Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Beat me to it
I was going to write something on Jacob Weisberg's incredibly illogical attempt to pin the financial crisis on 'libertarianism' (quotes because Weisberg is definitionally challenged).
Ilya and Matt beat me to the punch.
Here's a choice bit from Matt Welch, pointing out how Weisberg's drole little spit-ball of ennui has backfired:
Ilya Somin lays out a few of the logical problems:
At some point I'll write that post naming one of the obvious villains in the financial crisis - Basel II and the race to the risk-based bottom it encouraged. Nobody will read it, but the truth has its own merits.
Ilya and Matt beat me to the punch.
Here's a choice bit from Matt Welch, pointing out how Weisberg's drole little spit-ball of ennui has backfired:
Weisberg's beef with libertarians stretches back from even before the speculative capital-fueled Internet boom helped create his current job (along with the charity of a man whose wealth Weisberg finds downright immoral). No doubt he, like Thomas Frank and everyone named Naomi (not to mention their ideological cousins on the neoconservative side of the aisle), wants to use a second blip in a quarter century of consistent growth and worldwide poverty-reduction as an excuse to pretend that capitalism is fundamentally flawed, or that libertarians ever had anything to do with George W. Bush.
Is this the New Regime getting ready to round up the first ideological suspects against the wall? I'd suggest something far more comical. There's something almost poignant about the bland Process Liberal center-left, with a financial crisis in its quiver and a super-majority wind at its back, still feeling wobbly enough to attack a set of ideas that are marginal at best to the two-party debate. Why, it's almost as if Weisberg's not confident that Americans will join him in Defending Government!
Ilya Somin lays out a few of the logical problems:
Recent American economic policy has not been especially pro-market in areas outside finance regulation either. During his first five years in office, George W. Bush presided over the biggest expansion of government spending in decades, including a major increase in regulatory spending.
Second, even if one can say that the US was following market-based policies in recent years, the same can't be said of European nations such as Germany, Iceland, and Spain, all of which have had mortgage/financial crises at least as severe as ours. If the financial crisis discredits "libertarianism" in the US, does it also discredit German social democracy? In my view, neither is true. But Weisberg's logic points in that direction.
At some point I'll write that post naming one of the obvious villains in the financial crisis - Basel II and the race to the risk-based bottom it encouraged. Nobody will read it, but the truth has its own merits.
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