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[H]ere’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.
(…)
The promise of the meritocracy has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, but the reputation is lower.
In his usual obtuse point-missing way, Brooks nibbles around with minor-to-nonsensical explanations like class solidarity, excessive transparency(!), and The Crazy Pace Of Modern Life Today With All Its Twitters And YouTubes And Whatchamacallits, but he completely fails to address the two biggest reasons why no one trusts elites anymore:
1) They’ve earned it. The most powerful people in America have been on a nonstop corruption and fuckup spree that is now impossible to ignore. The financial elites gamed the system to sack the economy, the political elites bailed them out while stiffing everyone else, and the media elites made excuses or looked the other way.
Throw in serial government incompetence, obstruction and malfeasance that just happens to benefit elected officials’ biggest campaign donors, and it’s not at all surprising that most Americans think their politicians are corporate stooges.
2) Right-wing anti-intellectual demagoguery. Of course, not all elites are intent on destroying the country for their own personal gain. Many members of the scientific and academic elites have been alarmed by the actions of the political and financial elites – on climate, on the economy, on education, on foreign policy – but in order to neutralize their warnings, conservatives have embarked on a decades-long campaign to discredit intellectuals and experts as effete out-of-touch liberal eggheads, junk-science scam artists, intolerant indoctrinators of the impressionable, and God-hating secular humanists.
The power elites thus gained the latitude to thoroughly discredit themselves, while the intellectual elites who actually know what they’re talking about mostly found themselves shouting into the wind, their vindication forever unnoticed.
Of course, not all professors and scientists are smart, noble Cassandras trying to steer us away from ruin, just as not all CEOs, politicians and pundits are selfish creeps trying to steer us towards it… but it’s a pretty safe way to bet.
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crooks and liars
and that is what we need to address
that is a must read article
In retrospect, I probably should have said something to the effect that we’ve gone from an elite of all rich, connected white guys, to an elite of *mostly* rich, connected white guys…
eli!
Suz!
Eli !
Be nice to Dave Brooks, he
sold his soul to Darthdonated his Brain to Science.Petro !
And he does write, like, one reasonable column every year or so.
Part of it is the intrusive 24/7 media.
To some extent we are like Gulliver viewing the Brobdingnagians and being repulsed by their magnified pores, moles an stray hairs
You have really summed it up.
It’s OPM, nothing to loose.
Meritocratic. For David Brooks to write that word from his perch is self-parody.
Meritocracy these days means being able to sell yourself to a patron who is looking for your particular brand of incompetence.
Meritocracy these days is having skills in selling and internal political patronage above any (sometimes none at all) skills in that for which you supposedly have merit.
The elites are not there because of their merit. They are there either because of daddy’s money (or mommy’s money) or because their organizations found the easiest way to get rid of their failing ways was to promote them.
I really do not think their wankery is being overreported. However, it is very possible that the previous generations of elites’ wankery was significantly underreported.
Bwahahaha … Excellent !
Be nice to Dave Brooks, he
sold his soul to Darthdonated his Brain to Scienceboy, did he ever pick the wrong organ to donate.
and the timing is a little bit off there, Bobo. Wait until you’re completely deceased – not just brain-dead.
LOL … Jayt !
I’m gonna go watch Transformers for the umpteenth time … leaving y’all plenty of Crab Dip & Margaritas to enjoy your Friday evening.
Or maybe they were more discreet without cell phones or publicity about diapers or when a trail was a trail.
The thing of it is, when you evaluate these guys opinion of “the good old days” they think the good old days were when they were like 6. It was ever thus, it’s just that when you are 6 mom and dad are taking care of your every need, of course that would seem like the good old days. I bet the early Sumerians had these exact same conversations about the late Sumerians…or it may be that Brooks is just a class A douchebag and is spreading his douchebaggery around for all to smell.
ELI….good eve!
What I meant to say was, no one ever trusted or hated the elites any more in the past than they do now.
elite…
Hiya, sadly!
Not much of a tax write-off there.
Admittedly my politically memory doesn’t really go past the 80s, but I don’t remember the sense of “The game is totally rigged” ever being as strong as it is right now. Hell, Nader probably would have *won* in 2000 if it were as strong as it is right now.
speaking of elite,watched the old Bewitched tonite,Sam was wearing a Vuitton pocket book .heh
Not so much. For instance, it would be inaccurate to describe FDR’s or JFK’s conduct as discreet.
