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Oh sure complain, but what alternatives can you offer?
November 6th, 2009, 2:17 pm · 29 Comments · posted by Mark Landsbaum
We get that a lot of this comment here at OrangePunch: “Oh sure, complain. But what alternatives can you offer?”
On the face of it that seems to be a constructive criticism. But it mostly misses the point.
It was folks like the Soviet commissars and their infamous five-year plans dictated from on high who “knew” how to set things up in advance. And in every case it resulted in economic failure, dismal lives lacking of deprivation and, let’s not forget, death via starvation and more direct means. Such are the prices when we expect an elite to “know” how to construct an economy from the top down.
Our former colleague, Steve Greenhut, makes this point in a column Sunday in the Register. But we’ll give you a peek in the meantime. We don’t know exactly how to make the state’s water system work. But we don’t have to.
What we do know is that a gaggle of self-anointed “experts” sitting in conference rooms in Sacramento don’t know either. Yet they presume to dictate to us what’s best for everyone. Poppycock. Sounds a bit like those commissars, no?
What we do know is that unfettered by government interference, the private market has through self-interest, competition and trial and error found solutions to just about every one of the challenges mankind’s faced. And virtually none of those who ultimately arrived at solutions “knew” precisely what would work going in. But they were allowed (unrestrained by government know-it-alls) to invest their time and money and seek what is profitable and workable.
So, we don’t need to offer an alternative to the state’s top-down government-planned, government-run, government-regulated, taxpayer-funded “solution” to California’s water problems. If we get government out of the way, real people advancing their own interests will come up with what works.
The choices are pretty stark, actually. Trust big government to know it all (ala Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, et al), or trust in human ingenuity and self-interest. History’s a pretty good test. The Soviet Union failed miserably. American capitalism has given us the most prosperous and beneficial lifestyle the world’s ever known. No contest.
As Steve does Sunday, we recommend skeptics read “I, pencil.” It’ll be a lesson worth learning.
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” If we get government out of the way, real people advancing their own interests will come up with what works.”
Can you imagine how this economy would be roaring back to life, if we only followed the advice above.
Not only can I imagine it, but history records it.
Before the liberal know it alls started interfering with our economic system American wealth, lifestyle, and happiness was the envy of the world. Not only that, but our economy drove world economic advancement.
Starting with FDR’s ill conceived shotgun approach started the demise and it picked up with LBJ again. Since then there have been good years and bad, but the decline has been steady. The last 10-20 years or so of liberal meddling have resulted in our current woes. More liberal band aids are hindering recovery now.
Before the liberal know it alls started interfering with our economic system
==============================
The economic system collapsed because of GW Bush, and not regulating Wall Street and CDO’s and CDS’s.
That is why the country collapsed.
Sure, we know you hate GW Bush. But so what? Such a childish assertion that GW Bush collapsed the economic system is just a fantasy. GW Bush did not create the universe, he did not cause the Black Death, he did not single crucify Jesus. Only in the minds of haters who don’t stop to think is GW Bush the be-all and end-all of everything. Yes, we know it’s fun to wallow in the paranoia of hate.
It’s just not much use for explaining the real world of causes and effects.
History does record it.
Before the Libertarian never-done-anythings started complaining about our economic system, American wealth, lifestyle, and happiness has been the envy of the world. Not only that, but our economy drove world economic advancement.
Starting with FDR’s resuscitation of a country desperate in the depths of a Depression caused by Libertarian mismanagement, saving the world from Totalitarianism in World War II and starting and leading a long cold struggle against Communism, extending voting rights and integrating institutions along the way, AMERICAN LIBERALISM HAS A LOT TO CROW ABOUT. If Bush had tagged Osama bin Laden, he’d have something to crow about too. But he didn’t.
The Rush Limbaughs, the Glenn Becks and the Ayn Rands are mythologists for their willing believers, political scientologists.
Chris,
I think we have a little way to go. Lets see what happens in 2019 when SS trust funds can only pay out 76 cents on the dollar, interest expense on the national debt cannot be serviced and foreigners refuse to buy American debt.
SS is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever conceived!
But Calpers is going to go bust before SS does. And I won’t shed one tear over it-in fact I am going to throw a party.
Medicare will go bust before SS does .
Calpers will not go bust until California does. The State underwrites the fund.
