Woman and Superwoman

Paul Krugman discusses reform, and the burning question that so perplexes Megan McArdle: Who could have known the financial system was in trouble? Megan says:

So while yes, part of this story has been simple greed, a willingness to believe that we could and should massively increase consumption no matter what, I tend to take this desire as a given. The question is how you design an institution that channels those given desires into productive ends. Markets, for example, channel self-interest into exchanges that result in gains to both sides; government lobbying channels that same self-interest into rent-seeking that makes society as a whole, and at least one major party to the exchange, worse off.

Megan ignores power inequalities that inevitably arise if self-interest goes unchecked. McArdle's dominant drive is self-interest, and fortunately for her, others have refined it into both a political and moral philosophy. Lack of charity and empathy is encouraging self-reliance. Callousness is individualism. Greed is supporting free markets. Elitism is rewarding hard work and innate superiority. There is always an excuse for what would be considered moral underdevelopment and self-indulgence in a child, but is found acceptable in an educated, privileged middle-aged woman.

McArdle's frequent excuse for the exposure of her philosophy's failure is that nobody is smart enough to know what went wrong, and it's useless to try. This is an incredibly weak and patently false lie. For three years a few economists and journalists warned of the coming storm. I read them every day; John Hussman, Bill Fleckstein, Mish, Bonddad, Calculated Risk, The Big Picture, Angry Bear, The Oil Drum, and of course Nouriel Roubini. They warned and explained, showed graphs and charts, but were mocked and vilified, often by McArdle herself. People knew, and to say otherwise is a lie. People were just making too much money to care. As long as the party continued, Wall Street could siphon off as much money as possible. When the party ended they demanded more money to clean up the mess, and McArdle supported that too. Then they ran off without cleaning up and again, nobody who isn't paid to look the other way is surprised.

We are in deep shit. McArdle is nothing but the Magician's assistant put on stage in a short skirt and low-cut top to distract the audience while he pulls off his magic act of disappearing the audience's money.

Village Idiot Speaks; Brain Cells Curl Up In Horror

Jonah Goldberg has found a solution for the country's economic problems.

But rather than blow money on a lavish reenactment of the New Deal, or
continue bailing out undeserving corporations, why not really think outside the
box? Rep. Louie Gohmert (R., Texas) suggests an across-the-board reprieve on
paying 2008 income taxes. This would leave an extra $1.2trillion in the hands
of Americans, who are the best stewards of their own money.

I don't need to tell you how stupid this idea is. Jonah, however, doesn't seem to realize that taxes actually pay for things we need. Or that having Americans buy at lot of stuff from China might not solve the economic problems. But it really doesn't matter how stupid Jonah's ideas are, since his readers believe him anyway.

Happy Shopping Holiday!

You may have noticed that Megan McArdle, a week after scolding parents for buying their children toys in hard times, has created a list of Christmas presents. They have been culled from her very well-stocked kitchen, which is evidently filled with expensive gadgets. She also lists some less-expensive items for the little people, for which we give the generous Miss Megan thanks.

Anyway, Happy Holidays, everyone, I have a lot to be thankful for
this year; my family is safe and healthy, my dog is adorable and affectionate,
my job is amazing, my friends are so great I occasionally suspect that I am
actually in an indie film, and in the new year, I'll be taking up residence
in a great new house in Bloomingdale. All of my worries are the best
sort: the kind I can't do anything about, and therefore have no reason
to fret on, beyond making emergency provisions. I know a lot of you
are probably suffering from the financial crisis, and others from the
general tendency of life to hand you a lot of lemons and no sugar to make
lemonade with. But I hope that all of you have some good thing to be
thankful for.

I suspect she sees herself as an extra-large version of Parker Posey, winsomely charming one and all while oozing with Upper West Side exclusivity. It's a wonderful life for Megan. Sure, a lot of her friends are going to lose their jobs as magazine and newspapers close and cut back, but Megan works for David Bradley, who runs The Atlantic as a vanity press and pays for it out of pocket. No, Megan, it's not that the magazine is cheaper to run than a large newspaper. It's the deep pockets that fund it, instead of depending on advertising revenue. I wouldn't be quite so sanguine, however, if I were Megan. Thomas Friedman's wife lost about 90% of her shopping mall fortune. It could happen to Bradley's consulting empire also, and the expensive toy you work for could easily be the first thing to go.

