You're On Your Own

In this, the best of all possible world, the Land of the Free Market and the Home of the Brave Libertarian, every problem is merely an opportunity for the savvy businessperson or consumer. We don't need regulations because when a person or business produces a bad product, everyone will not buy it and the business will be forced to improve quality. Equilibrium will be maintained and we are free of the regulations that just mess up the orderly ebb and flow between consumer and producer. Let's ask Megan McArdle what she thinks about regulation.

For instance, should the financial industry have been better regulated to prevent the housing bubble?

When I try to get people to specify, beyond those four rather anodyne [regulation] suggestions, we should do, there's a lot of hemming and hawing. Even the left-wing think tankers sort of look at their shoes and whisper "We need a better regulator". At which point even the left-wing journalists in the audience start asking "Where are we going to find regulators who understand this better than the guys at Goldman Sachs--and are willing to work for, say, a GS-13 salary?" The only people who confidently state that they have a surefire master plan to fix the problem are, not to put too fine a point on it, morons with very limited understanding of financial markets. These people generally start by talking about how the Bear Stearns crisis can really be traced back to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, then almost immediately reveal that they know nothing of Glass-Steagall other than its name.

I have tried all sorts of ways to ask these questions. Nor am I engaged in "libertarian gotcha"; though the game is hours of fun, I am not actually against better or even more regulation of investment banks*. I just want to know what sort of regulation we are going to have; I am against doing something for the sake of doing something.

[yap]

But the fundamental question that no one ever answers is simply "How will the regulatory agency be any smarter than the banks?" The political process and existing regulatory infrastructure did about as well at anticipating and preventing the current problems as the banking system did. As I say above, this question usually gets asked by liberal journalists. And its usually answered by an honest and intelligent liberal policy wonk forthrightly saying, in essence, "I have no idea."

Indeed. It's much better to do nothing and experience a global housing bubble than risk enacting a bad regulation. Everything is too hard and nobody ever knows.

What we need, fundamentally, is not simply stricter regulation or less greedy bankers. What we need is better economic theory of how these things play out, so that the regulators have better tools to assess and prevent systemic risk. But that's not how we're thinking right now. What we're looking for is not better tools, but someone to blame.

Shame on us, thinking that better regulation will help us when what we really need is better theoretical thinking. Especially when regulation doesn't work anyway.

I think systemic resolution is important, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to keep an eye on systemic risk. But Tyler is probably right that we cannot get the financial regulation we want until we decide what we want: low inflation, low interest rates, and broad credit availability; or low risk and low profits in the banking sector.

I'm also generally skeptical that we're going to achieve the implied goal of making sure that financial crises never happen. If anyone, including congressmen or regulators, had believed that there was a reasonable risk of the financial crisis we just experienced, it never would have happened. That's what you have to fight, not some perceived imperfections in the regulatory structure.

And for god's sake, leave poor Alan Greenspan alone. Just because he encouraged everyone to take out bad loans doesn't mean he encouraged everyone to take out bad loans.

Gramm/Greenspan haters from the left: If regulation is so impotent that a single rule change, or even two, can leave the system vulnerable to this kind of collapse--indeed, make it worse with other rules that are still there--then why the hell do we bother regulating? If your regulators need to get it right 100% of the time, we might as well pack it in now, because there is no system on earth that can guarantee no one will ever be wrong. If one guy can leave us in a position where the regulatory system makes things worse rather than better, we may well be better off without the regulatory regime.

Paul Krugman disagrees.

Most of what Alan Greenspan said at last week's conference in his honor made very good sense. But his words of wisdom come too late. He's like a man who suggests leaving the barn door ajar, and then - after the horse is gone - delivers a lecture on the importance of keeping your animals properly locked up.

Regular readers know that I have never forgiven the Federal Reserve chairman for his role in creating today's budget deficit. In 2001 Mr. Greenspan, a stern fiscal taskmaster during the Clinton years, gave decisive support to the Bush administration's irresponsible tax cuts, urging Congress to reduce the federal government's revenue so that it wouldn't pay off its debt too quickly.

Since then, federal debt has soared. But as far as I can tell, Mr. Greenspan has never admitted that he gave Congress bad advice. He has, however, gone back to lecturing us about the evils of deficits.

Now, it seems, he's playing a similar game with regard to the housing bubble.

At the conference, Mr. Greenspan didn't say in plain English that house prices are way out of line. But he never says things in plain English.

What he did say, after emphasizing the recent economic importance of rising house prices, was that "this vast increase in the market value of asset claims is in part the indirect result of investors accepting lower compensation for risk. Such an increase in market value is too often viewed by market participants as structural and permanent." And he warned that "history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low-risk premiums." I believe that translates as "Beware the bursting bubble."

But as recently as last October Mr. Greenspan dismissed talk of a housing bubble: "While local economies may experience significant speculative price imbalances, a national severe price distortion seems most unlikely."

Wait, it gets worse. These days Mr. Greenspan expresses concern about the financial risks created by "the prevalence of interest-only loans and the introduction of more-exotic forms of adjustable-rate mortgages." But last year he encouraged families to take on those very risks, touting the advantages of adjustable-rate mortgages and declaring that "American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage."

If Mr. Greenspan had said two years ago what he's saying now, people might have borrowed less and bought more wisely. But he didn't, and now it's too late. There are signs that the housing market either has peaked already or soon will. And it will be up to Mr. Greenspan's successor to manage the bubble's aftermath.

Why are we reviewing McArdle's attitudes towards regulation? Well, it seems that the happy couple is having a bit of trouble with their rented house.

Lawyers out there: what are your legal rights the third time the plumbing breaks and floods the house?
about 4 hours ago via TweetDeck

@elfrankenstino Rent, and it's a row house
about 3 hours ago via TweetDeck

@earldean71 What is constructive eviction and why is it dangerous?
about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

earldean71 I'm curious more than practically interested
about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

(Her correspondent tells her that it is being unable to live in a rental because of substandard living conditions that have the same result as eviction--one is unable to live in the place one rented, but judges don't buy it unless you have actually been driven from the house.)

@earldean71 Well, technically we have been, since we are afraid to use the plumbing, but I'm not looking for anything that involves bailiffs
about 2 hours ago via TweetDeck

No, technically McArdle is still living in the house. So technically she hasn't been driven from the house. When you don't bother with facts, the truth is whatever you choose to believe. A judge will disagree, but they're just party poopers who don't understand that the elite get to make up their own facts.

I called a lawyer friend, and he explained the legal options and came up with an answer. His response:

They're fucked.

The landlord is not breaking the law. McArdle can't break the lease either. She will have to find another way to get the landlord to do the right thing. The Washington Post, in an article about DC renters' rights, says:

The District of Columbia Housing Code (DCHC) is enforced by the D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs Housing Regulation Administration (HRA)."

DCRA publishes the "Tenant's Guide to Safe and Decent Housing." This 30-page booklet summarizes the Rental Housing Act of 1985, and Chapter 14 of the DC Municipal Regulations (DCMR), which cover the city's laws and regulations for rent-controlled apartments."

So ultimately McArdle is dependent on a consumer protection agency, which is pretty funny because she is currently trying to ruin the reputation of Elizabeth Warren, who is trying to create a financial consumer protection agency and is being considered to head that agency. For McArdle, the idea of siding with consumers over bankers is the worst sort of heresy, so we devoutly hope that McArdle isn't forced to give up all her most cherished ideas and seek redress with an agency that should have never been created in the first place, according to her ideology.

More on McArdle and Warren later. It's almost beyond belief that McArdle would depend on her debunked criticisms of Warren, which are full of inaccurate statistics and ideological bias, to state that Warren can't be trusted because her work is full of inaccurate statistics and ideological bias, but self-knowledge is not exactly a characteristics of the willfully blind authoritarian follower.

