Chuckles is a frequent reader of the Independent Bloghorn, who is apparently not impressed by my ideas. He recently commented on my latest diagnosis that our economy is suffering from a severe case of Baracktile Dysfunction. I have juxtaposed my response to his comments below. I am in italics.
Truly Amazing. Thank you!
You argue that the government is becoming involved in the industries mentioned precisely because, through them, they can create more dependence? I wonder how it can escape your attention the possibility that the government is becoming involved in these industries only because people now depend so heavily upon them. This didn’t escape my attention. Nor did it escape the attention of Peter Wehner and Paul Ryan. I cited their article as a jumping point for my ideas, and any of my ideas that I would call “good” I would probably give them credit for. I especially agree with the following passage in their article:
Once a large number of citizens get their health care from the state, it dramatically alters their attachment to government. Every time a tax cut is proposed, the guardians of the new medical-welfare state will argue that tax cuts would come at the expense of health care — an argument that would resonate with middle-class families entirely dependent on the government for access to doctors and hospitals.
I would much rather have people dependent on industry rather than the government. So Yes I agree with you and it didn’t escape my attention that people depend heavily on the financial and health care industries. However, the fact that people depend on these industries sounds like a great problem for industrious people to solve instead of indolent legions of sociology and psychology majors that are flooding out of our universities and flocking to government jobs. Maybe they can create a powerpoint full of acronyms that will solve all of our problems.
First, if I may, comparing Circuit City, with its ear bud earphones and speaker wire to financial institutions with retirement plans, and the entirety of the health care industry—truly a stroke of brilliant convolution. We’re not even at apples and oranges. I can’t think of something so disparately incomparable, so there’s got to be some kind of prize for that. Looks like you are on the verge of discovering irony. The disparate incomparability was the point of my comparison. I could have chosen even more disparate examples, but probably the best reason for bringing Circuit City into the picture was to point out the fact that Circuit City should fail and that in return Best Buy, Costco, and Walmart can share in the plunder of market share that they leave behind. In a free market, when one business fails it turns out to be a net positive as competitors fill in the hole. You take away this dynamic from an economy, and eventually you can end up in a dangerous place. You create an economy where failure is no longer an option, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. In other words, what happens to the United States Government when the trillions of dollars of bailouts don’t work? Who comes to clean up the mess of that failure? You should read the parts of Alan Greenspan’s autobiography where he visits the former Soviet Union. By encouraging people to believe that a bank can get too big to fail, a government can create a false sense of security that it too can get too big to fail.
Build a 60 story sky scraper on farmland in Mona with a drunk foreman, a blind architect using support beams made out of candy corn, the government would survey it, clear the building, and let it fall over. Build that same building, same drunk foreman, same blind architect on E46th street in NY, and the government is going to do everything it can to make sure the building will stand—that, or come down safely. The difference is one will affect countless innocent bystanders. The other will not. That’s the difference between Circuit City and our financial institutions. (And again, I’m not even saying I’m on board with the bailout, just can’t stand to see such a poor comparison.) Candy corn buildings? Come on, you can’t make support beams out of candy corns. Maybe pixie stix or the little sucker things that you dip into fun dip, but candy corns. Feel free to knock my comparison of failing electronic stores to failing banks even though you missed the point, but don’t follow up your criticism with egregious examples of confectionary ignorance. I also think you are giving away innocence too liberally. I would venture to say that most Americans share the guilt of our current situation. The fact that the government feels the need to insulate and protect hundreds of millions of people from hundreds of millions of bad decisions is disturbing.
If you want to argue about how the building got built in the first place, that’s your right. It doesn’t change the fact that this thing was built and people will be seriously harmed if it falls. These people will probably be harmed more when the government fails. If we want to argue culpability, we can do that too. Again, doesn’t change facts on the ground. Facts and ground are two words that carry little weight. For example, is it a fact that in order for Obama to spend $850 billion on our economy that he has to have the money to spend? Where is he going to get this money? Conjure it out of thin air? Borrow it? From whom? Maybe Kenya? Let’s start the printing presses? Maybe the First president of African descent can make our economy look a little more African. I am hoping we can inflate our way out of debt Zimbabwe style. Otherwise, who is eventually going to pay for it? Leprechauns in Candy Corn houses?
As far as pointing out the obvious? I’d love to meet a group of people to whom your argumentation is obvious, because I have SO MANY bridges to sell for some amazing prices. Spread the word. Only if they are made out of candy corns.
It was my plea after my last reply to a post of yours, and I sincerely plead for it here: rigor. That’s all I ask for. Why this obsession with rigor? No one I have met that voted for Barack Obama seems to care much for rigor. The mainstream media seems to have given up completely on rigor and has resorted to slobbering adulation. Rigor has lost its connection to power, and so it is pretty much worthless in my opinion.
Howdy,
First, a correction: I’m not that frequent a reader. I was introduced by a friend who could not believe the tripe he was reading. So I thought I’d give it a go.
I’m not as internet-cool as some, I can’t do the fancy italics, so forgive my rudimentary separation markers.