It's wonderful that her family is well and that she and her massive dog can both fit in her cute little car, although the effect must be somewhat trippy. And it's exciting to move, even if you have to share a house because your stock portfolio has tanked, because you believed your friends and fellow elites at investment banks. What Megan doesn't get, and probably never will, is that the ruling elite worked her over too. Her credit limit will go down, just like the undeserving poor person might lose credit. She might not only lose her job, but might see most of her entire industry disappear, like one of those overpaid union-supporting auto workers in the Midwest. If she loses her job she will lose her house, like all those feckless minorities who traded votes for low Fannie Mae mortgages, who should have stayed in the rental class, where they belong. And all those carefully worded posts supporting the ruling elite and the monied class will have done exactly what Megan wanted them to do; enrich the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Megan McArdle went shopping.

One-liners

Megan moves.

I don't know enough about rent-to-own to say whether it is ever, or never, a good idea.

Then why did you write the useless post?

But--Clinton!

Rubin is one of the few icons of Wall Street who hasn't been stained with the fallout from the financial crisis--Republicans don't want to blame capitalist institutions, and Democrats don't want to imply that St. Robert of Clinton might not have miraculous economic healing powers

What are you, a twelve-year-old with a superiority complex and subscription to The National Review?

I have an iPhone.

What's the over/under on the first government attempt to shut this down?

What's the over/under on you sounding like a Liberal Fascism groupie?

I know better than you.

The Obama team is unnecessarily (I hope) make it look like they're dithering,
testing the waters for popularity rather than competence.

Concern troll.

I was wrong.

But we'll undoubtedly get their mildly manic cousins: minimum wage laws, stiffer unionization rules, and heavier corporate taxes, on the theory that if demand for something is falling, the best way to fix the problem is to make it more expensive.

Yes, God forbid we reverse the trend that got us into this mess, and try to prevent the entire country from sinking.

You're A Mean One, Megan McArdle

This post of Megan McArdle's has already been exposed as a vapid, selfish, deeply heartless excretion, but it deserves all this scorn and more.

Screw you, kids, I got mine.

This represents a nadir of sorts for McArdle. Kids don't need presents because McArdle doesn't remember any of the presents she was given. That makes her both ungrateful and unappreciative, but it doesn't mean other kids will feel the same way. Why does she find it necessary to write a post complaining about mothers who want to give their children Christmas presents? Does the thought of someone, somewhere, buying something that they can't really afford for their child really bother her so much?

I know that my parents expended a lot of precious money and time on my Christmas gifts. But with a few exceptions (a certain Raggedy Ann and Andy Pen and Pencil Set comes to mind, along with my very own Beach Boys "Endless Summer" casette"), what I remember about Christmases is not what I was given, but the non-material traditions: the food, the family, the snow angels and crackling fires. This is true of basically everyone I know. So why do we continue to think that the gifts are the most important part?

Because they're children. Unbelievably, McArdle brags about the expensive and thoughtful gifts she received while saying that other children do not deserve the same. Once again, the rules are different for Miss Megan.

Let's not forget that hypocrisy. McArdle has a sidebar item called "Gadget of the Week." (Of course she doesn't update it because that would take effort, but never mind.) The gadget for the last few months is a $500 TIVO.

Is it worth spending over $500 on a Tivo? I'm sorry to report that it is. The Series Three has all the functionality that made its older products the best DVRs around: an intuitive user interface, transparent menus, simple and fast recording. Now it's added HD capability and two cable cards so you can record and watch at the same time (or record two shows). With the cable cards, the most annoying feature about older Tivos--the latency switching channels--has disappeared. They've also added new features that prove surprisingly useful, such as the ability to download movies on a whim from Amazon's Unbox service. I'd give up my dishwasher before I'd part with this.

Megan also recently bought an IPhone and a Mini Cooper, and we all know how important buying new clothes is to her. It's strange to see a sickness of the soul labeled a political philosophy, so that cold, calculating, greedy people can feel comfortable as they contemplate how much they own, and how much superior it makes them compared to those with less. It's a pinched, miserly attitude worthy of Scrooge himself.