UPDATE:

Packing up the valuables and refugeeing to Petworth for the duration
about 1 hour ago via TweetDeck

She will insist on using that word, no matter how stupid it makes her look.

Keeping The Little People In Line: How Authoritarians Maintain Dominance

Professional Submissive Rod Dreher wrote that Truth is information disseminated by the authoritarian leadership and whole-heartedly accepted by the authoritarian followers. Authority, like power, is given. One way to maintain authoritarian control is to use appeals to authority to slap down dissent, which can undermine authority if it is not eliminated. Let's watch Megan McArdle, our favorite authoritarian leader wannabe, attempt to maintain her authority in the face of criticism.

The back story: (feel free to skip if you are up to date)

McArdle:

Zosima, let me see if I can put this kindly. Or frankly, let me not. Your obnoxious student crap is getting incredibly old. In fact, it was old when I was ten, because I come from a family of academics, and you're not even very good at it.

Knock it off and talk like an adult rather than like an anxious freshman who hopes that he can use arrogance as a substitute for manners and insight, or get off the board. You never had any realistic hope of intimidating me into conceding to your superior intellect, because as I mentioned, I come from a family of academics who are actually intellectually intimidating. But any hope you had was long ago squandered in our various interactions, where you have demonstrated a tediously mechanical grasp of talking points you've heard elsewhere, an imperfect familiarity with your intermediate coursework, and what seems like some sort of nascent personality disorder.

I've no doubt that you are charming and erudite in person, with many friends who respect your intellect and your deft wit. But for some reason, that is not shining through here. You haven't violated any explicit rule of the board except one, which is that you are annoying the hell out of me, and contributing nothing to the discussion. If this continues, I will ban you.

If you were better at contempt and sarcasm, I might let you stay, but I'm afraid it's just not your metier. You might experiment with respectful interaction, which is always welcome.

Zosima:

That's funny, because I was thinking the argument you're making sound like that annoying kid from the freshman macro class. They're almost completely non-specific(except for the ones you got wrong). That kid is finally coming to realization that economics is imperfect, but doesn't really understand why, or understand the ways by which we would measure how wrong.

p.s. It sounds like I hurt your feelings, if you look back through our comment history, you dish the ad hominem out as much or more than you take it. (Your previous post being an excellent example) But you're perfectly within your rights to restrict who speaks on your blog. I would think it hypocritical, but then, I wouldn't be surprised either.

p.p.s.
I might add that I generally find your posts irritating, as well. What frustrates me is that in the world of internet blogging you have a plethora of excellent resources, and excellent options for arguments, but the arguments you choose are so mind-numbingly banal, that they make me want to bang my head against the wall. Nothing is certain in this world especially in research, and 75% of the points you make boil down to a restatement of this claim. I criticize, because I hope that eventually you'll stop scratching the surface; realize that lack of certainty is not a reason to change anything. But you're right, I can't see that I've made any difference.

Let's look at McArdle's response in detail, to pick out the methods she uses to impose dominance to maintain authority when she has not earned it by virtue of education, self-improvement, or achievement.

McArdle:

Ooooooh, snap!

More-in-sorrow-than-in-anger requires making some point I find at least tangentially interesting.

As brad says, the Lady of the Manor has spoken. The little people are here for her amusement, or she would not bother with them at all.

On a serious note, don't worry that you hurt my feelings. Mosquitos don't need to hurt my feelings to piss me off.

Slap-down number 2: you're nothing compared to me--a nuisance, an insect.

I don't like nasty internet invective.

When somebody else uses it. Only Authoritarian Leaders can use invective to keep the followers in line; when followers use invective it is insolent and shows a lack of humility.

And not because I'm not good at it. Invective is fun, but entirely counterproductive, which is why I deploy it only with people who a) use it liberally themselves and b) have ignored myriad previous warning shots across the bow.

Invective is very productive, which is why McArdle doesn't want it used against her and why she routinely uses it against others.

Contempt is only a good arguing tool if the person you're arguing with wants your respect.

Wrong again. By showing contempt instead of respect, you are refusing to acknowledge the authority of the object of contempt.

And, respectfully, you haven't earned mine, so I don't really care about yours.

To earn McArdle's respect, a person must be either an acceptable Authority of higher rank or a person of lower rank who does not criticize or challenge--that is, question the authority of--McArdle.

Only the very young, the very stupid, or the very insecure are impressed by the condescension of random others, and alas, I am no longer any of those things.

Since McArdle routinely uses condescension, as she does in these passages, she is showing her hand by making this statement. She deliberately insults people to put them in their place and thereby maintain authority.

Had you attempted straight argument, stripped of the attempt to project a superiority you didn't work for, you might have won that respect; there are a lot of liberals whose opinions I do care for.

So much projection, so little time. McArdle will not attempt straight arguments because she fudges the facts to win arguments. She attempts to project an air of superiority by repeatedly telling others she knows more than they. She named her blog Asymmetrical Information, for god's sake--she knows what she's talking about and you don't. And her respect must be earned while she demands that everyone else automatically respect her authority.

You are very welcome to attempt to be one of those liberals; or you can go away. But the very next time you express the merest sliver of contempt for me, or anyone else on this thread, I'll ban you.

Dissent must be banned because it threatens authority. If people start to question authority, authority is destroyed.

Note to others, ideologically sympatico or not: this is one of my periodic housecleanings. Be nice to one another. Both liberals and conservatives have fallen prey to my axe before, and I'm ready to start swinging again. You know I love each and every one of you, but that doesn't mean we can all live in the same house.

She says she loves them yet she demands absolute obedience and insults them frequently. She's going to be one hell of a mother.

Zosima responds:

FYI, the substantive arguments are above, you've pretty much dropped those. Your stated preferences and self-aggrandizing descriptions aside, you demonstrate a revealed preference for content free invective both through the posts you choose to respond to, the relative length of those posts, and your tendency to escalate ad hominem battles rather than defuse them.

p.s. I could care less about your respect. I see mistakes and I correct them. I learned a while ago that it helps to direct your attention to the more consequential arguments if I give you a little prod.

McArdle later says, in response to someone else:

Zosima has been substituting condescension on a near-daily basis for substance since HCR and I've finally had enough.

Correcting mistakes is condescension--that doesn't even make sense in an authoritarian framework. Correcting mistakes is a simple matter of fact, but this is McArdle's authority on the line and she must call it something else to hide her factual mistakes or lies and maintain her manufactured air of authority.

ADDED: McArdle has erased her post. It's not the first time and no doubt will not be the last. (Thanks, brad.)

The Hunting Of The Snark Cookie Of Gratitude: Let's Hear It For The Commenters!

Megan McArdle's Commenters, these cookies are for you!

Megan McArdle sees someone suggest that Bush's tax cuts for the rich should be eliminated and the money used for better purposes, and she decides that it just wouldn't make any difference. McArdle's problems with the argument:

Dylan Matthews at the Washington Post has asked what we might be able to do for the economy if we repealed the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and spent the money on something else. The result is a nice post full of graphs, but the answer seems to be "not much"--the very best estimate is that we get about $75 billion in added economic activity, or about $25 for every person in the country.

The first two commenters correct her math. "Or $250, whatever," says the first. The second: "Using current census data, I get $244 per person, but yes let's call it $250, Megan was off by a factor of 10." McArdle and math are two ships that pass in the night, never to have contact. Fortunately her commenters are available to do her long division for her.

McArdle:

That, mind you, requires some pretty big assumptions.

For starters, it assumes that the rather optimistic estimates of Mark Zandi about the size of the stimulus multiplier are correct. Estimating stimulus multipliers is incredibly difficult when you try to do it at the macro level (how much spending equals how much extra GDP), and even more difficult when you try to figure out whether food stamps are better than a jobs program--the examples are fewer, and the amounts are smaller, making it hard to pick up direct effects.

