This is a fight every roommate household has had. We recognize it. I’ve seen it before, and you, dear reader, if you’re like me, probably have too.

And the government is having this fight at the top of their lungs, risking our tenancy and our neighbors’ goodwill, and our ability to continue to live in this house. And they simply will not stop!

In an an arrogant riposte to an earlier posting of mine, Lawfare blogger and member of the Hoover Institute Task Force on National Security and the Law, Benjamin Wittes, proclaimed he is “Happy to be a government proxy.”

Wittes’ tongue may seem somewhat in cheek, but he really means it. “Government proxy” how? In my earlier article criticizing both Wittes and Adweek columnist Alex Koppelman for their poorly resourced and vituperative articles attacking Scott Horton’s investigation of the 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees, published by Harper’s Magazine in January 2010. Department of Defense investigations had labeled all three deaths suicides.

Barack Obama was the right “product” in 2008 to be sold to a country that was reeling from, to say nothing of being embarrassed over, eight years of George W. Bush. But the game has changed and, in combination with the Geithnerite upper class twit cabal, these guys are in such a bubble that they’re going to blow this presidency up.

Jennifer Rubin’s “we must keep building aircraft carriers to protect ourselves against homemade car bombs” post was close, but the winner is the most consistently stupid wingnut on the planet, none other than CNN’s Erick Erickson.

Is the much-touted “Fourteenth Amendment option” a viable end run around the debt-ceiling nonsense that threatens to destroy the world?

Charles Grassley thinks so. Bruce Bartlett thinks so. Former president Bill Clinton definitely thinks so: He’s said he’d do it “without hesitation, and force the courts to stop me.”

CNN has reported that Harry Reid is working on his own debt limit proposal that would cut deficits by $2.5 trillion total, include no revenue increases, and raise the debt limit by that same $2.5 trillion amount. Reid, Nancy Pelosi, the President and Vice President are scheduled to meet in the White House tonight starting at 6pm ET. Aides stressed that this would satisfy two key demands of the House GOP. It would have the dollar-for-dollar relationship between spending cuts and an increase in the debt limit; and it would not include revenue.

It sounds to me like the Democrats feel they need a counter-offer to what John Boehner will propose.

It is a pleasure and an honour to introduce Professor Bernard Harcourt to the Lake for a discussion of The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of the Natural Order. The book advances several claims that go to the heart of libertarian ideology. For FDL readers probably the most important claim holds that belief in the efficacy of unregulated markets naturally to secure maximum economic and social well-being has as its counterpart the assertion that the role of government is properly confined to the spheres of criminal justice, national defense, and the protection of private property. Harcourt considers it no coincidence (Comrade, as we used to say in my cell), that the nation where free-market ideology is most pervasive has the world’s highest rates of penal incarceration by an order of magnitude, and that the rising incarceration rate since the mid-1970s is synchronous with the ascendance of an exceptionally rabid free-market ideology.

There is a deeper set of intellectual issues at play, however. What exactly do we mean by ’free markets’?

Update: Looks like negotiations are deadlocked. Boehner says “I and my Republican colleagues in the House are prepared to move on our own.”

If economics were a science, professors would sic their grad students on a paper by Casey Mulligan explaining that the minimum wage hike in 2009 cost 800,000 jobs.

It was John Boehner who invoked the spectre of the “Asian markets” by saying that he would deliver a framework deal on how to increase the debt limit by Sunday night. Once you do that, there’s nowhere else to go. If no announcement is made, the Asian markets will most certainly react negatively. If the announcement is seen as unworkable or inadequate, they’ll drop too. This creates rather than arrests a crisis.