…Sam was wearing a Vuitton pocket book .
I love mine.
hehe
I completely agree..so out in the open and in-your-face.
The Boomer elites really did us in, man. The former hippies who became the Man are now waterboarding us to death with their evil corporatist ways. And the Gen Xers like Obama are even worse since they grew up loving Raygun.
Nice summation. I would not let off the academic elites though. A lot of the bullshit theory underlying the philosophy of looting of our elites came from economic academia. Then there are our neocon war-loving foreign policy academics who hang out at various schools and think tanks.
Way close to old joke:
Q: What’s the Golden Age of Science Fiction?
A: Eleven!
Yeah, I was thinking of them specifically when I put in that caveat at the end. They never seem to have any trouble getting themselves heard, either.
Well, it might not have been discreet, but it certainly wasn’t heavily covered by [alleged] news media.
I have to say though that your second point: Right-wing anti-intellectual demagoguery lets the Democrats off the hook. The institutionalized looting that we see now was a construction of both Republicans and Democrats.
The prez of Harvard comes to mind.
I’ve stopped listening to NPR because of Brooks. Both he and Dionne are the epitome of conventional inside the beltway spin. Both pampered and privileged asshats that do a disservice to the nation while they fatten their bank accounts.
Brilliant. It is Upton Sinclair updated.
Oh, the looting was absolutely bipartisan, but the virulent anti-intellectualism that enabled it was almost all Republican.
Then there are our neocon war-loving foreign policy academics who hang out at various schools
intellectual molesters.
Comforting to know that NPR provides a platform for Brooks to spread his “douchebaggery.” NPR sees him as a real star.
What is meritocracy for David Brooks is kleptocracy to the rest of us.
Meritocracy?
In what kind of meritocracy does George Bush brcome President? He destroyed the world economy and then genius Brooks wonders why the plebs have no respect for nobility?
Sadlyyesoveyich ! *g*
The former hippies who became the Man???
I guess you never heard of Young Americans for Freedom, the source of the current crop of Ayn Rand addicts.
Most of the former hippies I know struggled with employment for years and are now on Social Security without pensions. But then, there weren’t a whole lot of hippies in the South.
I guess Mara Liasson didn’t do it to you in the 1990s. I think I last heard NPR when Tavis Smiley was interviewing some Bush nitwit in around 2002. I broke my NPR habit (acquired when Bob Edwards hosted Morning Edition) in 1998.
I admit I don’t read or listen to Brooks anymore. The pleasant demeanor doesn’t even work on the level of clownish superficiality. It doesn’t hide the vacuousness or the propaganda wrapped in the old newspaper of badly faked folksiness.
But what is interesting is deconstructing his latest blather. Of course he blames us for not being sufficiently in awe of meritocrats like himself. Look at it the opposite way. The elites sense the discontent rising up against them. They aren’t going to reform or stop looting, but they are beginning to deploy their propaganda guns against the hoi polloi. This lament of meritocracy goes hand and hand with recent alarms about “class” warfare. It is all very reminiscent of the attitude of the French aristocracy toward the Paris mob, and we all know how that turned out for them.
True, not all. But a lot of the boomers became reich wingers. Which is sad. The Gen Xers are the most reich wing, though. (My generation.) They’re the worst “libertarians.”
It’s true the zeitgeist now is extremely Randian. That’s also sad. I see people reading that crap Fountainhead book. Why aren’t young people reading Kropotkin or Chomsky or Bakunin? True libertarians.
Between American Idol and Jersey Shore I doubt if they have much time to read. Maybe that will change when China makes the U.S. it’s concubine.
Yup, that sums it up. Honestly, the US has been in productive decline since the early 1970′s. And maybe our elite really are no worse in than earlier generations in terms of corruption, but when the pie is shrinking and the cleptocracts do not reduce thier corresponding thievery… well eventually they’ll be eating the entire pie themselves(and still feel hungry).
The generation that grew up sitting in the back seat of a station wagon waiting in gas lines under Carter ended up loving Reagan. Mostly because they hated Carter. Could Obama make people love Palin? You betcha.