Commenter zosina:

So after the bad math and bad macro we're left with....multipliers are hard to estimate. Not incorrect, but the estimates we have are not pulled out of thin air, but based on a lot of empirical research, soooo, I'm not feeling it is a very strong objection, especially in light of the fact that she doesn't assert any reasons why we should expect that they're wrong. This like Megan noting that designing skyscrapers is hard. True, but unless she has a reason why there is a problem with the design for this particular skyscraper, the fact that it is hard isn't a reason not to build it.

McArdle:

It also assumes that any measured increase in GDP measures some improvement in human welfare. It is trivially true that if you increase one component of a measured variable, that variable will get bigger. It's much harder to know that any particular increase in GDP represents a real change in human welfare, or merely moving chess pieces around the board.

It's the old "it's too hard to understand" trick, as Maxwell Smart might say.

Commenter zosina:

This is true, but utterly banal and irrelevant. Almost all discussions in policy, including many that Megan has involved herself in, use GDP as an imperfect metric of welfare. This isn't perfect, but there are many good reasons for believing GDP is a pretty good metric of welfare. For example, Okun's law, which is actually an extremely well supported conjecture that GDP and unemployment are negatively correlated.

This is my favorite part. McArdle:

Too, this basically assumes that there are no dynamic supply-side effects from the tax increase. And it assumes that the multiplier from a tax cut is the same as the lost GDP from a tax increase, which is not necessarily the case--where you start matters. In this case, we're starting in the middle of a recession, when people may find a tax increase more worrying, because they're already feeling more financially insecure. To be sure, that worry might push them to work harder, or to hunker down and do as little as possible. But there's no reason to think that it's somehow steady state through good times and bad.

In a time when income inequality has soared, McArdle wants to tell us the rich are so worried about income insecurity that they would not spend money if their taxes are raised.

Inflation adjusted percentage increase in mean after-tax household income between 1979 and 2005.

This ignores the incredibly low tax rate for the rich, the actual amount of money the very rich have, their use of tax shelters, and basic human nature. The rich are not checking their on-line bank account every day to see if they can afford a new Prada bag. They have more than enough money to spend and probably will not cut back their hours running global companies because mean Mr. Obama raises their tax rate.
This is why conservative leaders want to put Reagan on Mount Rushmore.

Commenter:

This entire argument is silly. As if we'll just hand out $250 dollars to every person in the country. What a ridiculous idea from Megan and [other commenter].

These tax cuts (along with other Bush policies like medicare part D and unfunded war) have been the primary contributors to the debt over the last decade, along with the lagging business and poor growth.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/econ...)

The idea that if wealthy people have slightly less wealth they'll dramatically affect jobs or the economy is just silly. How can 3,500,000 people possibly move a consumer economy of $14 trillion in any appreciable way?

Unless your assertion is that they regularly engage in orgies of spending, specifically because of these tax cuts and the moment they are repealed they will come to their senses and stop buying stuff? Maybe they'll realize they don't need all those helpful staffmembers and servants and unemployment will go up? They'll stop investing and stuff their mattresses?

My experience is that the wealthy don't spend much money at all - that's why they got there and continue to be there. I think your theory is crap.

Back to McArdle:

Finally, it seems to assume that we could repeal the Bush tax cuts this year. We can't. As far as I know, you can't tax peoples' income retroactively, a legal nicety that considerably frustrated Congress in dealing with the AIG bonuses. By the time Congress actually got around to repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, they'd be getting ready to repeal themselves. It would be a pointless waste of legislative energy this late in the game.

Commenters:

Congress can change the rules for any taxable year which has not yet ended without causing any Constitutional problems. Basically they have until, depending on how you count, April 15 (assuming they don't change the filing date before then) of the next year to change the rules for the previous year. An argument could be made that they really only have until December 31st - though I know they've changed rules in the taxpayer's favor after that but before April 15 - but in either event they can change anything for year when the final tax due is not yet determinate.

What I remember from previous mid-year tax increases (IANAL and IANACPA) is that Congress can, and has, increased taxes mid year and it has been effective as of the start of the year. (A quick wikipedia search on ex post facto laws shows that this goes back to Calder vs. Bull in 1798!)

McArdle:

Especially when you think that the cheery estimate is a gain of $75 billion, which sounds like a lot in terms of my income, but is, in terms of our national income, the equivalent of one extra pizza party per person. I like pizza and all, but I think we have bigger issues to worry about right now.

Commenter:

Let's see: (1) you got the amount wrong by a factor of 10 (which weren't so bad if you didn't make such a big deal of that amount, but you did, with 'one pizza party per person' and all); (2) you were wrong on Congress' ability to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the current year; (3) even if you'd been right about that, FY 2011 (starting Oct. 1) stimulus such as Matthews proposes could be funded by repealing the Bush tax cuts effective 10/1/2010, which is in the future; (4) there are going to be no 'dynamic supply-side effects' of a tax increase, on top of the usual multiplier, in a world where we've got far more available goods, services, and labor than people are able to purchase - i.e. the supply side is already full to bursting; (5) it would be hard to make up a hypothetical route of the economic multiplier effect that *didn't* improve human welfare - and since while there are exceptions, increased GDP generally correlates with increased human welfare, the onus is on you to show how it wouldn't, in this case; and (6) sure, the amount's still not huge, but dammit, those of us on Matthews' side of this debate would LIKE a much bigger additional stimulus; his point was that, failing that, doing a little bit is better than doing nothing, and if paying for it is the hangup, here's one way to get a little bit of stimulus while actually paying for it at the same time.

How did McArdle take all the corrections? I'm glad you asked. Like this:

You're [zosima] wrong about [supply-side effect], since Matthews is discussing repeal now, not future opportunity cost, and no, it doesn't model the dynamic supply side effects, which don't necessarily take place in the same time frame as the stimulus. It is absolutely true that we have to used measured GDP, but the point is hardly trivial, and matters more depending on context. In this context, it's not clear, for example, that increasing measured GDP is decreasing unemployment or by how much, since it is, as you know doubt know, a lagging indicator.

But thanks for playing, and there will be some lovely parting gifts.

And this:

Zosima, let me see if I can put this kindly. Or frankly, let me not. Your obnoxious student crap is getting incredibly old. In fact, it was old when I was ten, because I come from a family of academics, and you're not even very good at it.

Knock it off and talk like an adult rather than like an anxious freshman who hopes that he can use arrogance as a substitute for manners and insight, or get off the board. You never had any realistic hope of intimidating me into conceding to your superior intellect, because as I mentioned, I come from a family of academics who are actually intellectually intimidating. But any hope you had was long ago squandered in our various interactions, where you have demonstrated a tediously mechanical grasp of talking points you've heard elsewhere, an imperfect familiarity with your intermediate coursework, and what seems like some sort of nascent personality disorder.

I've no doubt that you are charming and erudite in person, with many friends who respect your intellect and your deft wit. But for some reason, that is not shining through here. You haven't violated any explicit rule of the board except one, which is that you are annoying the hell out of me, and contributing nothing to the discussion. If this continues, I will ban you.

If you were better at contempt and sarcasm, I might let you stay, but I'm afraid it's just not your metier. You might experiment with respectful interaction, which is always welcome.

(She's 37, by the way, not 17, despite all appearances.) You see, because McArdle was raised by a family of intellectuals (her daddy was a lobbyist, her mother was a real estate agent and caterer whose family were dairy farmers), she also became intellectual by osmosis. She didn't need to study or learn, she just soaked up that elite knowledge by growing up with smart people. Which is why all children of intellectuals are intellectuals as well, and why the elite is so very very smarter than the rest of us.

Although we grew up in a family of smart-asses, so maybe there's something to that theory after all.

ADDED: Atrios notes McArdle's mad math skillz, as does Avedon Carol. Aimai adds her comment to McArdle's post, which we will reprint for posterity since it will probably irritate McArdle.