*****I could have chosen even more disparate examples, but probably the best reason for bringing Circuit City into the picture was to point out the fact that Circuit City should fail and that in return Best Buy, Costco, and Walmart can share in the plunder of market share that they leave behind.*****
First of all, I would like to thank you for my introduction to irony. It’s better than I had hoped to imagine. But it appears you missed MY point: that you are comparing minnows to whales. Circuit City is small potatoes, and it will be consumed by niche small potatoes. Lehman, Bear Sterns, and their ilk, there is nobody to step in and fill that void. It’s that simple. For large-scale collapse, we saw the preview to that movie in September. We let Lehman Brothers fail, and the paper market froze for nearly a month, choking out countless small businesses who couldn’t make payroll, halting hundreds of thousands of transactions, and terrifying consumers worldwide into the downturn we’re currently in, still spiraling down b/c nobody’s buying the crap we’re producing. We’ll be feeling the effects of that month for at least a year.
And I fear you reason from a fictitious paradigm: free market v. government intervention. The free market is, as Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz would call, a 70% solution. Yes, it’s most of the way there. Aside from malignant (and natural) market inefficiencies such as monopolies, markets are horrible at regulating common goods and services. We don’t pay private companies to pave the roads we are willing to drive. We don’t pay private security to protect our streets. We allow the government to provide these services for a percentage of all paychecks. Signing on for even these basic services is un-market. There’s no “yeah, but…” arguments here. Either you’re a full-member of the free-market club or you agree to some govt intervention. And from there we aregue degrees of involvement. We would resort to tribes otherwise. Sadly for some, we have evolved. We are communities now.
*****In a free market, when one business fails it turns out to be a net positive as competitors fill in the hole. You take away this dynamic from an economy, and eventually you can end up in a dangerous place.*****
What dangerous place is this? America since 1916? We have never lived in a free market society. Not since the dark ages, and even then, only in the informal sectors, have “free markets” ever really existed.
*****You create an economy where failure is no longer an option, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. In other words, what happens to the United States Government when the trillions of dollars of bailouts don’t work? Who comes to clean up the mess of that failure? You should read the parts of Alan Greenspan’s autobiography where he visits the former Soviet Union. By encouraging people to believe that a bank can get too big to fail, a government can create a false sense of security that it too can get too big to fail.*****
I don’t know anybody who thinks “too big to fail” is a good model. To say that others are promoting the idea now is a straw man, and to complain about it now is spilt milk.
*****Candy corn buildings? Come on, you can’t make support beams out of candy corns. Maybe pixie stix or the little sucker things that you dip into fun dip, but candy corns. Feel free to knock my comparison of failing electronic stores to failing banks even though you missed the point, but don’t follow up your criticism with egregious examples of confectionary ignorance.*****
I think this is one of one area where we will have to agree to disagree. I find candy corns, when a small amount of water is applied, and the contents of the corn itself properly cemented together, is one of the most durable creations known to man.
*****I also think you are giving away innocence too liberally. I would venture to say that most Americans share the guilt of our current situation. The fact that the government feels the need to insulate and protect hundreds of millions of people from hundreds of millions of bad decisions is disturbing.*****
Well here I’m going to have to raise a flag. How is it that somebody who so adamantly supported Prop 8, taking away the right of homosexuals to act in a certain way in order to “protect”, not even physically or financially, but just those with delicate sensibilities. Another social conservative with a libertarian economic streak. I’m sorry dude, but Milton Freidman is dead, as is William F. Buckley. And their ideas have been thoroughly discredited. Look at Russia and Malaysia during the 1990s. The Washington Concensus brought on more misery through unfettered capitalism than anything state planning could have done. But these are longer discussions.
*****Facts and ground are two words that carry little weight. For example, is it a fact that in order for Obama to spend $850 billion on our economy that he has to have the money to spend? Where is he going to get this money? Conjure it out of thin air? Borrow it? From whom? Maybe Kenya? Let’s start the printing presses? Maybe the First president of African descent can make our economy look a little more African. I am hoping we can inflate our way out of debt Zimbabwe style. Otherwise, who is eventually going to pay for it? Leprechauns in Candy Corn houses?*****
Where’s the money coming from? Our future prosperity. Pray it comes. Funny, I’d never read these criticisms on conservative blogs during the catastrophe of the Bush years, turning Clintonian surpluses into monsterous deficits, with unncessary wars that would be paid for under the same principle. That has nothing to do with Africanism. I dont’ even know what that means. Obama was elected with a clear mandate, pockets of Utah that feel it is the beginning of the apocalypse notwithstanding.
*****Why this obsession with rigor? No one I have met that voted for Barack Obama seems to care much for rigor.*****
Well then I would like to introduce myself.
*****The mainstream media seems to have given up completely on rigor and has resorted to slobbering adulation. Rigor has lost its connection to power, and so it is pretty much worthless in my opinion.*****
A startlingly weak argument, the “nobody else does it so why should I?” But I guess it is to be expected, given your general life outlook. Democracy is an enlightened tool when it’s cutting gay people’s rights, but it’s lamentable when the biggest 1st term majority in 50 years elects a man who insists government can help solve a problem. It’s time for us all to get over Reagan and our parent’s politics.
Also interesting, I like rigor and support Obama. I know you’re frustrated, but you can’t claim that because your ideas aren’t in the forefront right now that I don’t want the situation closely looked at. It’s well, juvenile.