Conor wrestles with Bastiat Beasts.
Conservatives and libertarians sometimes face a disadvantage in policy
arguments. We're attuned to the indirect effects and unintended
consequences of certain policies, whereas our liberal interlocutors
concern themselves primarily with direct effects. Why is this a
disadvantage? Because the liberal can say, "Look at David from Detroit,
who is going to lose his job, and his home, if GM goes bankrupt."
Whereas the best conservatives and libertarians can do is to say,
"Somewhere in America there is an unknown person who will lose their
job, and their home, if the automakers are bailed out, due to the
inevitable effect of egregious economic inefficiencies that will course
through the financial system."....
The person who is hurt in the
liberal narrative and the one hurt in the conservative narrative are
both real human beings. But the fact that the former is identifiable is
often used by liberals as an emotional bludgeon.
Freddie responds.
I'm still struggling with whether I think the tyranny of the specific hard case makes conservatives systematically worse off in argument; I think it does, but I'm not ready to commit on that yet. Surely on taxes, for example, it works the other way around.
While I'm maundering, I offer you the poem all this wrangling made me think of: The God Who Loves You, by Carl Dennis.
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week--
Three fine houses sold to deserving families--
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.
People never like to face that sometimes there are only a set of bad options and the best choice is the least of those bad options. Liberals have the ability to live in fantasy. They can sell their programs as always being a good option regardless of the facts. In an ideal world no one would ever lose their job and there would never be recessions. It sucks for the people who lose jobs in the auto industry. That is all the liberals care about or bother to consider. They never consider the costs of saving those jobs and just talk about the need to solve this or that problem. The liberal argument is appealing because people would rather live in a fantasy world where yes we can save every job and industry at no cost to anyone else than face the realities of the market.
Is there a deity pacing his cloudy bedroom in angst thinking of the man who marries his high school sweetheart and then, through his uncle, gets into the IBEW? Or is this sort of angst reserved only for college-educated wankers?
What a provincial poem, some nice touches (e.g., "his cloudy bedroom") aside.
More 'liberal' bashing? Isn't this getting rather old?
I'd also note that being able to point to a specific example shows existence, a rather important attribute, I would say. Specifying the characteristics of something without bothering to find out whether or not it actually exists is something that happens all the time in mathematics, but probably isn't such a good thing in the venues being discussed here.
"More 'liberal' bashing? Isn't this getting rather old?"
It is not liberal bashing it is liberal policy bashing. Since a large group of people continue to cling to discredited and fanciful ideas, bashing those ideas will never get old.
BTW,
On another thread you said I have no mathematical ability. I actually do. I majored in economics and took two full years of college math up through Dif E and Linear Algebra. I couldn't solve a dif e today to save my life, but that is due to lack of practice not ability.
Aren't we done making sport of Babbitry yet? I find poetry that mocks the pretentions of unemployed literary baristas to be funnier, more acutely cruel, and more touchingly tragic.
Davein Hack-in-sack,
It is easy to seize on an interpretation of a poem, and then criticize it on those specifics
(which are not the whole of the thing)
Without considering what others may have seen in it
Which they thought made it good
Consider it without projection of your own biases
(Surely the wankers are people, too?)
--
Also, in answer to your questions, yes, obviously, yes; and no, unless you realize
We're all wankers on this bus.
That's a really fantastic poem, despite the fact that it ends somewhat happily.
I'm still struggling with whether I think the tyranny of the specific hard case makes conservatives systematically worse off in argument; I think it does, but I'm not ready to commit on that yet. Surely on taxes, for example, it works the other way around.
I'd also say "the tyranny of the specific hard case" works to conservatives' advantage in the context of a lot of social issues too.
We're attuned to the indirect effects and unintended consequences of certain policies, whereas our liberal interlocutors concern themselves primarily with direct effects.
That's simply not true. In the present case, conservatives have shown a complete blindness to the indirect effects the failure of the Big 3 automakers would have on otherwise healthy and competent parts suppliers and other related industries. They have shown an utter lack of comprehension of the indirect perverse effects of thrift during a liquidity trap. Conservatives have held fast to simplistic, common-sense reactions -- when the economic situation worsens, we must all tighten our belts -- which in fact are foolhardy during the kind of economic crisis we're currently facing. Conservatives have failed to understand that policies which favor allowing weaker firms to fail become counterproductive when, in the teeth of an abrupt crisis, they cause ALL firms to fail at once (much as harsh environmental conditions which exert strong evolutionary pressure on members of a species will cease to produce ever-fitter individuals if they get to the point where they cause all individuals to die. That which does not kill us makes us stronger, but that which suddenly kills all of us is pretty goddamn useless).