Chris,
You like all true liberals like to give credit where none is due. FDR did not resuscitate the country out of the depression. The Japanese and the party they through on 12/7/41 in Pearl Harbor ended the depression. Millions of American men suddenly had “employment”. Problem solved. And Johnny admit it. W had a lot of help from Clinton, Barney and Chris pushing a lot of people into mortgages they shouldn’t have been given and forced banks to give mortagages to to people that normally would have never gotten them. As I see it the rules at the time were the problem not the lack of rules. However y’all blame W. It’s the popular approach to all the problems.
I only hear this kind of tortured logic coming from right wingers and told in kind of a Glenn Beck conspiracy voice. (Of course, you don’t even mention Lend Lease or increased trade with Britain well beforehand.)
But for full marks you’re also supposed to say that FDR’s policies made the Depression worse and the Depression wasn’t at all caused by rampant speculation under Coolidge and the ensuing Crash nor by Hoovers suddenly protectionist policies. Extra credit for saying that Glass Steagal was unconstitutional.
Remember: Blame, Blame, Blame. Deny, Deny, Deny.
You can do better.
Oooooh, you mentioned Glenn Beck’s name. That means you won. I’m so happy for you.
Thanks! That’s very kind of you.
And Johnny admit it. W had a lot of help from Clinton, Barney and Chris pushing a lot of people into mortgages they shouldn’t have been given and forced banks to give mortagages to to people that normally would have never gotten them.
===================================
Oh, don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of blame to go around, but make this very clear-Bush was the one that took out all the regulations on Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps-where AIG was handing out CDS “insurance” on the CDO to the tune of $1 trillion with NO money to back it up-and when AIG crashed it was positioned so big it may have caved in the entire financial system-that was due 100% to BUSH, and Phil gramm who torpedoed the Glass–Steagall Act t that would have prevented this nonsense.
You simply do NOT allow Wall Street and commercial banks write million dollar mortgages to meth addicts who have no job, no money and no downpayment and then go and sell that loan on the open market as a AAA investment grade debt to pension funds and investors.
There never were any regulations for Bush to take out. Pure fantasy. Even liberal economists admit there were no regulations in place that were removed that would have had any effect on the problem. You know better? List the regulations.
However y’all blame W. It’s the popular approach to all the problems.
==============
Dubyah was the worst President of the last 100 years-including Carter.
He deserves all the flack he is taking, and then some.
That trust funder isn’t the one who is losing his job, home and going hungry at night
Your opinion. Not necessarily wrong, though. I can’t see worse than Carter. Carter had no uses.
Your opinion. Not necessarily wrong, though
=============
Just my opinion, everyone is entitled to theirs.
But what is not my opinion is that Bush let the CDO and CDS markets almost destroy the country by not giving them the regulation they neded.
Well, the kremlin owned the soviet banking and finance institutions, the auto industry, housing distribution (ie. fannie mae, freddie mac), healthcare and the education system, the soviet citizens stopped buying the newspaper(s) since they couldn’t believe anything in print, there wasn’t any real difference between candidates who ran for political office, no one took the candidates seriously when they campaigned for office since they all lied, and shortly before the soviet empire fell their soldiers were fighting the taliban in Afghanistan which was bankrupting their financial system.
Hmmm. Getting a little too close to home for comfort???
Damn liberal programs are the fault of all the worlds’ ills. Like water projects that turned much of the American west into profitable farmland. What private sector interests were itching to build any of those projects. Same with the Interstate Highway System. If it wasn’t for that stupid liberal program Rural Electrification much of those affected areas would still be using candles for light and communicating with two cans and a string.
Another stupid liberal program called the GI Bill only helped educate an entire generation that in turn led to an unprecedented era of manufacturing innovation that continues to this day.
Oco, the Kremlin did own all those interests. After seizing them. In this case it was those entities going to DC hat in hand asking for bailouts to save them (and the entire economy) from collapsing. Try and keep the difference in mind.
As far as FDR and New Deal. I cut and pasted this post from fellow poster RLH long ago. He summed up the contributions by FDR quite succinctly.
==================
One of the great hobbyhorses of the right is the notion that it wasn’t the collapse of overinflated, overleveraged and outright fraudulent business practices that caused the Great Depression, but nasty governmental intervention - things like the Securities Acts, the TVA, the Rural Electrification Administration, The Wagner Act, and of course the ultimate sin, Social Security. The nonsensical nature of this argument has been well put elsewhere, so I’ll just pause for a single question.