And make no mistake; McArdle's post is not written out of a stringent morality or political philosophy. It is selfishness and heartlessness, callousness and fear, pure and simple. It is the refusal to feel anything at all that might touch the heart (or, with Megan, also the brain). To feel is painful, and these cowards and weaklings refuse to take that risk. They cannot cry for the children we have killed in Iraq. They cannot worry about poverty or hunger. They cannot think about the terror and desperation of men hooded and bound and kept in cages. It hurts too much, and they utterly refuse to try. Therefore they create excuses for their refusal to feel. They turn to God to justify their hatreds, to patriotism to hide their hunger to see others suffer and feel what they cannot. They turn to politics, to coat the blood and bones and burnt flesh with respectability. We can't be silent and let them do it. This world is all we have, this world and the people in it. What we do to each other is the only thing that counts.

Yummy, Delicious Spite

From the editor of the National Review Online:

palin increases turkey sales [Kathryn Jean Lopez]


An e-mail: "My wife and I have never been that fond of turkey, but with this dust-up we went shopping for a Thanksgiving/Christmas turkey and will thoroughly enjoy every bite."

This couple will actually choke down a food they don't like because it gives them a thrill to spite some anonymous people somewhere who laughed at Sarah Palin, and who will never know what this couple did?

Why don't they demand their teenage daughters get knocked up next? That'll teach the Palin haters!

The Clare Luce Booth Calendar--Brought To You By Kleenex Tissues

I have a feeling that Conservative America is going to spend the weekend in the bathroom.

The fur coats are a nice touch. I have nothing against other people killing animals and wearing their skins. It's like wearing diamonds--how else is a conservative woman to know her worth, except in dollars and cents? It's not like her brethren think she's an equal.

Megan McArdle Suffers For Our Souls

Needless to say, given that Obama's sterling choice of highest-caliber economic advisors was one of my main reason for supporting him, my regret is mounting faster than ever.

Poor Megan. What shall she do? She was depending on Obama to follow her philosophy, and now must live with a "bloody embarrassing" pick, if the news is true. How can she converse with her liberal friends who will support whatever Obama does with worshipful abandon? Everybody knows that liberals are fantasists who don't live in the real world. They don't hold down jobs or live in neighborhoods or buy food or pay taxes or send their kids to school. No, they only dream and meander and simper their way through life in a haze of imaginary thoughts and dreams of Jesus Obama fulfilling their every wish, tra la la.

Thank goodness Megan is here to set Obama and the liberals straight. Even though it does extract a heavy toll on her soul, and fill her with ever-mounting regret.

Shorter (But Not By Much) K-Lo

Single pregnant women make Baby Jesus cry.

Same Old Megan

Would it kill Megan McArdle to prove her statements? So far the main source of information for Miss Megan is her gut, and we all know that it is as empty as her head.

Now, I think a lot of liberals often mix up these claims with simple outrage that those CEOs are not, in fact, reduced to total penury.

Prove it, troll. Who is outraged that CEOs aren't beggered? Name names. Otherwise you're just another Michelle Malkin, but without the funny cheerleading video to give you entertainment value.

Evidently I must continue saying this over and over until it penetrates thicker brains. Put up or shut up. If you want to assault the majority political party with accusations of immorality and spite, you had better provide quotes and names, because we don't have to listen to you anymore. When Glenn Greenwald eviscerates conservatives he addresses people directly and provides copious evidence to support his accusations. However, Greenwald works hard on his blog and has standards of honesty and professionalism.

Elections have consequences. The conservative way of doing business utterly destroyed our economy, violated our land and laws, and built up a well-spring of hatred that poisons the country. Conservatism ran wild and free for eight years and was a massive failure.

Why would McArdle make vague, unpleasant accusations about liberals that (for all anyone knows) are not even true? So she can do this:

Now, I think a lot of liberals often mix up these claims with simple outrage that those CEOs are not, in fact, reduced to total penury. But the justice and the incentive problems are separate problems. It may well be totally just to take every last dime from them (and I imagine that shareholder lawsuits will do exactly that). But that frequently morphs into a muddy complaint that if these CEOs had suffered more, we wouldn't have had the crisis. The one does not follow from the other. There are many injustices in the world; almost none of them cause financial crises.

I know that my trolls are already mentally penning long whines that I have entirely missed the point--that their wealth is outrageous, that justice is important! Indeed it is. But it seems to me that it is also important to settle the empirical question of how such excessive risk taking could be prevented in the future. If we allow our outrage to convince us that taking every last dime from the bank presidents will help with that task, and this is not actually true, then we are simply setting ourselves up for more problems in the future.