It is liberals who are at a disadvantage in arguing the present crisis, because the economic rules for government during a liquidity trap are the reverse of the rules that hold for individual households facing economic hardship. The things government needs to do in the current situation are counterintuitive. Faced with a huge deficit, it needs to spend more. This is an easy case to make at a vulgar level, obviously -- nobody is going to turn down the check you offer them. What is frustrating to liberals is that the conservative chattering classes consider themselves to have perceived the shallowness and shortsightedness of the liberal argument, and treat is as a soft-hearted, foolish quick fix which is self-destructive in the long term. When in fact it is the conservative argument that is shallow and simplistic, and self-destructive in both the short and long terms.
It's not often that I feel the need to quote Stalin, but it seems appropriate here:
It's much easier to identify with an actual person rather than just the idea of one (or many).Great Post, Thanks
I can not quite get my arms around "a road less traveled". Maybe it is a lack of imagination. Maybe you would be better off with your ideal mate, but how many devastations are out there to balance it all out. I think for all the what ifs there is a path (not predistination) and we walk it once.
Conservatives have failed to understand that policies which favor allowing weaker firms to fail become counterproductive when, in the teeth of an abrupt crisis, they cause ALL firms to fail at once
Of course not all the automakers are going to fail. Toyota, Honda, Nissa, Hyundai, BMW etc. will weather this crisis.
For anyone who has not read Neal Stephenson's latest, Anathem, he explores the idea of multiple selves in a branching multiverse, connected via a strand of consciousness. Essentially, he argues that the only conceivable way the human mind can narrow down the infinite probabilities confronting it in each infinitesimal moment is if the mind is actually present in each of probability strands, the same way a particle can exist in a superposition of states.
Scientifically valid? I have no idea. I make no pretense of being a physicist. It's an interesting idea, probably stolen from someone else.
Conservative Libertarians think they're looking far afield when they call to let GM fail. They're not. These are the same people who got it wrong on Iraq; who supported Bush twice; who supported the bailouts of Bear Sterns and AIG with no oversight. Conservative Libertarians simply put are on a very long losing streak of flat out getting it wrong.
If GM goes under, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs directly and indirectly. An entire region of the United States will enter their own great depression. It will cripple our country's economy for some time and ruin our manufacturing base.
Let's not forget, oh wise conservative libertarians; for all of GM's faults, they actually make a product that has value. The financial service sector - which Ms. McArdle and her Libertarian free-market worshipers were so quick do defend a bailout for - has proven itself with regards to its value to the economy to be a step and a half removed from people who steal money to support their gambling habit.
If they let GM fold and don't support a bailout, the Republican Party is finished. Sometimes political parties simply can't succeed in the marketplace and so they go out of business. I suggest to conservative libertarians that they use their brains for something other than figuring out how to kiss their own asses.
"they actually make a product that has value."
Then they should be able to sell this product for a profit.
What liberals forget is a lot people know Dave in Detroit, and not only don't care if he loses his job, but would like to see him taken down a notch. It's galling to live near a family of bullies headed by a not very bright high school graduate who nonetheless have a boat, an RV, dirt bikes, and a big truck. People who are proud of being stupid and should be, considering they are better off than your graduate educated parents, who for some reason still regard these people as "poor", when they are well off, and "oppressed" when they are well taken care of by the system and feel free to push other people around when they feel like it.
But, what we are going to see for a few years is the succor of the overprivileged, obnoxious, and connected, whether they are unionized workers or investment bankers.
The poem's conclusion subverts its body, rejecting fantasy for "the life you've witnessed, / Which for all you know is the life you've chosen." This turn replicates the mournfully orthodox theology of Eliot's Four Quartets, the poem's locus classicus:
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Fantasy has its place in policy disputes as well, no doubt. But surely there is some virtue in grounding one's ideological speculations on "what has been" and is present and is therefore not entirely "unredeemable."
There is no need to wait. The onerous effects of bailing out GM, or anyone else, can be measured directly and immediately.
When we rescue a company - any company - from their poor decisions, we do it by using taxpayer money. We take money away from people who earned it and give it to those who didn't. That's called "stealing". The reason it was stolen doesn't matter - It's theft.