Aimai:

Hm, lets see if the site lets me post. Can I ask whether this long, incoherent and off point attack by Megan on poster zosina is, in fact, by Megan? I mean, look--for one thing the "Megan" in this post claims to be the child of academics when the real Megan, as far as I know, is the child of a former public employee turned lobbyist and a realtor. Second of all the real Megan presumably grasps that "being the child of academics" doesn't actually amount to an argument. No, really it doesn't. Actually, and for real, I'm the child of a Nobel Prize winner and for kicks I'll add I'm a third generation Harvardite. So what? This really, really, really, never comes up in academic arguments which are actually won and lost not by some kind of bizarre blood test but by concrete arguments. The "you are tedious and lack charm" argument is also one that I have yet to see adduced in a respectable discussion. Certainly, on the basis of the evidence from this thread, its hard to tell which of the two of you, the "megan" poster and the zosina poster is the younger. If I didn't know that the real Megan is 37 I'd have had to award this avatar the palm for most juvenile approach to intellectual discussion. Finally, I have yet to see the imaginary comments "Megan" refute any of Zosina's points. If this thread "Megan" isn't the real Megan I think the real Megan might want to step in and clean up the comments by deleting her. But if she is the real Megan I think the Atlantic might want to step in and jerk the blog entirely. This is a positively craptacular piece of incoherent special pleading on Megan's part, from the first post to the comment thread. Really, its shameful. And you don't have to be the "child of academics" to know that.

aimai

Actually, it would explain a lot if McArdle's posts were the product of a teenage performance artist. McArdle finally does refute zosina's points, with a predictable lack of success.

Religion And Authority

Rod Dreher, "an intellectually serious and culturally engaged Christian," discusses authoritarianism. Or, as he puts it, Truth.

The question of authenticity depends on authority. A friend and I last night were talking about authority and the Catholic Church, and he made the important point that authority only has meaning if it has been accepted by the people.

That is far more true than people realize. Power is given, not taken. We tell ourselves that the powerful control us but they do so only with our permission. If we revolted as other nations did when their living conditions became intolerable, we could take back control and the elite would be in their graves.

What we see among many, many Catholics today is a rejection of traditional Catholic teaching about authority, and the installment of the subjective individual as one's own Magisterium.

The reason conservatives hate the 1960s is because people of different sexes or races or ethnicity refused to accept white males' description of and opinion about them. They rejected the absolute authority of the white male and his proclamations of what everyone should and should not believe. White males said that everyone else was stupid, lazy and slutty, and without them, white Christian males, the entire world would collapse. Any visible signs of this rejection drives them into a fury, such as overt homosexuality, women in pants, men with long hair, or successful Black and Hispanic men and women.

These are the times we live in: the essence of modernity, or at least one essence of modernity, is the radical exaltation of the Self.

You hear that, people? If you don't obey White Males, you are elevating yourself over White Males, and that's very bad. Bad, bad, selfish woman or dark-skinned man, to think that you know what is right instead of your White Male Authority. And since God is a White Male Authority, you're even going against God! Who is White! And Male!

Yet my friend is certainly correct: authority, even external authority, means nothing if it is not inwardly appropriated, and furthermore, if that inward appropriation is not shared by others.

This just knocks my fucking socks off. Dreher realizes, dimly, that the people in power impose their version of reality upon others, and that his and their authority means nothing if they can't brainwash people into accepting it and have an entire society constantly reinforcing it.

A revealed, dogmatic religion like Roman Catholicism will have a very difficult time in conditions of modernity, precisely because we are all conditioned to think in terms of the Self as the final arbiter of truth.

Poor, poor Catholic Church. How it suffers because women look at the Church's teachings about the role of women in society and decide that they will follow their own heart and make their own plans, instead of thinking and feeling and doing only what they are told is okay for women to think, feel or do. And let's not even get started on the gays. You see, if you think for yourself you are rejecting the authority of White Males, from God on down to that guy at the convenience store who orders you to smile because he doesn't like to see a pretty young woman with a frown on her face because women should look pleasant and biddable at all times.

To exist in proper relationship with the Truth, I believe, requires passionate inward appropriation of external, objective realities.

In other words, to know if something is true, you must go to the authority and they will tell you what is true. Whatever they say is your Truth. To determine the truth for yourself is selfish, wrong, and immoral, because only the God-backed Authority can do that. And you and everyone else must embrace this Truth with all your heart, or people will question the absolute authority of the Absolute Authority.

The key point is faith that there is a such thing as religious truth independent of my own subjective judgment. If people don't believe that, I don't see how a religion like Christianity is sustainable over the long term, at least not in any meaningful sense.

Since you have no way of knowing if your Authority is correct or not, you must have Perfect Faith that they are correct. The more faith you show, the more obedience you show to your Authority. The crazier your beliefs, the more faith you show.

And we wonder why our country is in so much trouble. We obey our Wall Street Elites and can't believe that they were stupid and dishonest. It must be the fault of the brown-skinned Community Reinvestment Act, since White Male Authority can't be wrong. We cheer our military and give them whatever they want, all our money and our sons and husbands, yet we lose wars anyway. It can't be that our White Male Authority betrayed us to sell guns and grab oil-rich countries. It must be the fault of those brown, immoral Arabs. And what happened to America's jobs? It can't be that the White Male authority is trying to ground down wages to third-world level. It must be the fault of women and illegal brown people for taking jobs away from white men. Authority is always right. Authoritarian followers are always right as long as they are obedient. And everyone else is a threat to the social order, because if even one small child points out the Authority has no clothes, all of Western Civilization will crumble.

Another Poor Victim Contemplates His Fate

Shorter Ross Douthat: Why should poor minorities get scholarships when poor whites, the salt of the earth and the defenders of our faith, do not?

Douthat wants to claim that cultural bigotry is keeping the poor out of the aristocracy. It's not income inequality, the result of out-of-control and unregulated capitalism. It's not the end of the American Dream of rising to a higher class. It's the university admissions offices, who are liberal and hate the poor and patriotic.

Ross Douthat Eats Breakfast:

Hmm, what do I feel like eating today? I could have oatmeal. That's conservatives. Good, hearty, heavy, oatmeal. But I hate oatmeal. I want French Toast. But that's French, and I hate the French because they envy us for our masculinity. No French Toast. Maybe doughnuts. That'll show the Nanny-staters. Lots of fatty doughnuts. But doughnuts are eaten by cops and cops are lower class. Maybe I could eat a cruller. That's higher class. What's more elite, a bear claw or a cruller? But the doughnut shop has doughnuts with rainbow sprinkles and that's gay and anything gay makes me extremely uncomfortable and gives me flashbacks of those times at my summer camp for young gentlemen of good family. I'll have eggs and toast. That's safe. Pastry is a liberal plot to corrupt American masculinity anyway.

White On White

Kathryn Jean Lopez twitters:

"john tesh will join me live this hour." best news i've heard on msnbc in a long time.
about 23 hours ago via web

And after that she had a white bread and mayonnaise sandwich and some vanilla pudding and read Chicken Soup For The Bland Soul.

Links

Well, slap my ass and call me Susan. Megan McArdle links to Glenn Greenwald, because he criticizes a Democrat. I guess she doesn't think he's a sock-puppet ninny who uses too many words--now.

The Esteemable David Brooks

Brooks in paradise


Let's face it, David Brooks isn't very bright. However he has a fine grasp of the obvious, if the obvious is conservative conventional wisdom, and it's taken him far. But when you substitute popular misconceptions for evidence and wisdom, you're going to end up saying stuff that's just stupid.

Let us enter, you and I, into the moral universe of the modern narcissist.

Immediately Brooks is in trouble, for he is using a word with an actual definition, and Brooks only fares well when he can make up his own words.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the diagnostic classification system used in the United States, as "a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy."[1]

The narcissist is described as being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power, and prestige.[2] Narcissistic personality disorder is closely linked to self-centeredness.

