Vox Popoli

A commenter at Megan McArdle’s suddenly begins to grok:

No, the credit crisis has significantly changed my political views. Before, I thought that Ron Paul was a crackpot, that mainstream economists were generally on top of things, and inflation and fractional reserves were healthy and normal aspects of the economy. Now I believe that Ron Paul was mostly right, mainstream economists have systematic blind spots, and consistent inflation is corrosive. I have essentially turned from a Megan McArdle libertarian to a Murray Rothbard/Mencius Moldbug libtertarian.

What I find interesting is that despite the fact that pretty much all of my economic contrarianism has been more than justified by recent events and the more mainstream economists have been shown to have been completely and utterly wrong, just as I have been writing for more than seven years, the large majority of readers are still turning to those who were completely wrong about the situation to explain it to them now. This is as stupid and as unlikely to be effective as, well, turning to expert Wall Street financiers to fix the failure of the Wall Street financial system.

I have to disagree, however, with McArdle’s thought for the day: “Isn’t it marvelous how the financial crisis has been caused entirely by things that you were opposed to before the crisis happened?”

Now, I’m opposed to the Green Bay Packers. I’m opposed to Manchester United. I’m totally and utterly opposed to Juventus and Bayern Munich. I’m also opposed to the Federal Reserve, fiat currency, and politically-driven financial incentives to commit economic insanity. But one would have to be truly and deeply stupid to fail to recognize that the latter three were primary contributors to the credit meltdown regardless of whether one approved of those things or not. That being said, she’s largely correct here: “The Paulson plan is not a plan. It’s a plan to maybe have a plan at some unspecified point in the future. The basic idea seems to be that we give the Fed a big pot of money, which it hands over to banks in exchange for illiquid securities. Essentially, we’re recapitalizing the banks with federal money.”

No, it’s not federal money. It’s money that belongs to American individuals. But it’s true, it’s not a plan, it’s an attempted robbery under the color of crisis.

These scientific studies are one reason I find the atheist enlightenmentals and their irrational belief in reason as a logical basis for ordering society to be so amusingly ironic:

Saying that correcting misinformation does little more than reinforce a false believe is a pretty controversial proposal, but the claim is based on a number of studies that examine the effect of political or ideological bias on fact correction. In the studies, volunteers were shown news items or political adverts that contained misinformation, followed by a correction. For example, a study by John Bullock of Yale showed volunteers a political ad created by NARAL that linked Justice John Roberts to a violent anti-abortion group, followed by news that the ad had been withdrawn. Interestingly, Democratic participants had a worse opinion of Roberts after being shown the ad, even after they were told it was false.

Over half (56 percent) of Democratic subjects disapproved of Roberts before the misinformation. That rose to 80 percent afterward, but even after correcting the misinformation, 72 percent of Democratic subjects still had a negative opinion. Republican volunteers, on the other hand, only showed a small increase in disapproval after watching the misinformation (11 percent vs 14 peercent).

Along those lines, a pair of political scientists, Brendan Nyhan of Duke and Jason Reifler of Georgia State, have shown a similar effect, this time concerning misinformation surrounding the presence of WMDs in Iraq, tax cuts, or stem cell research. Participants were shown news reports that contained inaccuracies, followed by a correction. The news reports were not real, but were presented to the volunteers as coming from either the New York Times or Fox News. Again, the findings suggest that facts that contradicted political ideology were simply not taken in; if anything, challenging misbelief with fact checking has the counterintuitive effect of reinforcing that misbelief.

Of course, one has to consider the source. The idea that the news media is a reliable source of facts is in itself a very questionable assumption. Given the vast panoply of inaccuracies reported by both the New York Times and Fox News, a refusal to accept their reporting as fact is a logically defensible position. I further note that these material reductionists often staunchly cling to a belief in the supreme importance of “equality”, a manifestly non-existent immaterial object.

Also, declaring a belief in Obama’s Muslim faith to be an example of being misinformed is pretty poor example. There is, after all, considerable reason to doubt the media attempts to define his faith for him, especially considering that the man has publicly referred to “my Muslim faith”. Perhaps it was, as George Stephanopolis helpfully suggested, a misstatement. And perhaps it wasn’t.

In order to concentrate on helping La Cosa NostraWall Street bankers rob American citizens:

John McCain announced that he will suspend his presidential campaign on Thursday to return to Washington to help with bailout negotiations. He urged his opponent Barack Obama to do the same. The Arizona senator also asked the Presidential Debate Commission to postpone Friday’s scheduled debate with Obama so that he can work on the financial crisis bailout plan now on Capitol Hill.