"It's only money," you reply.
Okay, then - It's only money. It's little pieces of green paper with writing on them. It's a collection of ones and zeroes in a computer somewhere.
In point of fact, it's more than that. It's much more. Money is life. Every bill, every coin, every one, and every zero represent a tiny piece of the life of the person holding them. The money in my bank account was given to me in exchange for that portion of my life I exchanged with my employers. When you go to work, you do so specifically to exchange a part of your life for money that you will use to buy the food, clothing, and shelter that you need. Everything you buy with money is something you've said "I'd like to exchange x number of hours of my life for this."
This is why stealing is wrong. This is why it's evil.
When you take money from someone by force, you're taking little pieces of their life. What you're saying to them is that whatever you're taking the money for is worth more than the portion of their life they gave for it. If you're a common thief, then you're saying that your individual desires mean more than your victim's life. It's the same when government steals. The only difference is that instead of one thief and one victim there are millions of each and the thieves vote on it. Adding insult to injury, and to assuage the conscience of the thieves, we graciously allow the victims to vote as well.
Theft is evil, and that evil isn't reduced by either the number of thieves or the alleged righteousness of the cause.
A bailout of the "big three" will be a direct and measurable injury on the lives of the taxpayers called upon to pay up. And that effect will occur long before the unavoidable unintended consequences manifest themselves.
I remeber the occasion that I identified myself as a Liberal 57 years ago. My perspective has not changed.
As a liberal, I am sure that a bail out of GM, Ford and Chrysler would be more soft-headed than soft hearted. If the government lends money to the companies, the boards of those companies have a bounden duty to use the opportunity offered for the benefit of the shareholders. On past performance, they will also use some of it to benefit themselves and another share to benefit UAW officials. Much of the remainder will be wasted. We liberals want to help the auto workers who will face dislocation and may face real hardship. We had better help them directly, and take responsibility for doing it in ways which are effective. We have no interest in helping out the vested interests of the bosses, the shareholders and the UAW officials.
Experience of knowing workers who have been through the process of their industry being bailed out once and again before ultimate failure has left me near to weeping, in the shadows of my terrestial bedchamber, for the fuller lives they might have lived. In the bowels of Christ, I beg you friends and fellow liberals, think it possible that bailing out the company may harm the worker.
Nathan,
If the government really did print its own money, as opposed to borrowing it or taxing it from others or printing it at the expense of the value of everyone else's currency, you might have a point. But of course the government can't do any of those things. It has to get the money from somewhere at the expense of someone. To prop up the big three you are just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Worse still, in granting the big three immortality you are preventing new more innovative companies from rising. Currently, there are numerous start ups making electric cars that don't look like eco penalty boxes and are actually close to practical. In another few years they may be very practical. Bailing out the Big three just makes it harder for new and better companies to arise. Yes it was painful when companies like ITT and Woolworths went down. But I would rather have Apple and Wal-Mart or Target than any of the companies they replaced. In the same way, I would rather take the pain of losing the Big three in order to gain the possibility of having better more competitive companies to replace them.
In the end, you and those like you are clinging to childish views of the world. It would be wonderful if everything could stay the same and no one would ever lose their job and no company would ever fail. Sadly, reality doesn't work that way. The cure of trying to make it work that way is much worse than the disease of instability and change.
You do, however, make a good point in calling out Megan for supporting the financial bailout. She was wrong to support it and now looks like a hypocrite more interested in saving her friends' from the Wharton Business School's jobs than acting on any real principle or coherent theory.
brooksfoe:
Whoa whoa whoa, time out. How can a business BOTH:
-be competent
AND
-predicate its entire business model on the perpetual success of 1-3 businesses, all of which have a severely negative net book value and total liabilities equal to a huge multiple of yearly profits in those few years when they actually make one?
Sorry, anyone that dependent on a US automaker should have known they were living on borrowed time. Yes, that includes the union kiddos too.
If GM goes under, hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs directly and indirectly. An entire region of the United States will enter their own great depression. It will cripple our country's economy for some time and ruin our manufacturing base.
This is an assumption. It is not a fact. Giving $25 billion to incompetent managers hounded by a ridiculous union on the basis of an assumption seems like bad policy.
Nathan: "These are the same people who got it wrong on Iraq; who supported Bush twice; who supported the bailouts of Bear Sterns and AIG with no oversight."