[snip]

The etiology of this disorder is unknown, according to Groopman and Cooper. However, they list the following factors identified by various researchers as possibilities.[4]

An oversensitive temperament at birth
Overindulgence and overvaluation by parents
Valued by parents as a means to regulate their own self-esteem
Excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic feedback
Unpredictable or unreliable caregiving from parents
Severe emotional abuse in childhood
Being praised for perceived exceptional looks or talents by adults
Excessive praise for good behaviors or excessive criticism for poor behaviors in childhood

These characteristics were explained by Alice Miller. A sensitive child who feels deeply, a gifted child in Miller's words, who is given love and attention only when he satisfies his parents' emotional needs will grow up twisted and unable to love. Brooks, because he is ignorant, slurs neediness into vanity. Narcissism doesn't mean you think you are the greatest thing on earth. It means you constantly seek the attention and love you did not get in childhood by obsessing about yourself and what others think about you. You must constantly be praised and envied because you were never given attention and love for who you actually are, you only got them if you acted in ways that pleased other people. It is the opposite of excessive self-esteem and vanity.

The exploitative, sense of entitlement, lack of empathy, disregard for others, and constant need for attention inherent in NPD adversely affect interpersonal relationships.

And it also affect everything else about a person; their religious, political, social and even trivial entertainment views.

Some narcissistic traits are common and a normal developmental phase. When these traits are compounded by a failure of the interpersonal environment and continue into adulthood, they may intensify to the point where NPD is diagnosed.[5] Some psychotherapists believe that the etiology of the disorder is, in Freudian terms, the result of fixation to early childhood development.[6] If a child does not receive sufficient recognition for their talents during about ages 3–7 they will never mature and continue to be in the narcissistic early development stage. It has been suggested[6] that NPD may be exacerbated by the onset of aging and the physical, mental, and occupational restrictions it imposes as can most personality traits.

Brooks acknowledges this definition, but, without making the slightest attempt to corroborate his claims, states that the definition is now considered wrong. By David Brooks, at least.

The narcissistic person is marked by a grandiose self-image, a constant need for admiration, and a general lack of empathy for others. He is the keeper of a sacred flame, which is the flame he holds to celebrate himself.

There used to be theories that deep down narcissists feel unworthy, but recent research doesn’t support this. Instead, it seems, the narcissist’s self-directed passion is deep and sincere.

His self-love is his most precious possession. It is the holy center of all that is sacred and right. He is hypersensitive about anybody who might splatter or disregard his greatness. If someone treats him slightingly, he perceives that as a deliberate and heinous attack. If someone threatens his reputation, he regards this as an act of blasphemy. He feels justified in punishing the attacker for this moral outrage.

And because he plays by different rules, and because so much is at stake, he can be uninhibited in response. Everyone gets angry when they feel their self-worth is threatened, but for the narcissist, revenge is a holy cause and a moral obligation, demanding overwhelming force.

Brooks parrots the words but obviously doesn't understand their implication. Someone secure in his self-belief to the point of "deep and sincere" grandiosity isn't threatened by criticism. Someone with doubts is.

Mel Gibson seems to fit the narcissist model to an eerie degree. The recordings that purport to show him unloading on his ex-lover, Oksana Grigorieva, make for painful listening, and are only worthy of attention because these days it pays to be a student of excessive self-esteem, if only to understand the world around.

Gibson's father is a radically fundamentalist Catholic, Holocaust denier, and all-around extremist. (We are very fortunate to have Arthur Silber's thoughts on Hutton Gibson, a textbook example of parental abuse warping his son's outlook.) He said, "The greatest benefit anyone can have is to be a Catholic. You have the lifelong satisfaction of being right," and obviously has spent his entire life telling everyone else that they are wrong and he is right.

Gibson is an outspoken critic of the modern post-conciliar Catholic Church and is a proponent of various conspiracy theories. He disseminates his views in a quarterly newsletter called The War is Now! and has self-published three collections of these periodicals: Is the Pope Catholic?, The Enemy is Here!, and The Enemy is Still Here![6][19]

Gibson believes that the Second Vatican Council introduced explicitly heretical and forbidden doctrines into the Catholic Church in order to destroy it from within.[citation needed] He also holds that every pope elected since John XXIII, inclusively, has been an anti-pope or illegitimate claimant to the papacy.[citation needed] This doctrine is called "Sedevacantism", from the radices Sede ("See") and vacante ("vacant"), and affirms that from 1958 until the present the Holy See is being occupied by invalidly elected, imposter "popes".[citation needed]

[snip]

At the January 2004 We The People conference, Gibson advocated that the states secede from the Federal government of the United States and that the United States public debt be abolished.[21]

Gibson garnered widespread outrage when remarks questioning how the Nazis could have disposed of six million bodies during the Holocaust were printed in a March 2003 New York Times Magazine article.

[snip]"The entire catastrophe was manufactured, said Hutton, as part of an arrangement between Hitler and 'financiers' to move Jews out of Germany. Hitler 'had this deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs,' he said".

Gibson was further quoted as saying the Second Vatican Council was "a Masonic plot backed by the Jews"[2] and that the September 11, 2001 attacks were perpetrated by remote control: "Hutton flatly rejected that Al Qaeda hijackers had anything to do with the attacks. 'Anybody can put out a passenger list,' he said".

[snip]

In the early 1990s, Gibson and Tom Costello hosted a video called Catholics, Where Has Our Church Gone?[26] which is critical of the changes made to the Catholic Church by the Second Vatican Council and espouses the Siri Thesis that in 1958, after the death of Pope Pius XII, the man originally elected pope was not Angelo Roncalli, but another cardinal, "probably Cardinal Siri of Genoa" (a staunch conservative candidate and first papabile).

[snip]

Gibson endorsed Ron Paul for President in the 2008 United States Presidential Election.[29] In January 2010, he made an appearance on the far-right-wing radio show, The Political Cesspool, to promote his views.[30]

The man who reveled in always being right brainwashed his son into hating Jews, women, blacks and himself. But Brooks has a different, imaginary interpretation.

[T]he sad fact is that Gibson is not alone. There can’t be many people at once who live in a celebrity environment so perfectly designed to inflate self-love. Even so, a surprising number of people share the trait. A study conducted at the National Institutes of Health suggested that 6.2 percent of Americans had suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, along with 9.4 percent of people in their 20s.

In their book, “The Narcissism Epidemic,” Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell cite data to suggest that at least since the 1970s, we have suffered from national self-esteem inflation. They cite my favorite piece of sociological data: In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.

That doesn’t make them narcissists in the Gibson mold, but it does suggest that we’ve entered an era where self-branding is on the ascent and the culture of self-effacement is on the decline.

Authoritarian leaders do not want people to have self-esteem. It makes it much, much harder to manipulate and control them. Instead of merely pushing their buttons, you have to use facts and logic to persuade people, and that's a tiny problem when you are trying to convince them that we need to drill for oil offshore or neglect our infrastructure or invade other countries. Authoritarian followers are horrified at the idea of self-esteem because their leaders tell them it is bad, and they are terrified of being rejected for holding opinions that displease their leaders/God/parents, which all run into the same Disapproving Authority that must be feared and obeyed. The last thing in the world David Brooks will approve of is self-esteem.

Teacher For A Day

Megan McArdle loves her some teachers, as long as they are the elite.

Teach for America Attracts an Elite
Jul 13 2010, 12:22 PM ET Comment

I'd argue that in an ideal world, teaching needy kids would be a higher status, more sought-after job than corporate law. And apparently, we really do live in the best of all possible worlds.

That's lovely, but how long do they teach?

In the past much of the organization's efforts have been tightly focused on recruitment, but are now shifting to boost the retention rate. Teach For America also reports that 34% of alumni teach at their placement schools for a third year. Many others go on to teach elsewhere, especially at KIPP charter schools and other schools founded by Teach For America alumni. Still others train for administrative positions, and Teach For America now reports that 63% of its alumni are working or studying in education.[9]

Sixty-six percent abandon the school that hired them to bring their specialness to the poor and struggling masses. They find easier jobs elsewhere or move up the ladder into administration. Some seem to have the attitude of corporate CEOs, who treat each job as an opportunity for personal advancement instead of dedicating their career to running an organization well.