Obama and the Democrats had a golden moment to make themselves the anti-Bush, anti-Republican, anti-corporate (and anti-dote) heroes, but they just couldn’t bring themselves to turn their backs on their benefactors.
So now we all go down the tubes, the Democratic Party goes down the tubes, the fat cats keep getting fatter, and everyone else goes to hell.
Things have been weird ever since the Reagan-Bush team got into office. And that explains a complete lack of competence from leading figures such as Greenspan, Brooks and Bush.
As Hunter Thompson would say: When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
I was that generation–the kid in the back seat waiting for my dad to gas up. But I was always a big time lefty–even as a child. I hated Raygun in college, but was in the minority.
Personally, I think the rancid right wing culture we have now is a product of the backlash against the Sixties. People like Obama hated the hippies and hence hate the Left because he equated the Left with hippies. He just used the hippies to get into office knowing they are gullible. But he has the utmost contempt for them, no doubt in my mind. That’s why he likes Rom Emmanuel, the epitome of anti-hippie.
I feel about the same way as I felt a year after 9/11. So much good will squandered. But less disappointed now, as I am better informed and did not expect much better.
The elites today probably would agree with The Nazi Propaganda Minister Herr Goebbels infamous statement, as the German Army was heading east through Poland. He was asked what plans did the Germans have for the Slavs and he replied, “We’ll teach them just enough German to be able to read our street signs so they don’t get run over by our tanks!.” Just change a few words for our elites today Americans for Slavs and English for German and Limos for Tanks and you’ll get the idea of what they have in mind for the great un-washed masses of increasingly destitute Americans.
Dumbya didn’t destroy the world economy, he just stood there and watched, and got rich off of it. Just as Slick Willie did. Just as Gore or Kerry would have done.
I don’t think you can blame any one person, not even Reagan. It’s been brewing for a long time.
You can’t spell ELITE without E L I
I never expected Dubya to put the post-9/11 goodwill to any positive use, although I certainly didn’t expect him to go as far off the rails as he did… or be allowed to.
Everything is the DFH’s fault if you hadn’t noticed.
ROFL … TKK !
I was pretty naive back then.
… tee hee hee …
Do you really think Obama and the Democrats considered going against the corporatocracy for one moment? I think the whole reason they got into politics in the first place was that they saw where this was going and they wanted to be on the winning side when it went down.
A different president probably could have done some great things in the wake of 9/11. But Dubya was just about the worst possible person to have in the White House at a time like that.
I said they had the opportunity, I didn’t say they had the inclination.
I am not a person who thinks things happen for a reason, but I do wonder whether it is preordained that W should be in charge (and now O) at a point when the U.S. needs great leadership to maintain its status.
I knew that was coming when I first saw the headline to this post.
I just knew it.
And from whom, I might add.
I fear that we have reached a point where it is impossible for a great leader to get elected in the first place.
My point.
I put GW in a class all his own. Truely. And the leader of the free world standing around slack-jawed in Fall, 2009 is as good as causing the global economic fiasco, IMO.
“David Brooks looks around and wonders why we no longer respect our elites”
___
Like him, first and foremost, ‘eh? All those unwashed, supercilious lefty bloggers…
To elaborate on my point, the CPAC convention. Return of the John Birch Society. No prinicipled right.
You mean Fall 2008, don’t you?
And the principled left isn’t allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
Yep. Fall, 2008. Slack-jawed, dumb, smirking Chimp.
Yep. NPR=Never Provoke Republicans.
You don’t think individuals with the potential to become great leaders want to attend Rotary club events and eat bad food across Iowa for a year?
no spoiler alerts, but Maher is good tonight.
Been that way for decades but somehow manages to get worse. During the past several presidential election cycles the cost of mounting an effective national campaign has grown (almost) exponentially every four years. To even be considered a viable primary candidate pols have already mortgaged their soul to every special interest who will have a piece.
David Brooks is calling for the WAAAAmbulance, he just realized things aren’t what they used to be .
Memo to D. Brooks:
You are not the reporter of this problem, you are this problem.
This quote towards the end of Brooks’ steaming pile is a gem:
“Fifth, society is too transparent. Since Watergate, we have tried to make government as open as possible. But as William Galston of the Brookings Institution jokes, government should sometimes be shrouded for the same reason that middle-aged people should be clothed. This isn’t Galston’s point, but I’d observe that the more government has become transparent, the less people are inclined to trust it.”