The only one of those things supported by most conservative libertarians was Bush, and only once (in 2000, before he revealed that he was not a free marketer).
You'll note that when Megan supported the bailout, most libertarians strongly disagreed with her in the comments.
By the way, liberals supported two of those three things. And note that the bailout passed congress with a majority of democrats in favor, and a majority of republicans against.
Surely on taxes, for example, it works the other way around.
That may be why taxes are the one issue where the conservative position has been almost wholly co-opted by liberal/progressive politicians.
brooksfoe,
Those are actually part of the direct effects. The indirect effect is the loss of economic activity caused by shift $X billion worth of resources away from where they would have gone in the absence of the bailout.
Conservative Libertarians think they're looking far afield when they call to let GM fail. They're not. These are the same people who got it wrong on Iraq; who supported Bush twice; who supported the bailouts of Bear Sterns and AIG with no oversight. Conservative Libertarians simply put are on a very long losing streak of flat out getting it wrong.
I was against the war, voted for Harry Brown in 2000 and didn't vote in 2004 and didn't support bailing out AIG or Bear Stearns, so I am not sure how I am on a losing streak.
It's an interesting idea, probably stolen from someone else.
It is a synthesis of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics and Penrose's theory of consciousness arising from quantum mechanical effects in neural circuits. Others probably contributed the ideas.
Anathem is a good read, BTW, as are all of his books I've read. His Baroque Cycle is an interesting examination of how our modern world of commerce and science was created in the 17th century.
"For anyone who has not read Neal Stephenson's latest, Anathem..."
Is it more like his door stopper cycle or the entertaining stuff he used to write before that (e.g., Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, The Diamond Age)?
Every time I read posts like this I think of the pig Squealer in Animal Farm. Yes, it may SEEM like ending the inheritance tax is a gift to the rich, but actually we did it to help the poor. That's why we'd like to end the minimum wage, that's why we oppose unionism, and that's why we support lower taxes on dividends and capital gains. It's all to help the poor, cross my heart and hope to die. Does anybody really believe this stuff?
@brooksfoe: In the present case, conservatives have shown a complete blindness to the indirect effects the failure of the Big 3 automakers would have on otherwise healthy and competent parts suppliers and other related industries.
Not the ones I've read. What they want is to find a way for GM to go into bankruptcy and come out leaner, without going under. Bankruptcy seems to be the only way under the current laws for them to alter the structure of their business practices and costs. At that point, there might, just might, be a role for federal money. I'd suggest that it is possible to pull off. The airlines do it all the time.
Oh, and when the oil business went bust in the 80s, the rest of the US said "Who cares?". It took quite a while for the small to midsized companies and the towns in the oil patch to come back.
Wouldn't said god also be feeling grateful for the millions of opportunities you have missed of stubbing your toe, being bullied, bullying, catching some dread disease, or killing yourself young by slipping on a piece of ice?
And, judging by their biographies, famous artists on the whole are not known for making their families happy.
Anathem is a departure from both his earlier work and the Baroque cycle. He's not concerned with minutiae of how or why some economic, social or technological phenomena came about. He's looking for truth now, trying to find away around the philosophical dead end we find ourselves in. The book treads old ground, looking into the history of thought in pursuit of some aspect of meaning or direction.
Some might find it naive. I found it interesting.
"Oh, and when the oil business went bust in the 80s, the rest of the US said "Who cares?". It took quite a while for the small to midsized companies and the towns in the oil patch to come back."
Yes, Oklahoma and North Texas were very bleak places in the mid to late 80s. I moved there in 1987 and the place was still in shock over the bust. I don't recall any liberals who professed to be so concerned abou the poor caring one way or another. But those Okies were just ignorant gun clingers working for a hated industry. A little unemployment and poverty probably did them some good in lieu of sending them for the re-education they so desparately need.
My employer pays its skilled machinists about $30/hr (salary, fringes, pension, fica, etc.).
I've seen them at work and I've been in auto factories (here and abroad) and seen them work.
I can't understand why auto workers need to be paid so much more (excepting what the union has extracted, of course.) Now I know darned well that the labor theory of value is false (hard work making mud pies is not worth more than easy work making apple pies) but my employer's workers and auto workers are equally skilled, equally hard working, etc. but my employer's goods are sold at a profit and the Big Three's aren't.
It's an interesting debate, but I was hoping the debate was between Conor Cruise O'Brien and Freddie Meadowes.
It only takes a little thought to find a nice, specific, counter-example.