Teacher Turnover and Attrition Rates are High [pdf]

The facts about the teacher retention problem speak for themselves. Turnover forteachers is significantly higher than for other occupations (see Figure 1).1Based on analysis of the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics for the1999-2000 school year, it is estimated that almost a third of America’s teachers leave the field sometime during their first three years of teaching, and almost half leave after five years (see Figure 2).2In many low-income communities and rural areas, the rates of attrition are even higher (see Figure 3). The attrition rate for those who enter through some “alternative” pathways can be as high as 60 percent.3

As a result of high attrition rates, despite their best efforts to recruit new teachers,many of our schools wind up with a net loss each year. In 1999, for example, our schools hired 232,000 teachers who had not been teaching the year before (i.e., new teachers hired who were not simply moving from one school to another). But the schools lost more than 287,000 teachers who left for other occupations that year—55,000 more than they hired (see Table 1a). When we see reports about how many teachers need to be hired this fall, we should be asking instead: “How many teachers left last spring? And why?”

As we explore the numbers and the accompanying figures, it is important to recognize that the teacher retention problem crosses all communities and all sectors of education (see Figure 3). Teacher attrition is highest in low-income communities, and in private schools, but suburban schools and affluent neighborhoods are not immune.

The retention problem plays itself out, to a greater or lesser extent, in every state.In Texas, which is one of the more dramatic cases, the problem was the focus of a recent report, which revealed that of the over 63,000 teaching positions in the state that needed to be filled in the 1998-99 school year, most of the openings (about 46,600, or 74percent) were due to teachers leaving the profession prior to retirement. In comparison,11,000 (17 percent) of these vacancies resulted from teacher retirements, in approximately 5,700 (9 percent) of these positions were created to accommodate increasing student enrollment. Crucially, many of the teachers who left the profession had not been teaching for very long. Between 1993 and 1996 as many as nineteen percent of the state’s new teachers left the profession after their first year.

I saw a lot of those one-year teachers. Many were unwilling or unable to take the constant insults meted out in schools, from condescending administrators, defensive parents and disturbed children. Their insulting paycheck is the last straw. Schools need dedicated principals who will involve his or her students' parents in the school as much as humanly possible. They need well-paid teachers who will stay in the jobs and improve their skills. It takes years to become a good teacher and disciplinarian. And they need a community that doesn't call them stupid, overpaid, lazy teat-suckers so the schools can be sold off to private corporations.

(Edited after posting, even more than usual)

Cheap Shot

Ann Althouse:

Drunk, stoned, old, stupid... you know, this may be why I enjoy listening to Rush Limbaugh.

She doesn't mean what she seems to mean, but who could pass up that quote? I'm only human.

A Suggestion

If I were the advice-giving sort, which I usually am not, I'd advise Ta-Nehisi Coates to start explaining who the Black Panthers were. The right is conflating them with the hate group the New Black Panthers, and his father's reputation will be trashed if everyone lets them get away with this.

Shut Up!

Megan McArdle has found an internet critic, nay, a venomous stalker, and is amused and puzzled.

Tee-hee! http://bit.ly/bBXe5g
about 10 hours ago via TweetDeck

The hee! references a post by a male who appears to spend most of his time calculating how little he can spend on a woman and still get to have sex with her. His view of women as a walking, whining, brainless vagina waiting to be gifted with his member will end up being its own reward, but his venom makes McArdle think.

@m_beauchamp At some point there's ironic tension in blogging . . . folks who pour whole life into perfecting pursuit of people they despise
6 minutes ago via TweetDeck

Ironic tension is the tension created by the use of irony--the viewers know something the writer (or character) does not. Evidently McArdle satisfies the inner unease created by criticism by telling herself that she knows the truth and her critics do not. Sadly, the facts do not back her up, but in this particular case she might have a point. The author of the criticism, Chateau, assumes McArdle is a ball-busting feminist out to bag a man any way she can. Little does he know that McArdle sees herself as an exclusive club which few are allowed to enter.

But McArdle's confusion about the motives of her critics is very interesting. She utterly ignores the fact that she is a paid advocate for global corporations who is pretending to be a journalist. It's possible that she's too stupid to know she is being used, but her stupidity is usually deliberate. She and the rest of her sorry band of bankster and oil company boosters think that they should be left alone to pass on their propaganda in peace and collect their hefty paychecks, which they will spend in the pursuit of an upper-class lifestyle they can't afford. Any consequences of their actions, any suffering they cause or disaster they help someone get away with, is irrelevant. Why can't those haters just leave them alone? They're not doing anything wrong. They're noble truth-tellers and arbitrators of public wisdom. They should be praised and accepted, and instead they are fact-checked and criticized. What the hell is wrong with the world?

Chateau is worthy of a post in himself, but we are not in the mood for the bile of the self-pitying, scheming, grasping male harridan out for all he can get, who views women as self-pitying scheming, grasping harridans out for all they can get. Our feminism comes from the knowledge that women are just as smart and stupid, venal and noble, adventurous and home-loving, and creative and destructive as men.

ADDED: Glenn Greenwald:

These [government officials] are individuals who destroyed the lives of countless innocent people with gruesome and lawless "policies." Not only did they never suffer for it, they have been richly rewarded with wealth and life-long job security. And still, the only tragedy they see from everything that happened is their own trivial "suffering," i.e., the fact that they're criticized in some quarters for what they did. The term "sociopathic self-absorption" should have a huge picture of them next to it in the dictionary.

The same thing goes for the "journalists" that aid and abet them.

Problem Solved

Before the unholy decade of the 1960s, students dressed in formal wear like little ladies and gentlemen and always paid attention to their lessons.

Townhall and talk radio dolt Dennis Prager has some new ideas for schools. If he had his way----.

If you wish to affirm an ethnic, racial, or religious identity through school, you will have to go elsewhere. We will end all ethnicity-, race-, and non-American-nationality-based celebrations.

Woops, there goes Christian celebrations like Christmas and Easter holidays.

First, this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity. I could not care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow, or white. I could not care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian, or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships.

There goes Columbus Day and Thanksgiving.

I will not authorize clubs that divide students based on any identities. This includes race, language, religion, sexual orientation, or whatever else may become in vogue in a society divided by political correctness.

There go all the foreign language clubs. My Spanish club's annual trip to La Hacienda? Verboten!

Your clubs will be based on interests and passions, not blood, ethnic, racial, or other physically defined ties. Those clubs just cultivate narcissism — an unhealthy preoccupation with the self — while the purpose of education is to get you to think beyond yourself. So we will have clubs that transport you to the wonders and glories of art, music, astronomy, languages you do not already speak, carpentry, and more.

But you got rid of the foreign language clubs. Does this mean that only non-Hispanics can have a Spanish club? And isn't art and music kind of gay? You don't want gay kids getting together, do you Dennis? And astronomy--isn't that kind of atheistic? Carpentry? Tools are expensive; who's going to pay for that? Not us conservatives. Just readin', writin', and 'rithmitic for us.

Third, because I regard learning as a sacred endeavor, everything in this school will reflect learning’s elevated status. This means, among other things, that you and your teachers will dress accordingly. Many people in our society dress more formally for a meal at a nice restaurant than they do for church or school. These people have their priorities backwards. Therefore, there will be a formal dress code at this school.

Most schools have dress codes. Many public schools require uniforms. But hey, if Prager thinks he can force the parents of his students to dress them in suits and ties or dresses and pantyhose, he can go for it.