Might I suggest a different wording: As the idiots in charge have had their F-ups revealed, people are less likely to trust idiots not to F-up some more.
As these idiots are still in the way it is hard to clean up their mess.
It further causes distrust when the idiots are heard to proclaim all these bad outcomes are a surprise, no one could have known things would end badly.
As Brooks states it is a meritocracy now, those that were making the decisions must have….never mind.
Brooks provides the final twist on the pile with this:
” Rather, our system of promotion has grown some pretty serious problems, which are more evident with each passing day.”
After reading this I must agree with Brooks (but only with this sentence and not the rest of this ) and that is a rare and horrifying thing to admit.
Not only that, but he has explained and proven his point with one sentence.
Brooks: go peddle this crap in the unemployment line. If some one thinks you are an idiot they won’t be afraid to tell you.
School them on meritocracy,aristocracy, inbreeding, Enron, Madoff,subprime mortgages, Sanford, offshore banking, CDOs, MBSs, Arbusto Energy, Harken Energy,and Worldcom to name a few recent ‘successes’ (feel free to add any you think should be included that I have not listed). You may find that some of those in line will have some knowledge of these names. Tell them all about how things have changed for the worse in this country.
Do you have some Carhartt to wear so you can fit in with your peers?
Let us know how it turns out; maybe you’ll even meet a few people that you can invite to your next social function.
jayt, I’m waiting for you to announce your candidacy for Bayh’s seat…
The principled ‘left’ is the mainstream voter. As we have always argued.
Any analysis of the decline in institutional regard that omits mention of media’s role, isn’t worth much attention in my view.
I think they would be willing to do that. But they wouldn’t be willing to play ball with corporate donors or Democratic power brokers.
That would be a small price to pay for power if, by doing that, one could actually attain power.
Paul Volcker may be our last best hope of salvaging the current disaster. He’s the only one I can think of that might have both enough sense and clout to kick the elite back into line.
Larry Summers, Timmy Geithner, Peter Orszag… these guys have no clout with the elite and they have no sense. They are mere errand boys for the elite, fit to deliver thier mail and shine thier shoes. And honestly, I’d throw Obama himself on that list.
umm, about that….
like I said the other day, my skeletons aren’t kept in closets, I had to rent out some serious storage space.
Stop fantasizing.
But that’s the whole point of this exercise…! The Fat Cats own the whole she-bang…! ;-)
Aloha Ya’ll…!
Let me rephrase that. They might be willing to play ball up to a point. But if it ever came down to choosing between the people and the powerful, they would choose the people.
That’s a good point, and of course the corporatocracy bought off the media at at the same time they bought the politicians. The telejournalists make big bucks and they want to keep it that way.
Krusty: “Gentlemen, I am your candidate. There’s just one thing. Are you guys any good at covering up youthful, middle aged indiscretions?”
Burns: “Are these indiscretions romantic, financial or treasonous?”
Krusty: “Russian hooker, you tell me.”
Burns: “We’ll say you were on a fact finding mission.”
-The Simpsons, “Mr. Spritz Goes to Washington”
Those guys are the elite. As soon as Obama loses in 2012 they’ll be back on Wall Street raking in the bucks. That will be their reward.
Now I’m completely confused by your position.
My position is that alpha males will do whatever it takes to get to the top of the mountain. Right now that seems like bending over for campaign contributors.
One big Q is that O seemed like such an alpha male a year ago. And now he seems like such a ditz lost in the wilderness. Waddup?
*heh* It’s a three-fer…! ;-)
I’m talking about a hypothetical and possibly nonexistent “great leader”… as opposed to the self-serving twits who make up 95-99% of the Democratic Party right now.
heh.
Russian hooker.
New skeleton on the way !!
One of my (many) favorite episodes.
We have a combination of crap leadership (Obama) and a pervasive right wing landscape wherein taxes and social welfare are considered the mark of Satan. I really respect what the Greeks are doing. That’s democracy in action. We are a pathetic democracy, a bunch of sheep, man. The Greeks are out in the streets not taking shit from the rank corporatists!
Obviously you have never been to a Rotary Club luncheon in Iowa. The basement meeting rooms are grand. The food sometimes approaches edible. The ethanol talk is scintillating. But best of all are the ubiquitous autographed portraits of Chuck Grassley.