Look at all those experienced auto-workers and shop-floor level managers Tesla Motors cannot hire because they are stuck in the husk of a zombie company. Sure, Tesla Motors is a risky business join, but taking risks lead to better rewards.
Nobody cries about the rise and fall of tech companies, but the workers that went through Wang Computers and Digital in the 70s and 80s became the fertile ground for the Massachusetts tech boom in the 90s. It was certainly painful, at times, for the workers, but we certainly reaped the rewards.
Nobody cries about the rise and fall of tech companies, but the workers that went through Wang Computers and Digital in the 70s and 80s became the fertile ground for the Massachusetts tech boom in the 90s.
That's exactly right. And it illuminates the precise reasons why a bailout of the auto industry might make sense, while bailouts of companies in other industries don't make any sense. 1. There was no credit crisis involved in Wang and Digital's collapses, and in any case people don't buy computers on credit the way they buy cars. 2. Wang and Digital didn't have anything like the market share of the Big 3, and their collapse didn't entail a resulting collapse of all the chipmakers or drive manufacturers in the US.
With regards to the merits of a structured Chapter 11 with government taking over the role of providing DIP versus a simple bailout, I am agnostic. Maybe the structured bankruptcy with benefits could work, what do I know? The main point is that this "the market will take care of itself" attitude is, when addressing very large fixed capital intensive industries, complete nonsense.
Along the same lines, when the oil industry went bust in the 1980s, the US economy was expanding, and a reasonable number of jobs were being created to absorb those being laid off. Right now we're looking at an economy that's lost hundreds of thousands of jobs since the beginning of the year already, and we're contemplating letting an industry collapse that will put at least another million people out of work. Doesn't make sense. You want to let GM go bankrupt, wait a few years until we're out of this mess, and see if it collapses then. And if it doesn't, hey gosh, maybe rescuing it wasn't such a bad idea after all.
And if it doesn't, hey gosh, maybe rescuing it wasn't such a bad idea after all.
If it doesn't, it's because it's limping until the next recession, when it will require another bailout. Seriously, companies fail more often in bad economic times, so we can't wait for them to get so screwed up that the fail during a boom. You know this, right?
I favor buying all the equity up and turning it directly over to the UAW or the workers themselves. Then they can sort it out!
But more seriously, the problem with the bailout is much like the problem with welfare for individuals. It's not that it's a waste of money--it is, but we can afford it--it's that it's a waste of a perfectly good company (and, in the case of welfare, of people). Any government money brings political strings and bad incentives, which will almost certainly prevent the company from actually managing to become profitable. What a stupid waste of perfectly good factories and competent workers.
If you accept the premise that conservatives tend to be focused on indirect effects rather than direct effects (I don't find that terribly convincing)- I think one can make a loose contrast with regard to rightward-leaning foreign policy.
Namely, that the current liberal focus is more on cultivating a cooperative framework in the international community, which will yield untold and *unspecific* dividends- versus the specific concerns that our focus must be to kill the *specific* bad guys to avert *specific* destruction in the US or Israel, nonspecific or counterproductive consequences be damned.
Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.
Could somebody explain for me why the "human cost" argument supports helping the very highest-earning factory workers in the country. We seem to have adopted some sort of "preferential option for the upper-middle class" while I wasn't looking.
To be sure, if you look at it politically, helping the UAW, which has been friendly to the party soon to be in power, makes sense. But this wasn't supposed to be just crass political calculation, was it?
GM declaring bankruptcy doesn't shut down GM, it doesn't shut down their suppliers, it doesn't mean they stop making cars, any more than the airlines scrap all their planes when they go bankrupt. It just means that UAW workers stop earning twice what others in the same field earn. Too bad for them, but not with my tax money, please.
When I read the subject line, for a second, I though Megan was talking about the old Brunching Shuttlecocks Breakfast Menu.
I'm still struggling with whether I think the tyranny of the specific hard case makes conservatives systematically worse off in argument; I think it does, but I'm not ready to commit on that yet. Surely on taxes, for example, it works the other way around.
As a general rule, any government will attempt to design its policies such that individual losers are hard to identify, or unpopular, but beneficiaries easily identified, especially by themselves. Wouldn't you do that, if you were in office, and wanted to stay that way?