Fourth, no obscene language will be tolerated anywhere on this school’s property — whether in class, in the hallways, or at athletic events. If you can’t speak without using the F-word, you can’t speak. By obscene language I mean the words banned by the Federal Communications Commission plus epithets such as the N-word, even when used by one black student to address another, or “bitch,” even when addressed by a girl to a girlfriend. It is my intent that by the time you leave this school, you will be among the few of your age to distinguish instinctively between the elevated and the degraded, the holy and the obscene.

Torture--hunky-dory. The f-word--obscene and profane. Let's keep our priorities straight.

Prager's mythical school sounds like it would be a sure-fire success. Once you make sure your students all look and sound like a 1950s picture book, every other problem melts away. But at least Prager isn't trying to get rid of public schools altogether, like all the gullible people being paid by major corporations to eliminate the corporations' property taxes. Those conservatives would be perfectly happy paying five grand or more per child per year to educate their kids, and pay for private police to protect them from the bored, angry, uneducated and unemployed masses that they can't wait to unleash upon the world.

Not If He Were The Last Man On Earth

For Jonah Goldberg, every natural disaster brings the faint, fond hope that somehow, in the death, destruction, chaos and suffering of an utter breakdown of society it will be possible for him to get laid, preferably by a hot college student.

So I keep hearing that these efforts to capture, clean and release oiled wildlife are counterproductive. Most eventually die from the stress of the oil and, apparently just as stressful, the dishwashing soap baths. In one of those weird ironies of nature, being surrounded by a bunch of soapy-sponge-wielding attractive University of Alabama female zoology students in wet t-shirts is an excellent plot device for a late nigh cinemax movie when the subject "victim" getting a bath is a sensitive-yet-jocular ski instructor, but it's terrifying if you're a brown pelican.

Somehow the hotties of Co-Ed Confidential never seem to dip from the eager and virginal Young Republican pool of candidates. And all of the little libertarians and conservatives who grew up reading Robert Heinlein and can't wait for the opportunity to mate with charming and willing young co-eds when the world ends wait in vain for the end of civilization, when they might finally have a chance with a girl of their dreams.

Watch Out, CIA

The Agonist points out a deeply improbably article from China.

Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents are training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops, according to a recent report by a British-based media agency.

Reporters from the media agency spotted and took photos of a few "monkey soldiers" holding AK-47 rifles and Bren light machine guns in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The report and photos have been widely spread by media agencies and Web sites across the world.

According to the report, American military experts call them "monkey terrorists."

The rest of it is just as good. There are no reports yet on whether the monkeys are working for the government or are XE contractors, or if Sean Hannity is throwing a fund-raiser to send bananas to the troops.

Coda

Remember Megan McArdle's assertion that Americans can't have universal health care because high American drug prices subsidize innovation for the world? It was hard to forget because she repeated that mantra for months. When she was asked for the supporting data, she tap-danced and waffled. Finally she acknowledged that she had no evidence, although she later tried to pretend both that she was right because she was confused when she gave that admission and that her "facts" came from sources who lied to her.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism reports:

A new and interesting line of attack has been opened against Big Pharma’s defense of its high US prices and its ongoing attacks on Europe and other countries that negotiate discounts. US drugmakers have contended that the rest of the world is effectively free-riding on US research, and that its inability to charge higher prices outside the US limits funding of R&D (ahem, have we forgotten the fact that most really big ailments already have treatments of some sort, making it much less likely that anyone will find a new blockbuster drug?).

But a more granular look at drug pricing within the US shows that drugmakers offer enough discounts here to undermine their attacks on non-US health schemes. And the foreign drug regimes at least assure that everyone in the population is on the same footing, while here, the highest prices fall on those either outside health care plans or in ones without favorable drug pricing, so the burden of higher prices falls disproportionately on lower income people.

Smith quotes the Financial Times, which calls the revelation "an embarrassment for the industry, and notably PhRMA, its powerful Washington, DC-based trade body. In the past PhRMA has argued that Europe’s ill-conceived public policies, including price controls and sluggish regulatory decision-making, have chilled innovation and raised doubts among private investors who help to underwrite research."

McArdle merely parroted whatever Big Pharma told her. They told her what to say, she wrote it down and printed it, and her job was done, except for all the funny posts defending the indefensible. She's a perfect example of the modern journalist, bought and paid for by corporations and without the slightest bit of awareness that they are merely stooges in a giant confidence game.

Big Pharma came out with a study of their own, of course, this one saying that drug price cuts in Europe will harm innovation because there will be less profit for drug corporations. This issue has been discuss a lot as well, since such studies ignore the role of government in drug innovation, as well as how much innovation actually goes on in drug corporations.

I wonder which study McArdle will address, if any. If I were her I'd just let the matter quietly die, but discretion has never been a McArdle virtue--thank goodness.

Derangement Syndrome

Kathryn Jean Lopez is verklempt.

the cowardly president http://ow.ly/28Sw2
11 minutes ago via HootSuite

The link leads to a post about Obama and a recess appointment. Lopez does not mention that Bush made 171 recess appointments [pdf] because she doesn't care. When you are a mindless sycophant, anything goes.

Job Hunt

Posting will be light today and tomorrow while I continue to look for work. If you would like to hire someone who is trustworthy, dependable, likes to work hard, and has a Texas teaching certificate, let me know. In the mean time, I will be trying to write cover letters that obscure the fact that I have worked from home doing teaching, writing, and office work for no pay for fifteen years.

The Rhyme Of The Not-So-Ancient Blogger

Megan McArdle links to a post written by Julian "insufferably pretentious" Sanchez mocking someone who tweeted through an opera performance. This is the same man that tweeted through the McArdle/Suderman wedding, along with the rest of the party. Then they wrote posts about how special it was to twitter the wedding and share it with friends.

If it's okay to tweet through a wedding reception, surely it's okay to tweet through the opera. Unless you just want to call someone a dick to emphasize your aesthetic purity.

Look, fussing with your phone constantly—even on “minimum brightness”—is kind of a dick move at any performance, but it’s borderline sacrilegious when it comes to Wagner, whose genius was in creating such an absolutely immersive experience through the fusion of music and drama. Which makes little intrusions from your neighbors that break the spell about a thousand times more grating.

Whereas twittering during a wedding reception is just fine.

But maybe we are wrong, and it was a blessing to have the DC blogging world hunched over their tiny electronics instead of regaling the wedding guests with monologues about how The Fountainhead changed their lives, or describing the time they kicked ass in Bloggingheads.

Rhyme Of The Ancient Mariner cloud from here.

Screw You

This is a tool. It is specially made to be attractive to those who are not familiar with tools. It is used to screw things.(from)

Megan McArdle tells us that Ireland isn't so bad off after all, no matter how bad its economy seems.

Today's New York Times article on the Irish economy makes for depressing reading. Despite swift moves for wage cuts and other austerity measures (backed by the unions, no less), the deficit is almost 15% of GDP, and the spread between Irish and German debt is about 300 basis points. Unemployment is high, and long-term unemployment makes up a significant portion of the problem.

Yes, Ireland is in very bad financial shape.

Ireland, in truth, has been something like a region of the US economy that had privileged access to European Union markets. In the 1990s, with help from a friendly White House deeply involved in the Northern ‘peace process’, we got rich by selling Intel chips, Dell laptops and Viagra tablets to our EU partners, while still benefitting from EU funds to improve our infrastructure. When that boom levelled out after 2001 we could still thrive on the new sources of cheap labour that the EU’s expansion to the east has offered. Dublin parishes offer masses in Polish; fishy Baltic delicacies hide behind obscure shopfronts; in some pubs vodka is more popular than Guinness. But much of the growth in this latter period, and much of the employment for our eastern friends, was fuelled by a mad property bubble, which saw government, developers and banks collude in a conspiracy that clearly bordered on criminal, and occasionally seems to have crossed the border, in order to build houses, apartments and offices that may never be occupied. Financial “innovation” also played its part: Dublin, with its low and lax approaches to taxation and regulation, became home, at least nominally to nearly a third of the world’s hedge funds.