Dante never approached creating a level of hell as gruesome as these luncheons.
Oh, the hypothetical that isn’t gonna happen. No wonder I don’t understand. BTW, I am not in favor of your great leader. Anything that is not built from the ground up is not worth having.
Burns is one of my favorite characters of all times.
Shorter Brooks: Gosh! It’s getting harder to f—k up and move up anymore—those competent people scare me!
“Dumbya didn’t destroy the world economy, he just stood there and watched, and got rich off of it. Just as Slick Willie did.”
I beg your pardon.
Bill Clinton inherited the biggest deficit in U.S. history and turned it into the biggest surplus in U.S. history. Povery rates plummeted and income rose at all levels. We had the longest sustained period of economic growth in history.
A simple thank-you will suffice.
PS: I think “Slick Willie” is a rip-off of “Tricky Dick,” don’t you? Even the criticisms of Clinton are second-rate.
Still no hope that the Indy Dem party will give ya a look-see for that newly vacated seat…? ;-)
Oh, but I have been to a Rotary luncheon in Houston, which is similar to Rotary luncheons everywhere. Not much of a problem. Do you really think that such venues would be an impediment to someone who lusted after power?
From The Eighth Circle (Fraud)
I should have been more specific. I’m refering to the folks that make the Forbes list. If those guys aren’t willing to play ball then it’s gameover.
You don’t want a president who will actually lead rather than just cave in to (or enthusiastically facilitate) corporate interests?
I understand that no one’s perfect, so I’m okay with a little wheeling and dealing, but I want a president who knows when and how to draw a line in the sand. Think Bizarro-Dubya.
There’s still hope in the DoD for ‘em…! ;-)
For me, the light came on when the blogosphere really took off in response to all the lies on top of lies surrounding the Iraq war. But as we have all seen and experienced, our awareness spread out from there. Not only did we start providing our own analysis on this but increasingly on all the other crap going on during the Bush years. And since that touched every aspect of government, that is where we went with our factchecking and analysis.
But more and more we are also going deeper into the past. The Democrats started going off track with Johnson and Vietnam, the Republicans with Nixon and Watergate. And then we have seen over the last 20 years the rapid coalescing of the two parties into a single corporatist entity with two faces, a fake choice for the rubes to keep them happy, and above all quiet. The result has been a highly unstable system fueled by looting alternating between bubbles and wealth destroying contractions. It is not sustainable.
We are now in a pre-revolutionary phase. Things are falling apart. Those tasked with putting them back together are the very ones who engineered this train wreck in the first place. This means there is no one to set things right. The two most likely outcomes of this are depression and revolution.
It came out today that, after some legal research, it was found that Indiana’s Democratic Party leaders cannot name a candidate until *after* the May 4 primary.
and once again, we extend a hearty Fuck You to Evan Bayh.
No. Those that lust for power will do it.
But, I think it might dissuade others with great talent from pursuing the
POTUS.
Late at night to be nuaced. I favor a leader who leads, but one who is chosen by the voters. The term great leader carriers with it an implication of someone who rises above the hoi poloi, not someone who comes out of it.
Actually, the blogosphere is probably a very large part of the reason why people have lost faith in elites…
Swopa is upstairs!
Late Night: So… Is That Really a Reconciliation Sidecar in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
Hats off to you, Hugh, for your tireless efforts in chronicling the whole sordid affair and the entire Shrubco fiasco…! *g*
And I was meaning it in the sense of “someone with great leadership qualities”, since that was kinda where that conversation started. Besides, FDR was as elite as it gets, yet he was one of the most progressive and effective presidents ever.
We voted for a great leader but got stuck with Dear Leader.
The next shoe to drop is commercial real estate foreclosures. After that, state and county layoffs. Unless, of course Obama stops fiddling. But that’s not gonna happen. He’s all about neoliberal austerity a la Pinochet Chile. We, the workers, have to tighten our belts (Soc Sec and Medicare “reform”) while the rank corporatists steal our money.
So you need to attend my hosting of Arnold Ludwig on The King of the Mountain on April 11 to find out, empirically, who attains leadership and why.
Sheer Fuckery at it’s primal prime…! 8-(
Was Bayhbye given the same job they offered Sestak…?