McArdle doesn't want people to think about the reasons for the financial crisis. She doesn't want the privileged few to have to answer to anyone else. She believes the rich are innately superior to those will less money. For those reasons she doesn't believe in regulation and tries to discourage anyone from finding out the reasons for the financial troubles, which she declares are too complicated for anyone to understand and would have happened no matter what CEOs did.

Finally, we see McArdle will fill her posts with ad hominem attacks and then accuse anyone who criticizes her of being a whining troll. She has no idea how unprofessional her behavior is, and therefore will continue to embarrass herself with her venom and attempts to justify her own support of a failed regime.

McArdle might wonder why she should change her ways or soften her speech. She should take a good look around her. The smarter conservatives and quasi-conservatives have slowly and carefully backed away from Republican failure. Yglesias decamped the Atlantic. David Frum and Christopher Buckley left National Review. Kathleen Parker is doing the same and is now appearing in the Washington Post criticizing the far right. I warned her, and now it's too late. She can't do anything but double down, and inevitably throw away the influence that she so carefully cultivated.

ADDED: Some people do not have a problem understanding the financial crisis, or assigning blame where it is due.

Liar

Andrew McCarthy, 11/18/08

Victory in Iraq has never meant a functioning democracy.

Andrew McCarthy, 5/23/07

Iraq, however, is a frustrating slog precisely because it is an exercise in
democracy building, not mere jihadist repulsion.

Lying tool of the ruling elite.

The Company You Keep

Sometimes you have to stop and smell the stupidity, so to speak. When analyzing a typical Megan McArdle post, you can seldom uncover all the stupidity and venality in one passing. There will be grave ethical breeches that demand one's attention first. Then come the errors in logic that make your head swim while trying to comprehend McArdle's point. Then you might get to the factual errors, if you are not too busy. Finally, you might go over the poor sentence structure, spelling and punctuation. It's quite time consuming.

Today Fire Megan McArdle points out yet another aspect of McArdle's writing that gives one pause; the company she chooses to keep. McArdle refers to Dan Riehl, as if he is a fellow journalist instead of a misogynist and homophobic moron. Megan likes Michelle Rhee's proposals to destroy teachers' unions, despite the fact that Rhee refuses to discuss who is funding her prospective efforts. She quotes young dolt Conor Friedsdorf, who is even stupider than Megan herself. And she also quotes Dr. Sally Satel, an AEI "scholar" who advocates selling body parts. It's not just for third world countries, says the doc. Idiots, one and all, brought to you by the crown princess of fools.

Asimetracul Enfurmashun

Megan McArdle posts about tenure, saying that anyone who doesn't give it up should be afraid of the following:

If Rhee's plan goes down, it will indicate that a majority of DC's teacher's think that they're incompetent.

Do you want to know who's incompetent? A writer paid handsomely by The Atlantic, who went to a prep school that cost $38,000 dollars a year, who can't be bothered to learn basic punctuation.

The Boy Can't Help It

Jonah Goldberg has an extraordinarily strong Authoritarian drive. It's strong enough to override an also-strong rebellious streak, embodied in his love of anti-social pop culture heroes like Homer and Bart Simpson and in South Park. It's strong enough to crush any creative streak that might have lurked in this former tv writer and producer. It's even strong enough to make him support the types of people who would be horrified by Goldberg, an East Coast elite Jewish writer; the evangelicals.

Jonah states you can't be conservative without being religious. He appeals to authority by listing several conservatives that purport to be religious. It does not occur to him that his Authorities might be lying or disbelievers ; for instance, it's well know that Karl Rove is an atheist. Jonah also seems to state that if you are religious you must also be conservative, or else you will start acting out of mercy and give away to the poor, which would make you a liberal. QED, in Jonah's snarled mind.

The conservative party is trying to figure out where they went wrong. They are split between realists such as David Frum, who wants to win, and fantasists such as Goldberg, who wants to be right. Authoritarianism and conservatism both abhor change, by definition. The future must be the same as the past; the child must obey and copy the father and mother. There is no solution or compromise possible. Either they have enough votes to inflict their view upon the world, or they don't, and that depends as much on the economy as ideology. No debate or intellectual exercise can change that.

Charity For My Friends, No Charity For You

Many posts later, McArdle still hasn't explained why it's okay for the US to lose its Midwest manufacturing base but it's not okay for bankers and stock owners to lose their money. She did, however, share with us a personal story. We learn that McArdle expected to make a lot more money than she has, and that she was once poorly dressed. Women who actually have to struggle through life know that you can scour discount stores for items on sale or search charity and consignment shops when you need to wear good quality clothes. They also know that wearing worn clothing is not a sign of shame and don't base their self-image on how much money they spend.