What, then, ended the Great Depression?
If the New Deal worsened or prolonged the Depression, what finally cured it? Did government wise up to its evil excesses? Did the blessed free market unyoke itself from government tyranny to reassert its place in society? Were the New Deal programs repealed, revoked, smashed by a political reassertion of untrammelled (and predatory) capitalism?
Well, no. What ended the Depression was World War II - an infusion of governmental spending - on good, services, infrastructure, research and development, employment - on a scale that made the entire New Deal look like a casual weekend outing. The Depression ended because government hadn’t previously done enough; it was not extended because government had done too much.
This sort of wing-nut revisionism has been around for a long time. I recall reading a piece in (of all places, but this was a long time ago, so pardon me) Reader’s Digest, when I was in junior high, arguing that Hoover had the whole thing solved in the summer of 1931, only to have the looming evil shadow of FDR destroy all his hard won gains and plunge us bak into ther depths. I asked my grandparents about this idea (my grandfather had run a textile mill through the 20s until after the war), and in response got the first truly derisive laughter I ever heard from those kind old souls (my developing tastes in music and hairstyles would soon give me occasion to hear it again, alas).
The reason for such remarkable blind vituperation is the rght’s visceral hatred for Franklin Roosevelt, a hatred that spans the generations like a running sore. And the reason for their hatred is, of course, that FDR broke the rules. He was a member of the gentry who betrayed his class, who actually did things that helped ordinary people, who halted the insane (and very exclusive) gravy train that early twentieth century capitalism had become and demanded that it work not just for its own selfish benefit, but to confer those benefits on a wider sphere. Who noted that corporate profit without social equity and stability is not merely short sighted, but ultimately destructive of that profit, and of liberty itself.
And the worst thing about his betrayal is, it worked. Government
intervention - massive public “interference” in the private markets and expenditures of public monies - finally broke the back of en economic collapse so terrible that it swallowed most of a decade. And he did it without sacrificing the essential private nature of the American economy, without destroying liberty or stifling individual initiative, and by in fact expanding true liberty, which must include economic security, to masses of people previously left out in the cold.
That success, of “socialist” policies (as Mr. Landsbaum and Mr. Sowell would label them in their intellectually sloppy way), is the ultimate refutation to the Register’s unwavering and blind devotion to an abstract philosophical libertarianism - a philosophy that has never worked in the real world, just as the equally beautiful ideal of Communism has uniformly failed. No wonder they continue to despise FDR - his very existence in the history books gives the lie to all their airy idealized beliefs about all- inclusive philosophical systems.
Adherents of both Communism and libertarianism will sniff that, well, it’s never really been tried - that the social experiments that have been conducted in their respective names (the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, and the past generation, on the one hand; and the Soviets and old-guard Red China, on the other) have been incomplete and bastardized forms of the ideal society their philosophies espouse. This is, of course, an easy way to protect your academic purity: deny everything, especially when it doesn’t work. But it’s also morally dishonest, and blind to the real world we all must, alas, live in.
I don’t expect the Register, or its columnists here, to recognize their blind adherence fo an ivory tower ideal that simply doesn’t work in the real world. They, like all fanatics, are too enamored of the bright, shiny, and intellectually/ogically pure thing they have positied, to allow the messy grit of day to day reality to intrude into their fantasies. But let’s us, who live in the real world, recognize their blind beliefs for what they are.
Of course there were some failures in the New Deal—-starting out with over 25% unemployment and in virtually uncharted waters, mistakes were made. But failures in the private sector occur daily now and daily then. Its the flip side of the creative brilliance and sucess of the private sector. Its a wonder that the New Deal acheived as much as it did.
Most economists without an ideological dogma to reinforce will acknowlege that the New Deal was an important part in stopping the bleeding and helping the private sector get on its feet again. It didn’t “end” the Great Depression without the intervention of Lend Lease and World War II but it did four things.:
1) Helped improve virtually all economic indicators to some degree,
2) Put a paycheck in the pocket and food on the table for millions who otherwise would have likely perished,
3) Left lasting public infrastructure improvements that otherwise would never have been built, and
4)By generating hope in the people who had been hopeless, being told before FDR that they would eat pie in the sky. This was no insignificant measure to preserve democracy .
Government works best in the economy when it can get in quick and decisively, and then get out where private markets can provide the services.
The Frank Rich of the NY Times (I know part of the liberal media) stated:
“Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.”
