Stop It, You're Killing Me!

More McArdle, sigh.

Our Conor Clarke asked Larry Tribe whether or not one could, legally, tax away the bonuses paid to AIG employees. Larry Tribe seems to think that the answer is yes.

This has interesting implications for the banks that have already taken government funds, and certainly, any banks that might be considering doing so in the future. I suspect it would be hard to write a specific tax that applied only to AIG and not, say, to Citibank--and that's assuming that the Democrats in Congress would want to.

Why would the Democrats not want to? It would be a cheap and easy way to distract us from the billions they are giving away to the banking industry.

Moreover, only a bad journalist would announce they "suspect" something can't be done without trying to find out if it could be done. Is she too lazy to look it up? Make a call? Is she posting from her iPhone while standing in line for the latest consumer goods that will hopefully make her cool and hip? Why won't she do the basic requirements of her job?

I think it's safe to assume that if this passes, any banks that possibly can will rush to return bailout funds to the Treasury. And perhaps this is a good thing. But the attempt to shield shaky banks behind a general distribution of funds will be over.

Good for that, too. I don't know if bank failures would bring down the entire system, but neither does McArdle, no matter how many times she bleats that it will happen. She doesn't have any facts, doesn't consult anyone but bankers, why should I believe a word she says, especially when she has shown so little knowledge and foresight in the past?

I suspect that it would also not do any good things for whatever future plans Treasury has. All of the plans I'm currently aware of involve substantial voluntary participation from sound financial institutions. I don't think you'll get much voluntary cooperation from banks if you declare that any acceptance of government funds will involve substantial risk that they will appropriate your paycheck.

So banks will not take billions of dollars because their bonuses might be cut? They might make a few million instead of many millions, after eight years of looting the country? Bullshit.

Stop it! Stop being a stupid, lazy "journalist" who smugly defends the power elite. Post after post of concern trolling, ignoring basic facts like the bailout is not the stimulus--simple, basic facts that reveal her posts are built on absolute faith, trust and worship of the financial system, of all things. Of all the things to worship and believe in! Men and women whose main if not only concern is to make more money! I have to echo Jon Stewart here--you're hurting us. Your idiot commenters believe you, look to you to support their fantasies and hatreds. They are seething with hatred and lies that you offer to them like a human sacrifice. You feed the beast that is swallowing us whole.

If you have no pride at least have some self-interest. You are weak and poor and you support the rich and powerful. Whom do you think the people will persecute when the truth is too obvious to be denied? Do you think social unrest is only for the Third World? Take another look at our income inequality, sweetie. We are the Third World.

Compare and Contrast.

Let's compare and contrast Megan's attitude towards the poor and the rich. That's always fun.

The Poor:

On the other hand, expanding jobless claims to 52 weeks seems like a no brainer--not because it's awesome stimulus, but because it would be nice if people who can't find jobs in a severe economic contraction don't have to take up a second career as bank robbers.

The Rich:

Bankers are not criminals. As a class, they are exactly as self-interested, self-destructive, and short-sighted as other classes of people that liberals want less highly regulated, such as unions and community organizers. I don't view the purpose of regulation as punishment, or protection against a malevolent class. I view it as an attempt to make our institutions more effectively channel self-interest into collectively welfare-enhancing activity. Thus you can see why I might be somewhat uncomfortable with those who seem to view the crisis as an exciting opportunity to put those uppity bankers back in their place.

Megan assumes bankers are honest and poor people are dishonest. This fits in nicely with her theory that only rich people can be moral, because people are only moral if it benefits them. That may be Megan's belief, but it's not everyone else's.

It's so tiresome to have to constantly fight against immoral, shallow people. Why don't they just stick to little jobs that don't harm anyone, instead of trying to swim with sharks?

A person with such poor ethics and judgement should not be advising others about money.

This Dear Soul

I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
--William Butler Yeats


This poem is blessedly simple to understand. Yeats' protagonist fell in love with a fanatical, hateful woman. But he wanted her, so he created a false image to superimpose on her. He believed what he wanted to believe, instead of seeing the truth. Why? The real reason is much uglier than the fantasy. Need, vanity, lust--there are a hundred reasons, none of them attractive to look at.

I want you to look at something. Megan discusses the bailout and uses the homeless as an example. Her argument can be summed up with this bit:

How much money are we willing to pay to maintain our sense of
fairness?

And there you see where Megan lives. The smooth hair and placid, unlived-in face, the MBA wreathed in the "glory" of the Chicago Boyz, the cloying networking, the prep school education, the sidewalks of New York and designer shoes and dresses: They originate in the foul rag and bone shop of her heart. Her vanity and callousness, her love of luxury, exclusiveness and privilege, her smirking disregard for torture, poverty, pain and illness. That is what Megan McArdle really is. That is the creature who passes for a human being, the daywalking vampire who would drain the blood of her country to satisfy her base lusts.

She is revolting.

Morality--Reason versus Religion?

This study sounds very interesting, but I think there is a problem with its analysis. The subjects' brain activity was monitored to see if people made decisions based on emotion or reason.

This study, reported in the journal Science, suggests that emotion outweighs reason when fairness is at issue, said Michael Gill, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona.

In the study, most people's insula (a brain area "associated with emotions") lighted up when making a moral decision, but several people's insula did not.

``What this suggests is that when you see unfairness, it really bothers you, it makes you feel negative about it, and that reaction pushes you away from unfairness,'' said Quartz, an associate professor in the division of humanities and social sciences, in a telephone interview. ``Emotions seem to keep us in check, and some people don't get this response as strongly.''

But aren't they contradicting themselves? People make decisions based on emotion--except when they don't? Because another possibility is that those people have so thoroughly squashed their emotions that their insula doesn't react. People are not acting out of morality, they are acting out of empathy. And those whom the researchers say act out of reason are simply repressing their emotions to the point that they have none.

The Bloomberg article doesn't say if the scientists interviewed the non-responders to find out why they didn't respond; it seems the study might just establish the role of emotion in moral choices.

People often say we need religion to ensure morality, since moral decisions are based on teachings of God's Law. Instead, moral decisions seem to be based on emotion, and I suspect that is the case in all moral decisions, and that we use reason mostly to add authority to our decisions, just as religious people use God as the authority backing their moral decisions. It certainly explains how self-professed religious people manage to avoid actually following religious teachings about hate, money and humility.