Vox Popoli

FDR showed the way:

Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

This is interesting news that happens to be highly relevant, as Voxiversity II is going to be reading and discussing Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression. We’ll start the readings on Monday the 27th, but if you want to get an early jump you can download the entire book on PDF or bookmark the online text at the Mises Institute. However, Voxiversity I participants tended to find having the physical text on hand to be helpful, so you may wish to consider ordering the book from the Mises bookstore.

Full disclosure: I have no connection with the Mises Institute, they do not provide me with their literature, and I make nothing from their book sales.

Courtesy of the Responsible Puppet:

The Author of this book has already explained that he is not overly fond of being compared to Tolkien, thinking himself and his writings not up to the comparison, but I will begin this book review with the one criticism of the “Lord of the Rings” that Tolkien admitted to agreeing with in the forward: The book is too short. This is my biggest (and perhaps only) serious criticism…. Beale has implied that he isn’t planning on publishing any extensions to the world he had created here. Too bad, because my feeling here (getting back to Tolkien) is that this book could be a “The Hobbit”-like prelude to a much more significant fictional writing. This is no slight, because I really liked Hobbit. And I really liked this one, as well.

Just to set things straight, I probably will write something set in the world of Summa Elvetica in the future. I just don’t think it will be the next book I write. But I could be wrong, since I didn’t think SE was a book that was ever going to get written in the first place.

But thanks to Marcher Lord Press, it was, and you can buy it here if it sounds of interest to you.

Now that the novel is done and out, it’s time to leap into another Voxiversity. A warning: the book I presently have in mind will be even more brutal than Thucydides, so unless you’re ready to seriously dive into it, you may as well not even start.

I’m curious, however, to know what potential subject is of most interest to people intending to participate in Voxiversity II. Is it history, economics, politics, religion, war, or something else?

JS still isn’t convinced that government shouldn’t attempt to legislate away the business cycle:

I come at this as a liberal Democrat, so full disclosure right away. But let me ask you if you have considered that Ayn Rand style-libertarian economic policies have their limits as well. “Free markets” work in theory efficiently when every participant in the market has the same bargaining power and the same access to information. In the real world, that is never true. Oligarchs will always be oligarchs, whether that involves use of goverment pressure to exert their power or economic pressure and access (through superior funds) to better information to exert their power. But more importantly, psychology and groupthink work their way into markets, even markets as transparent as the stock exchange, but certainly in less transparent markets like real estate. Bubbles are a recurring theme in free markets, and when they pop, things go badly for people who were simply doing what 6 months ago was brilliant. And as we have seen several times (in the 1930’s and now today) a popping bubble can cascade through many sectors of the economy and cause an overall crash that crushes real business activity. In the long run, of course, the economy rebounds, but that’s little comfort for people in bread lines who in the 30’s tended to become interested in totalitarians of the left and the right, and so I think a legitimate societal interest would be in putting shock absorbers in the system so that downturns don’t become another depression. We can argue whether this or that policy will accomplish that task, but I think arguing that complete free markets is the way to go is as utopian as the communists’ worker’s paradise claims of most of the 20th Century.

I find it amazing, if entirely unsurprising, that the first reaction of many people to an economic crisis caused entirely by government intervention is… to express the same sort of doubts about the free market that originally justified the aforementioned government intervention.

JS clearly doesn’t understand what the point of the free market is… but I’ll explain that later today.

So does this reader of Rod Dreher’s. And he’s not the first Minnesotan from whom I’ve heard that had been planning to vote Republican this fall and has now changed his mind:

I was committed to the GOP ticket, supported McCain/Palin and Coleman financially. I live in Minnesota and can hardly bear the thought of Senator Franken. But I have decided NO major party candidates will get my vote. My Senators and Rep all voted yes. I have emailed and called each before and after the vote demanding detailed information on when they read this 451 page atrocity, and why it was neccesary to include the crap that it did. I told the people that answered the phone I expected a letter in response with detailed answers.

They hung up on me or just said they would pass the message on. Your elected officials, in most cases, are so afraid of what they have created they will do anything they are told to try and avoid the unavoidable consequences of the circumstances they have created.

I am more willing to suffer a President Obama and a Senator Franken that I am to support GOP candidates who advocated and voted for this bailout.

I find it incredibly humorous that Al Franken may win a Senate seat solely because Norm Coleman was dumb enough to set himself against the most vehement outpouring of public opinion since the Republican attempt to give migration amnesty. One benefit of this bailout is that it has ended “the lesser evil” argument once and for all.

89 Valders Valkyries (4-0-0)
87 Winston Reverends (0-4-0)

70 Alamo City Spartans (4-0-0)
53 Burns Redbeards (2-2-0)

68 Greenfield Grizzlies (2-1-1)
51 Black Mouth Curs (0-4-0

64 Silver Spooners (1-1-2)
48 Judean Peoples Front (2-2-0)

54 Mounds View Meerkats (2-2-0)
38 Masonville Marauders (1-2-1)

It’s getting to that part of the season when one has to actually manage the bye weeks and injuries. Needless to say, Winston is cursing its luck right now, putting up 87 points in a loss to the Valkyries.