I look forward to it.
Well, Bush had the most extreme negative impact on the economy. And Reagan has had the longest running negative impact. But I wouldn’t go praising Clinton. Sure, he was a little better than Reagan and Bush on taxation but…
Much of the Clinton “good times” amounted to Alan Greenspan’s bubble blowing.
Financial deregulation went into full swing under Clinton.
NAFTA and WTO were rolled out under Clinton.
FDR was chosen by the voters multiple times. Doubt that will be the case with O. Empirically it seems not related to background, as FDR’s was great and O’s is modest. But rather how one performs on the job.
Clinton’s Presidency is a case of the blogosphere starting to look back at and reassess. Clinton was a free trader with all the damage that meant for American jobs. He was tremendously successful at creating jobs but these were an offshoot of the easy money policies he and Greenspan tacitly agreed to. We also saw how these policies began creating the big bubbles that so threaten our economy. Clinton’s was the dot com one. A lot of what Enron did came out of the Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers working hand and glove with Ken Lay. There were Graham-Leach-Bliley which repealed Glass-Steagall and the CFMA which deregulated derivatives. This last started out as another Enron friendly move. So while Clinton’s record looked good at the time, his Presidency set up the disasters which Bush took to even more extreme levels.
I see captjjyossarian beat me to it. Drinks on me.
I’m not even attempting to make any kind of argument there. I was just talking about the kind of leader we need, and the reason why that kind of leader can’t get elected.
We came along just as they were going over the cliff. I think we helped the country in understanding how deep the rot went, in both parties.
Basically, what you describe is the harsh effects of neoliberalism. With no militant left (ie labor unions, communists and anarchists) to push back the capitalist vipers (like in 1930s America) we are shit out of luck. FDR did what he did to avert a leftist takeover of the US. Now we have a marginalized radical left which cannot force the liberals to do what is right, and hence we are pretty much fucked. I see a right wing populist movement which will eviscerate what’s left of the US body politic.
No. Clinton deregulated Wall Street which led to the current debacle. That was a fake boom.
No thanks.
Yeah, and if another right wing nutso gets elected in 2012 we’re not going to make it to 2016 without some form of martial law.
The men on top are going run out of people to steal from and assets to loot. And when they hit that point, are they going to stop or are they going to turn on each other like a bag full of hungry rats?
Unless at least some of the wealthiest families in the country want an FDR figure, we will not get the choice of electing an FDR figure.
Exactly. Although I would have said corporations – not that there’s a whole lot of difference.
I sorta figure that any CEO of a large corporation who actively tried to support an FDR type would quickly lose his job.
The foundations are another matter, in theory support could be gathered here but… most foundations these days seem to be right of center.
And I sorta figured that the odds of such support coming to pass were roughly comparable. That’s the problem – the haves will never support a candidate who cares more about the have-mores than about them.
Eli,
“nonstop corruption and fuckup spree”
That sounds like a good name for a band.
i’m with eli. first, because the progressive political blogosphere has been way behind the curve — the global justice movement of the ’90s (in north america) was way ahead of the curve and the political blogosphere has yet to even catch up more than a decade later. and second, because as far as i can tell most of the political blogosphere is still engaged in partisan politics and cheerleading one faction or another.
eli, your excellent post made me go looking for a paul krugman quote from a few years ago i like (went so far as to transcribe it from a podcast audio) about, as i recall, what happens when the masses see that the elites are incompetent. couldn’t find it though and now have missed your thread. damn.
Brooks would in fact be the ideal brain donor since his brain is like brand new, because it has never been used.
found it! not on my computer (my spotlight may need re-indexing), but online. way late in epu land, but still imo, worth a comment… at least it will make it easier for me to find next time i go looking for it. :)
from june, 2006. would so love to quote this one back to krugman now.
AMEN, brother!! Great post. You sum it up eloquently.
Time for a million (or two or three) person march on Wall Street. Jam up the street for a couple of days, say, a little after Labor Day? See if that gets anyone’s attention. I would take a rubber bullet for that. Anyone with me?
