 4:01 PM
TGGP said...: Who cares about this political economy nonsense, how far off the mark is Ross on comic book movies?

Anonymous: let's try a charitable take on the argument. Lefty populists ("proggle" to use the technical term) may find concentration of power in the government's hands appropriate. This makes them hypocrites if like Noam Chomsky they claim to be anarchists, but they could consistently favor that variety of concentration while also opposing the concentration of private financial power. Perhaps they could have some distributist leanings. What we've actually gotten is increased financial concentration with the implicit too-big-to-fail subsidy playing a part. Some folks like Stephen Williamson don't think that's so bad (in the abstract at least), but I don't think he's a proggle.; 9:13 PM
Anonymous said...: Douthat is repeating the ancient cynical truth that in D.C., nothing succeeds like failure.; 1:47 AM

Monday, May 17, 2010

To Swig, to Quail

10 comments:

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