He emails to explain that Al Gore has it wrong and that it’s not a green revolution that will solve the liquidity problem:

Actually, the solution to the financial crisis is pixie traps. All the money is getting taken away by these noxious little pixies that creep out in the banks at night and steal all the gold in the vaults!

So what we really need to do is invest in enhanced pixie traps!

We estimate with an investment of only 56 no, *57* mil *BILLION* dollars, we can quickly resolve this damnable pixie problem to our complete and utter satisfaction, and make it an ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY THAT PIXIES WILL NO LONGER CAUSE PROBLEMS WITH THE U.S. FINANCIAL SYSTEM!!!

Yes, indeed — this IS the key to financial solvency in the USA!! More and BETTER PIXIE TRAPS!

I don’t know about you, but I’m convinced. In fact, I’m frightened. If we don’t do something about these awful pixies THIS VERY WEEK, Heimdall very well may blow his horn!

I normally don’t care a bit about food-writing, but this raconteur could make a review of McDonald’s worth reading:

There is a well-founded belief that the “best restaurant in the world” is the one that all sensible, tasteful, relaxed and modest people would avoid like the Costa Brava.

It would undoubtedly be poncy. Poncy little bits of ponced-up ponce, served on poncy plates in a poncified room, by oleaginous ponces to unmitigated superponces. The whole thing would unquestionably be a poncimonious cluster-ponce…. I must admit, I was reluctant to make the trip to Barcelona for an El Ponci dinner, but the Blonde was very keen, and it turned out to be a salutary lesson in nose-amputating cynicism before experience.

He’s my new hero now that my faith in Congress has been shattered.

As you read this, notice the name of one of the individuals intimately involved in triggering one particularly significant element of the credit crisis. Yes, that’s right, it coincidentally happens to be the very same man who just successfully demanded economic dictator status and $810,000,000,000.00 in order to “fix” it:

Many events in Washington, on Wall Street and elsewhere around the country have led to what has been called the most serious financial crisis since the 1930s. But decisions made at a brief meeting on April 28, 2004, explain why the problems could spin out of control. The agency’s failure to follow through on those decisions also explains why Washington regulators did not see what was coming.

On that bright spring afternoon, the five members of the Securities and Exchange Commission met in a basement hearing room to consider an urgent plea by the big investment banks. They wanted an exemption for their brokerage units from an old regulation that limited the amount of debt they could take on. The exemption would unshackle billions of dollars held in reserve as a cushion against losses on their investments. Those funds could then flow up to the parent company, enabling it to invest in the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.

The five investment banks led the charge, including Goldman Sachs, which was headed by Henry M. Paulson Jr. Two years later, he left to become Treasury secretary.

A lone dissenter — a software consultant and expert on risk management — weighed in from Indiana with a two-page letter to warn the commission that the move was a grave mistake. He never heard back from Washington. One commissioner, Harvey J. Goldschmid, questioned the staff about the consequences of the proposed exemption. It would only be available for the largest firms, he was reassuringly told — those with assets greater than $5 billion.

“We’ve said these are the big guys,” Mr. Goldschmid said, provoking nervous laughter, “but that means if anything goes wrong, it’s going to be an awfully big mess.”

This also demonstrates the inherent problem with government regulation. Regulation doesn’t actually prevent most of problems it is supposed to prevent, it merely provides everyone with the illusion that they will be prevented. When the push of the politically powerful comes to shoves directed at the government regulator, they are always going to cave.

The big banks wanted the freedom to fail. The regulators acceded to their request. The American people should have let the big banks experience the consequences of their actions; since they have not, they can rest assured that they will suffer worse consequences than those with which they were threatened. It’s not likely, but here’s hoping that enough congressmen will stick to their guns once more and again refuse to roll over and play whore for Wall Street.

I’m never quite sure if I should be more amused or alarmed to discover that so much of Robert Anton Wilson’s bizarre visions have turned out to be far more true than more conventional models of reality.

UPDATE – The House rolled, 263-171. Well, at least one will be able to say that the American people eminently deserve what they’re soon going to be getting. And it should be extremely amusing to listen to all the Republicans and fair-weather conservatives wondering how they could have been hammered so badly in November when they showed such bold leadership by bravely abandoning their professed principles in a time of crisis.

UPDATE II – Rod Dreher saw Ron Paul on CNN:

Rep. Ron Paul, on CNN right now deploring the $700 billion bailout the president has just signed into law. He shook his head, saying that the government is throwing kerosene on the fire by spending more money.

“They’re not dealing with the fact that this country is bankrupt,” he said, of the Congress. “Doing nothing would have been a reasonable alternative.”

Paul also said that we are on the verge of major events in this country. He did not elaborate.

I didn’t bother to watch it, of course, so perhaps those of you who did can fill in the rest of us. From what I’ve read and the polls I’ve seen, it sounds as if it went largely according to my predictions of a moderate Palin victory thanks to Biden being Biden. It’s pretty obvious that the mainstream media has reluctantly concluded that she won, otherwise the debate would be given much more aggressive coverage.

But feel free to differ or otherwise elucidate here.