I understand that this is not what the auto workers want; they want their jobs. But while I am happy to help the auto workers, I am not happy to help them manufacture undesireable cars at massive social cost. I too, would have liked to keep my job as a management consultant. But I didn't have a right to have the job I wanted merely because I liked it. And it wouldn't have been good for America if I had.

Funny, I feel the same way about bankers and CDOs.

A More Serious Post

Megan McArdle mentions again that she worked at the World Trade Center after the collapse. She also seems to suffer often from lung complaints. Maybe she should find out if the toxic chemicals in the air hurt her lungs.

Very Quick Megan

One of the things you hear over and over again from critics of Detroit, especially ones from the left, is that their current woes are all management's fault because they kept making big cars.

Management has made a lot of mistakes. But making big cars wasn't one of them. That's because they couldn't profitably make small cars in the United States. And the reason they couldn't is that their labor costs were too high. All in, Detroit was paying about $30 more an hour than other companies to make cars. At that kind of differential, you have to concentrate on large cars with big profit margins, not economy cars where consumers fight to save $15 on the headlight bezels.

Read her link and you see she's cutting out half the story--billions in profits from big cars.


Dishonest hack.

Less Tall Megan

Throw the Christians to the lions.

Bonus Megan:

We sent the Republican party a message that we couldn't be taken for granted.

How? Libertarians think you can get rich by getting rid of the government. The rich know you get richer by using the government. It is the height of naivete to think the government will go away or the rich won't do what they want to do. That is why Libertarians are powerless.

Persons have a right to be protected against the initiation of force, and libertarianism has no basic principles that answer the question of when personhood begins.

For the billionth time--it's not a question of personhood. It is a question of who gets to make the decision to abort or not abort--the individual or the state, as libertarians like to put it. This implied omission/lie is obfuscation to give McArdle wiggle room to jump to whichever side is politically expedient at a moment's notice. She's an opportunistic coward.

I don't share the libertarian confidence that we are going to achieve massive new affirmative steps in our direction; a lot of the things we want, like a simpler tax code and privatized social security, are actually issues that the Republican leadership agrees with us on, and the greater American public does not.

You just lost the down payment for your house in the stock market. And you still want to invest your social security in the stock market. You are a very, very stupid woman.

Chaos Theory

I should refute some of the posts Megan McArdle is churning out in her attempt to confuse the public, but eh, why bother. McArdle is tossing all her libertarian beliefs and philosophy down the toilet and flushing it away to support conservative who are attempting to stem the consequences of their actions until after Obama takes office. She is plainly abandoning her "principles" whenever necessary. Conservatives are, after all, her source of income. How she achieves this noble goal is irrelevant, although it is very instructive to analyze the methods used.

The world is changing and we must change with it.It's going to be a smaller, poorer world, and most of us are going to be totally unwilling and perhaps even unable to tolerate the forced change. We will have to learn to find the good in this change. It will be there, if we are strong enough to look for it. We will need humility to ask each other for help, patience to learn new skills and deal with fear, and empathy to bring us together instead of drive us apart. In the chaos will be an opportunity to wrestle control back from the military-industrial complex, but we will lose the struggle without even knowing it took place if we continue to listen to the cowards and quislings who got us into this mess.

Don't Let This Happen To You

I am coming to the reluctant and more than slightly horrified realization that Megan McArdle might have read Liberal Fascism. And liked it. I know, I know. It's a horrible thing to accuse a stranger of, especially without iron-clad proof. You don't simply throw such accusations around; reputation have been ruined and nations felled over less. But there you are, the suspicion must be voiced so the unwary can know what is ahead of them.

I could be wrong, and if so I deeply apologize to McArdle. I've thrown a lot of criticism her way and she's deserved every word, but there are lengths that even I will not go. No sex jokes, no violence, no heaps of undeserved abuse. And most of all, I would never accuse someone of being so bone-deep stupid, so mind-numbingly moronic, so steeped in class warfare, selfishness, and spite that they would read and approve of Liberal Fascism. But the truth, no matter how ugly and threatening, must out.

Please, I beg of you all. Don't let this happen to you. Don't commit that final act of degredation and despair. Don't be a Jonah Goldberg fan.