If either McCain or Obama knew what they were doing, they’d be thundering against the extortionbailout and calling for fines and jailtime to be handed out to every executive at every financial institution responsible. And that would be every bit as Constitutional as what George Bush and his boy Paulson are trying to pull. Whoever champions the people against the bankers would win in a landslide… Ron Paul could have actually won this year if he’d only been able to claim the nomination.

Thanks ever so much, pragmatists.

A first review of Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy:

Theodore Beale’s Summa Elevetica is a guy book. It’s stuffed with manly men fighting gory battles, braving supernatural beasts, and recounting past glories. The women are lithe and lovely and mostly in the background. Even though it takes place in an alternate history, the overall tone is Ancient Rome meets the Age of Chivalry.

Or perhaps Tolkien meets the Inquisition. In Beale’s world, the Roman Catholic Church still rules the world, and Rome never fell. At least that’s how I saw the gladiators and slaves, politics, and Latin as the vernacular. For humans, that is. Elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, and werewolves all have their own native speech. The premise is intriguing: the Pope sends three Church scholars to decide if elves have souls. The stakes are high: If the committee decides in the negative, it’s war against the elves….

If you like long journeys on horseback, swords, sorcery, political intrigue, battles, explosions, and breathtaking rescues, this compact book is for you.

As has become my custom, I have arranged with the publisher to make free ebook downloads available here upon release. Those interested in receiving a PDF before October 1 for blog-review purposes should contact Marcher Lord Press.

The Lions have finally removed team president and GM Matt Millen from his post, FOXSports.com has learned, unseating one of the most criticized executives in Detroit sports history.

Did they finally find the pictures of Millen driving a Japanese hatchback? What could possibly have been the final straw? I couldn’t believe it when Millen got the job in the first place; his continued survival over the years has been one of the great mysteries of sports. But I’ll always remember the good humor of the Lions taking eight consecutive wide receivers first in the draft….

TMQ on the Washington-Wall Street attempted shakedown of America:

[O]n Sept. 12, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said the financial system had been fixed and “under no circumstances” would there be further bailouts; on Friday, Paulson said the system was collapsing and another $700 billion was needed. Suddenly Paulson is insisting the country has no choice other than immediately to hand over $700 billion to Wall Street fat cats, with barely any debate or even explanation of the plan. Why should anyone believe this guy, when just one week previously he said no further bailouts would occur? It seems clear Paulson had no idea what he was talking about then, while if the problem is really as bad as Paulson says now, his past delay in facing the problem has made the cost far higher. With such a poor track record, why is the treasury secretary suddenly viewed as a superbrilliant genius whose marching orders must be followed?

The only responsible answer, the only intelligent answer, to King Paulson’s demands for $700 billion for his corrupt buddies, is UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES will any money be given to Wall Street. The proposed plan simply will not prevent any of the problems that Paulson falsely claims it will prevent; the man has ZERO credibility in these matters.

J. Goldberg wisely concurs:

Paulson’s plan basically says, “I am the Lord thy God,” and that’s crazy. Also, it seems to me that Newt and the editors of NR are right when they worry that the Paulson plan essentially opens the door to unending government control of capital markets and that, too, is just crazy. Even if I completely trusted the wisdom of Paulson and his bureaucrats — which I don’t — there’s no way that I trust the Dodds, Franks or the next Treasury secretary. Every day the markets don’t go off the cliff suggests to me that we can do this in stages and that Paulson’s do-it-my-way-or-it’s-the-Dark-Ages-for-us-all argument doesn’t hold water.

I hope everyone doesn’t mind if I remind them once again that the “Dark Ages” were a myth. As is the idea that Henry Paulson’s just slightly self-serving assertion that giving him Caesar-like power and trillions of dollars is all that stands between American and economic catastrophe.

UPDATE – Unbelievably, Wall Street IS ATTEMPTING TO PLAY THE FREE MARKET CARD in defense of wildly overpaid executives:

Wall Street, its lobbyists and trade groups are waging a feverish lobbying campaign to try to fight compensation curbs. Pay restrictions, they say, would sap incentives to hard work and innovation, and hurt the financial sector and the American economy.

“We support the bill, but we are opposed to provisions on executive pay,” said Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade group. “It is not appropriate for government to be setting the salaries of executives.”

Some corporate governance experts say hastily devised compensation curbs in the bailout package would be a mistake and perhaps open the door to unintended consequences.