The weakness of your arguments is just that you throw a lot of stuff around just to see what sticks. None of it anything by itself, but some think quantity overrules quality.
I really do not know anyone who hates FDR, although I am sure if one looks, one can find someone, somewhere. That is just so much nonsense. A misguided, do-gooder with a real desire to be a savior, he was more of a thrasher than anything else. He followed no coherent policy, but like you just threw ideas around, hoping that something would work. None of it did, although while miring the country in the Depression longer, he did no irreversible harm. But harm came from the myth of helping beyond the band-aids that halted the panic. The irreversible harm came from the precedent that should have been seen for what it was, instead of for what it was not — a cure for the Depression. More the pity. America wallowed in the Depression until the war retrieved the situation. The war ended the effects of FDR’s policies for the most part. Ended the make work projects, But it also ended the rejection of deficit spending because that did win the war and contribute to ending the Depression. Unfortunately it also convinced many that the continued deficit spending and the continued ideas that our do-gooders can do what Soviet Commissars could not do — manage the economy. It is the gradual slipping from traditional economic thought to managed economy that is the downfall we are witnessing.
There is no one thing, one idea, one person who is the villain or the end of all things. Only the thoughtless and immature look for such an easy answer. But the liberal mindset will drown us all because they see no harm in one sip, and because they see no harm in that one sip, assume that a flood will be even better.
Tokens,
What is defense spending other than public investment on a large scale?
How is the money spent on so called “make work” projects any different than the money spent to build planes and ships?
It all comes from the source and must be paid back via the US Treasury.
I know that is a difficult concept for those who read about the Great Depression from today’s perspective.
Those that lived through it have a different POV.
There were mechanisms put in place then (and derided by conservatives as socialist programs) that have made this financial recession far less severe. ie. FDIC. Back in the 20’s banks went under and people lost everything. That hasn’t happened here. There are numerous others, but I know I’m talking to a brick wall/conservative.
OCDim wrote:
“Oco, the Kremlin did own all those interests. After seizing them. In this case it was those entities going to DC hat in hand asking for bailouts to save them (and the entire economy) from collapsing. Try and keep the difference in mind”
You’re taking your eye off the ball, OCDim. The end result is all that really matters. The means used to get there is meaningless. We have turned into ‘them’ whether you want to face the truth or not, comrade.
All these comments reenforce my position. Government is not effective when solving problems. It should follow the rule: ” First do no harm “. Unfortunately it usually doesn’t happen that way.
SANINTX,
You’ve probably heard the latest. Now the gobblement has crossed the line from just being a very strange spectacle and circus of contradictions into being a semi-fascist organization that is coming after your civil rights. The latest proposal on healthcare reform (written in the Bill) is that if you refuse to purchase an individual policy from a pigman insurance company and will be subject to to a surtax of $thousands$ of dollars at the end of the year collectible by the IRS. But that’s not the worst part. If you refuse to pay the surtax fine you can go to jail for 5 years and pay a $250000 fine. That for refusing to purchase a product from a private corporation. Samintx, that should make the hair on the back of your neck stand straight up. That is not the country I was born in. And YOUR elected leaders conjured up these draconian rules. No, they were assembled in Red China or Liberia or North Korea. That proposal came straight from Congress, my friend. Please - spread the word and write your congressman and senators immediately. This nonsense needs to stop forthwith.
observer, the health insurance mandate, how is it so different from the requirement that you have insurance in order to drive you car?
You have the option to drive or not to drive. There will not be an option in healthcare.
Yes, but let’s assume that if you don’t drive that you don’t need or want liability insurance. Are you arguing that if you do drive that automobile liability insurance should be optional?
Mark, excellent blog! The Obama/Pelosi/Reid Cartel are too busy creating the world’s biggest “Big Government for ALL” country to be bothered about history, and the fact that it does, in fact, repeat itself! Please keep up the good work in exposing how misguided they are.
“I, Pencil” was good. It unfortunately is an ineffective tool for educating people today as it is so long and has so many ideas that far too many young people will not be able to follow nor understand it.
The real problem with trying to have people understand what is happening and why it is happening is that most liberals cannot wrap their consciousness around so many ideas and threads of thoughts at one time.
The products of modern liberal education cannot get past slogans. “Bush lied, people died.” Two ideas, four words. Simple enough to follow, simple enough to repeat without having to concentrate. Therefore it must be true.