Go over to the PBS website and watch The American Experience ‘The Crash of ’29′. The parallels between ’29 and ’08, and the build-ups to each, are striking. Ayn Rand finally had her day, her dubious theories became policy and they failed. It’s strange that she crafted her philosophy in the shadows of the Depression and ignored what the Crash seemed to make clear; unregulated free-markets lead to disaster. But even now Wall Streeters are saying that regulation is undesirable, apparently having learned nothing from having been bitten twice. Of course the bite didn’t hurt them, the taxpayer took the pain for them so maybe what was taught was that you can screw America, and the rest of the world, royally and get away with it.
Shorter Brooks:
“We have provided them with bread and circuses and still they clamor for more. They must be put back in their places. Woe, I say woe.”
At some point Brooks might want consider the possibility that it is the lack of transparency of the self-asbsorbed and wholly interconnected elites to continually pad their own nest with the fruits of the efforts of everyone else that is the problem. I seriously doubt that day will ever come.
Hey, having trouble with posting. Gosh, did I do something wrong?
Yep, that’s pretty dead on. If you fuck up long enough and hard enough, no amount of spin from the media or political classes will be enough to conceal it. Especially when your fuckups have massively tangible negative consequences.
“she crafted her philosophy in the shadows of the Depression and ignored what the Crash seemed to make clear; unregulated free-markets lead to disaster”
Is that so? Ayn Rand had a lot of things wrong with her philosophy but reasonably so for a person who had escaped Ze soviet union. But you too have a lot of misunderstandings about “unregulated free-markets”. Try taking a look at the difference between “Associationalism” which is nothing more that cartelization – was quite popular among the ruling elites in the 20s and 30s – and is quite an antithesis to a free market – is often taught to kids in govt schools as “unregulated free markets”. Kids grow up believing this nonsense and it becomes a knee jerk reaction to demand regulation of anything that moves, and creates sort of deafness, where up is down, cartelization is free market, supersubsidized programs and institutions (e.g. banks) are independent and govt programs actually work.
I can understand the human folly of believing what was taught as a young age without question – but at least make an attempt to understand why there is this disconnect between consistent good people like Ron Paul and yourself!
One of the problems with Ron Pauls free market economics is that he seems to depend almost entirely on “after the fact” rule of law enforcement by the courts. He doesn’t seem to like proactive regulation at all.
“After the fact” enforcement of law violations allow a tremendous amount of potential damage to occur before the bad behavior is detected and put to an end.
If you are served poisoned food and you die, the law cannot give you your life back. Sure, maybe the restaurant gets shut down as a result but that doesn’t help you at all.
Likewise, people burned by Madoff’s Ponzi scheme are not getting thier money back. Much of it is long gone. Sure, he’s in jail, but fat load of good that does to his victims.
Also, beyond the direct victims, bad players in the market place can often drive out honest competition long before thier crimes are made public and brought to court.
Take the Melamine in baby formula example from China. Honest companies could not compete with the cheaters on price because it was far cheaper to put melamine in baby formula than it would have been to actually use nutritious ingredients. So honest players get priced out of the market and go bankrupt before the fraud is even uncovered.
I’m with Ron Paul on greater Congressional oversight of the FED, ending the wars, reducing our police state and stopping the wall street bailouts but I feel that some of his economic ideas are extremely flawed.
The people that give David Brooks his soapbox are getting worried about the rise of political movements outside the controlled left-right paradigm.
Thus his marching orders.
You need to make your points clearly so people may agree or not with those points.
Very simply do you beleive that someone who runs a business and provides a good or service should by law be required to meet certain standards such as safety and openess and fairness.
Do you beleive that whereas people in their daily lives are not free to do as they please and are prevented from doing so by law that the practice of gaining money has some special priviledge and should be exempt from laws.
The problem with people that advocate for unfettered markets is that they prize money above all else and place the attaining of money in a category all of its own. They want to endow money making with priviledges no other area of human activity enjoys.
You are free to beleive in that but if you do you have to give reasons for why money making is unique among all else that people do.
Obama is the typical nouveau riche / arriviste. Better to have a leader who is comfortable with himself instead of one who’s trying to play a part.
Can we please critique people with different political views without calling them Nazis? Geez.
It’s not impossible that a new progressive leader will come from the upper class. We’re all waking up now– no one feels good about the state of the country.
And don’t beat up on the Libertarians. Wouldn’t you rather have the political discourse be a debate between the progressives and libertarians instead of the Dems and Repubs?