Clearly the Indians have the correct view of how to reward these disgusting and shameless creatures. Americans should tell George Bush, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke and all of Wall Street to go to Hell without passing Go or collecting $200, let alone $700 billion. Their exercise of power has been the problem, so giving them more will only exacerbate it.

We’ve heard this song before, at least in the economic sense. It’s Fascism without the violence or the Italian nationalism:

The Paulson rescue plan is one chapter. But there will be others. Over the next few years, the U.S. will have to climb out from under mountainous piles of debt. Many predict a long, gray recession. The country will not turn to free-market supply-siders. Nor will it turn to left-wing populists. It will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks. For Republicans, people like Paulson. For Democrats, the guiding lights will be those establishment figures who advised Barack Obama last week — including Volcker, Robert Rubin and Warren Buffett….

The government will be much more active in economic management (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Democrat). Government activism will provide support to corporations, banks and business and will be used to shore up the stable conditions they need to thrive (pleasing a certain sort of establishment Republican). Tax revenues from business activities will pay for progressive but business-friendly causes — investments in green technology, health care reform, infrastructure spending, education reform and scientific research.

If you wanted to devise a name for this approach, you might pick the phrase economist Arnold Kling has used: Progressive Corporatism. We’re not entering a phase in which government stands back and lets the chips fall. We’re not entering an era when the government pounds the powerful on behalf of the people. We’re entering an era of the educated establishment, in which government acts to create a stable — and often oligarchic — framework for capitalist endeavor.

Neither the Paulson plan nor any other plans concocted by the Progressive Corporatists will work as advertised. They cannot work because they fly in the face of immutable economic reality. What they will do, however, is serve the interest of the Establishment of which Mr. Brooks speaks so highly.

This Indian response to financial crisis would not only be more emotionally satisfactory for American taxpayers, it would almost surely work better than the administration-proposed “give hundreds of billions of dollars to the guys who created the problem in the first place and pretend there’s a snowball’s chance in Hell that they’ll get it right this time” bailout:

Corporate India is in shock after a mob of sacked workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who had dismissed them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi. Lalit Kishore Choudhary, 47, the head of the Indian operations of Graziano Transmissioni, an Italian-headquartered manufacturer of car parts, died of severe head wounds on Monday afternoon after being attacked by scores of laid-off employees, police said.

If Americans are going to have socialism crammed down their throats by so-called “conservative” and “liberal” politicians anyhow, they may as well have the satisfaction of sending to the guillotine all the Wall Street crooks who robbed them blind and are attempting to pull off their largest heist yet.

A return to hereditary monarchy would be much better than anointing the Secretary of the Treasury as Fuhrer of the National Economy:

That’s right – every bank and other financial institution in the United States has just become a de-facto organ of the United States Government, if Hank Paulson thinks they should be, and he may order them to do virtually anything that he claims is in furtherance of this act. This might include things like demanding that a bank or other financial institution sell him its paper, even if it forces that firm to collapse and be assumed by the FDIC….

Having bought these securities for any price Mr. Paulson would like (and he can compel institutions to sell at his demanded price as noted above!) he can then sell those assets at any price he wishes, to anyone he wishes. It certainly is nice to be a “Friend of Hank”, and it most certainly sucks if you’re not.

This is just another attempt to take advantage of the American people’s fear of disaster. Do recall how 9/11 and the excuse of “fighting terrorism” has been used for a panoply of expansions of government power… this is the same technique but magnified in scope. If the financial system is broken, then let it fail. The probable consequences are vastly preferable to the likely consequences of this power grab.

The Democratic whack-jobs of the left are correct in two regards. First, the Republican Party elite really are national socialists in the economic sense of the term. They say “National Greatness Conservatives” but “national socialist” is actually more accurate. Second, George W. Bush absolutely deserves to be impeached and removed from office. His crimes are as blatant and far more serious than Bill Clinton’s. The Congressional passage of this proposal may well serve to demarcate the end of America as a nation with even the appearance of freedom.

A tangential thought: if depriving the government of one million dollars merits 11 years in prison, how much time will these bankers serve?

UPDATE – Obama does better than expected by getting it half right: “Obama said a combination of greed and unfettered free markets had brought the country to “a perilous moment …a financial crisis as profound as any we’ve seen since the Great Depression.”

There was greed, to be sure. But there was absolutely nothing free about the financial markets. They couldn’t have created a problem of such magnitude if the government had not been actively involved.