Tariffs, for example, at least give the impression of being paid by foreigners, who don’t vote, and aren’t popular
More generally, the negative effects of any government action will usually be side-effects and in a complex system, such as the world, it will be hard if not impossible to predict what they will be and who they will effect. (For example, how much will the bailout cost, not the average American, but you in particular? Probably it will never be possible to know what your taxes would have been otherwise). The expected positive effects will usually be the goal of the action, and as such ought to be pretty easy to find out and publicise.
Conservatives and liberals are both unconcerned with what is unseen when the direct effect is their preferred government action. Conservatives supported the war in Iraq, but didn't consider the follow-on effects of that policy. In the case of the automakers, liberals are missing both the moral hazard being extended beyond that already seen with the financial bailout (one effect of which is the near-certain bailout of the automakers- an effect seemingly unseen by those that supported the financial bailouts). In addition, liberals are not considering that the capital being diverted to the inherently unprofitable automakers is capital taken away from profitable ventures.
It is libertarian thinkers that deal most effectively with what is unseen, and that is because they rarely advocate a government initiative, but rather advocate letting free acting people make their own arrangements. If you wish to convince us that a government policy is net beneficial, you had better be ready to answer the questions about the unseen. This is why conservatives and liberals detest libertarians- they are not easily swayed the emotional appeals of selective anecdotal examples.
"I've chosen a life smaller than my 'talents' because a smaller life made me happier." - Richard Ford
The British aren't coming around Jan 20 if one is too mean Scotsmen like Adam Smith. In this setting, I think the best thing to do is see if we have somewhere an estimate of the yearly cost of the Wagner Act and perhaps other laws granting excessive power to unions. We should negotiate to revoke those laws in return for a grant to the automakers of $25 billion, or 4 times the annual cost of the laws if less, in loan subject to the additional restriction of Becker (cf. Becker-Posner blog).
Has anyone noticed that in this election, economic conditions being what they are, most voters chose candidates who did not come from the party whose policy wonks come from a place called The Hoover Institute?
Back to you, Megan.
oh my god teh liberals have a weapon we can't build or use because if we did... what? why can't a conservative or libertarian tell a heart-warming, or better, breaking story about Sara and Jack who do not work in Detroit but who will carry the check and who have two children to feed...
injecting liquidity into the banking sector can make sense considering the argument that all other industries depend on it.. as long as we do not support banks per se but rather their ability (willingness) to move money - it is a bailout for all american? not so with detroitarating detroit.
the right has picked the emotion of fear in the past and not that of hope. if you have something to lose you go for fear. if you need for your condition to improve.. hope might work better? from a Machiavellian point of view it is not either or but rather when? i think both emotions are needed right now.
Your political ignorance aside I want to know how a bailout is going to help Detroit. Seriously, the big 3 make crappy cars that Americans don't want to buy. The only reason they were doing as well as they did before gas prices spiked last summer was because of stupid government policies that allowed them to produce ridiculously over sized vehicles that were being indirectly subsidized by a generous tax exemption that was originally designed for work vehicles and not for Cadillac Escalades and Ford Expeditions, an exemption from CAFE requirements for these vehicles and a stupid exemption from gas-guzzler taxes.
Detroit's offerings are shit. The big 3 sat on their asses for years and made SUVs which are nothing more than piss-poorly engineered pick-up trucks with back seats. The margins on these oversized POSs was excellent, it's not as if you have to do a lot of brilliant engineering to turn a pick-up truck into an SUV and it's not as if most pick-up trucks were all that brilliantly engineered to begin with. As P.J. O'Rourke so brilliantly put it:
Substitute "SUV" for "pickup truck" in the above excerpt and you have a great understanding of Detroit's automotive engineering prowess, or lack thereof. So we have three companies that make cars that nobody wants to buy any more and that no one would have wanted to buy in the first place if it hadn't been for stupid and badly applied government policies (CAFE standards, and the aforementioned tax exemptions).How are we going to bail them out Nathan? What is your solution? Just throw money at them? Tariffs and import quotas aren't going to work as well as they did in the 1980s, the Japanese manufacturers now have plants in the US, so attempting to prop up the big three like we did back in the '80s by driving up the prices of Japanese cars isn't going to work. So I'd really like to know what your brilliant solution is to make Americans want to purchase badly made cars that get lousy mileage. Because that's the only thing that's going to save the big 3.
Unfortunately I see no evidence that any of the bailout advocates have really thought about how a bailout would work. There seems to be some belief that if we throw a bunch of money at Detroit that they will somehoe turn around 30 plus years of incompetence and bad decisions and start building cars that people want to buy. But how much money is it going to take so that the big three don't suck? How long will it take for the big three to stop producing cars that suck? I have yet to see a single bailout advocate such as yourself offer any answers to these questions. Instead you attack anyone who opposes another bailout for Detroit (Yes, another, what do you think those import quotas in the 1980s were?) and basically offer up incredibly ignorant and irrelevant ad hominem attacks and insubstantial arguments that are basically nothing more than bleating "but think of the children" over and over and over again.
You have to excuse liberals. Most of them study the arts and never learn the nuances of something as complex as opportunity costs..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost
fixing the car tax system would make sense - a progressive one. hell, even regulations regarding maximum fuel millage or what not - although not very libertarian. a good start would be getting rid of certain washington lobby groups. the local ones are always stronger than say the japanese or european. and they do not help americans as a whole. but a detroit bailout? show me the numbers...
Wiley E. Quixote,
sir;
First, I have heard that Sean Hannity is a nice person off camera so I don’t take your comparisons of me with him personally. As for your analysis of American auto manufacturing, I am not as pessimistic for GM and Ford’s long term prospects. I think they got broadsided by the collapsing economy and if they can hang in there long enough to get their next generation of cars to market, they’ll come back when the economy improves.
Further; a note on the ongoing trashing of American made cars. Insults of GM and Ford’s quality typically comes from people I doubt could change a tire. People who drive Audis or VWs and thinks they’re driving great cars while at the same time trashing GM and Ford are fools. A Golf is marginally – if at all – better than a Focus and only douchebag hedge fund managers drive Audis.
I think GM and Ford are unfairly baring the shame that Wall Street hasn’t. The people responsible for our current troubles didn’t make any product or contribute any service to the economy – they just made stupid decisions with other people’s money. GM and Ford deserve a chance to survive. The people who’ve run into the ground AIG, Bear Sterns, Meril Lynch, Citi, Fannie and Freddie . . I don’t see them walking around in orange jumpsuits! There’s been no accountability for people who’ve damaged the economy, and rather they were first in line for overpriced bailouts. Someone in our country has to actually make something useful. WWII wasn’t won with cubical-bound office workers checking their e-mail. Give our auto industry a chance to survive and make it through this crisis. You damn well better believe we’ll all regret it if we don’t.
Speculating on what would've been? Oh how dare I be disappointed. I could've done better, I'm not a man oh woe woe. HAHAHA. Those who dwell on roads not taken imperil themselves in fruitless course that can only hurt the road they're on.Yes ladies and gentleman you have not always achieved "optimal decision making" you've slept with the wrong people, and you've made wrong career moves. In essence this poem reads like this, "if you'd have been perfect, you'd be happier." What an absolutely cliched thought. Its supposed to make you think that, yes you too could be great in some way (after all great doesn't necessarily mean rich, or powerful).
The theology of that poem is kind of creepy. God, I would hope, takes more into account when judging your life than whether you're perfectly matched with your job and your spouse.
I guess that's why it's "god" not "God", but still, I would hope that even a minor deity in a very extensive pantheon would be a little more transcendant than that.
Yes, the reference to "the god who loves you" in the poem has left me completely bewildered.
Perhaps it's meant to evoke some sort of ancient Greek tutelary god or genius who presides over your personal fortunes? In that respect, it's reminiscent of Nietsche's view of what you yourself should be in a godless universe, the maximizer of your own excellence. Not an ethical god, by any means. But methinks I'm sending myself down a blind alley.
Or is the reference to an omniscient and sympathetic deity who has allowed you free will and infinitely regrets all your bad choices? No, because the regretful things in the poem result from pure chance, not from bad choices. And they're not ethical failings, but rather failings to achieve Nietschean excellence. Hmmm....
Kierkegaard remarked that there is a "despair of possibility" that follows from a lack of necessity in a person's life. The poem invites us to imagine our life as an infinite set of possibilities and depicts the "god who loves us" as experiencing that despair.
The most interesting aspect of this unusually interesting thread is, for me, Alexi's (and others') references to the idea of an infinite set of possibilities in an individual life that are somehow not just parallel but equally real. Something like Pablo's magical chessmen in Hesse's Steppenwolf. Further thoughts?
It's my distinct pleasure wile e. to point out as a participant in the automotive industry for the last 30 years that you have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to cars and engineering them.
Nice repetition of talking points tho