Fortunes were made, to be sure: it was not unusual to see a house increase by five-fold in price in the space of seven or eight years. But now that the bubble has burst, the most criminal of the banks--Anglo-Irish Bank, which became a Ponzi-like scheme for a golden circle of developers who benefited from all sorts of state patronage and tax breaks--has become property of the State, and billions of public euro have been poured into the larger banks to keep them afloat. This week we learned that Anglo-Irish made “loans” totalling 300 million euro ($380 million) to its friends last year in return for the recipients buying shares in the bank to prop up its share-price. It’s not exactly a conspiracy that will restore faith in the cleverness of our ruling elites, since the share-price nonetheless slid quickly into oblivion. But hey, it wasn’t exactly risky: no one is going to being chased for the money, and now we all own the bank.

Tax breaks for major corporations and lax banking regulations. A giant housing bubble. And profits that went to global corporations, contributing to giant income inequality. Doesn't that sound familiar.

The growing success of Ireland's economy encouraged entrepreneurship and risk-taking, qualities that had been dormant during poor economic periods. However, whilst some semblance of a culture of entrepreneurship exists, foreign-owned companies account for 93% of Ireland's exports.

In other words, libertarian heaven.


McArdle has a dilemma. She can accept the facts-a bloated financial industry, low corporate taxes and tax cuts, and cheap credit all lead to disaster. Or she can reject the facts for a more congenial reality.

Well, for starters, we don't know that the results have been pretty horrific.

It's rejection for the win!

What we know is that financial crises are pretty horrific, and that Ireland, for a number of reasons, was especially vulnerable to crisis. (Small economy, no independent monetary policy, highly export dependent . . . the list goes on).

Saying that "the results have been horrific" implies that we know the alternative, in the form of even higher debt, would not have been even worse. That is certainly the dominant macroeconomic theory, but that theory hardly rises to the second law of thermodynamics.

This argument is just like her argument for the American banks. We had to bail them out or the entire economy would collapse. We know how that worked out. We bailed them out, they kept the money, and the entire economy collapsed. And we became a lot poorer, while the banksters became a lot richer.

I am rather reminded of Ken Rogoff's infamous Open Letter to Joseph Stiglitz, when Stiglitz wondered why everyone had all this wrongheaded insistence on austerity:[snipped quote]. Rogoff is quoted in the article, but the author rather glosses his point: If Ireland hadn't done the austerity budget, it might now be more like Greece--in danger of default without massive intervention from the rest of the European Union. Intervention that might well not be forthcoming, if it became clear that too many countries were going to require it.

So the solution for the financial sector's rape and pillage is for the worker to suffer "austerity," the new word for poverty. How's that working out for Ireland?

Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations.

“When our public finance situation blew wide open, the dominant consideration was ensuring that there was international investor confidence in Ireland so we could continue to borrow,” said Alan Barrett, chief economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute of Ireland. “A lot of the argument was, ‘Let’s get this over with quickly.’ ”

Rather than being rewarded for its actions, though, Ireland is being penalized. Its downturn has certainly been sharper than if the government had spent more to keep people working. Lacking stimulus money, the Irish economy shrank 7.1 percent last year and remains in recession.

Joblessness in this country of 4.5 million is above 13 percent, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed — those out of work for a year or more — have more than doubled, to 5.3 percent.

Now, the Irish are being warned of more pain to come.

“The facts are that there is no easy way to cut deficits,” Prime Minister Brian Cowen said in an interview. “Those who claim there’s an easier way or a soft option — that’s not the real world.”

Despite its strenuous efforts, Ireland has been thrust into the same ignominious category as Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. It now pays a hefty three percentage points more than Germany on its benchmark bonds, in part because investors fear that the austerity program, by retarding growth and so far failing to reduce borrowing, will make it harder for Dublin to pay its bills rather than easier.

Other European nations, including Britain and Germany, are following Ireland’s lead, arguing that the only way to restore growth is to convince investors and their own people that government borrowing will shrink.

In the wake of austerity's lack of success, McArdle advocates---austerity! That's why she's paid the big bucks; she's a Big Thinker.

Austerity is an expensive form of insurance against a true fiscal crisis. And though it doesn't necessarily seem like it when you're not having one, fiscal crises are much, much worse than austerity budgets. Fiscal crisis means that rather than unpleasant cuts, you have sudden, unmanageable collapses in things like public pension plans. The resulting suffering is not unpleasant; it is disastrous.

Because if you don't cut spending to make up for cutting taxes and regulations, you know what will happen?

A year or two ago, I'm sure some corporate executive at BP was asking why the company would consider installing expensive remote control valves on its offshore rigs, when this sort of spill is extremely rare, and the fail-safe might not even work. One could even argue that given the economic cost of higher gasoline prices, and the rarity of these spills, BP made a good bet. We might well . . . if the spill hadn't happened.

But once it has, we're damn sure that we wanted them to be a lot more careful, no matter what the cost.

That's right! After your policies create a disaster, you can use that disaster to warn people from changing your policies! Because a disaster might happen!

Just as even before the spill, some environmentalists were sure they wanted the added protection at whatever cost, some fiscal hawks are sure they want the added protection from fiscal breakdown. Given that the odds of fiscal crisis are less than 100%, this is certainly arguable. But unless you know how much less than 100% they are, it's not exactly crazy to try to head it off by spending less than the bond markets are willing to let us.

People are tired and worried. We've absorbed as much bad news as we can take and we know we're going to be hit with more. We're hunkered down, shoulders hunched, waiting for the blow to land.

And McArdle is right there, whispering in our ear, telling us that we deserve to be hurt, we deserve to suffer, we deserve to be poorer.

How else will the banking industry recover?

Shorter Megan McArdle

Less Geopolitical Megan: Why would Russia want to find out the plans of the most powerful nation on earth, which is currently running military operations in scores of countries and must have an eye on Russia's oil and other resources?*

*Note: All facts have been added and are not the contribution of Ms. McArdle.

Less Populist Megan

Shorter Megan McArdle, in her own words:

Felix and others have offered plenty of evidence that doing principal-reduction mortgage mods would be good for borrowers. But I've never seen much analysis showing that they'd actually be good for the lenders.

Priorities, people.

Twilight Of The Virgins

What the hell is Kathryn Jean Lopez reading?

abstinence doesn't have to be WEIRD. i feel like girls (&guys) obsessed with twilight need to know that.
about 5 hours ago via web

Lie down with Mormon fantasy writers, wake up with Bella, a grossly passive young woman of 18 who has no dreams, no desires, no interests and no plans but to marry her boyfriend, who speaks and acts exactly like a bad imitation of Heathcliff. A Heathcliff, moreover, who sneaks into her bedroom at night to watch her, fights over her obsessively, and makes all her decisions for her.

Meyer, a Mormon, acknowledges that her faith has influenced her work. In particular, she says that her characters "tend to think more about where they came from, and where they are going, than might be typical."[43] Meyer also steers her work from subjects such as sex, despite the romantic nature of the novels. Meyer says that she does not consciously intend her novels to be Mormon-influenced, or to promote the virtues of sexual abstinence and spiritual purity, but admits that her writing is shaped by her values, saying, "I don't think my books are going to be really graphic or dark, because of who I am. There's always going to be a lot of light in my stories."

The Mormon church teaches that the only role in life for women is wife and mother, and supporter of her husband. A Mormon workbook for girls states:

President Kimball cautioned, “Do not … make the mistake of being drawn off into secondary tasks which will cause the neglect of your eternal assignments such as giving birth to and rearing the spirit children of our Father in Heaven” (Ensign, Nov. 1979, pp. 102–3).

[Teachers should] Point out that if we have the proper attitude toward our role as wife and helpmate, we too can have great influence for good in the lives of our future husbands, regardless of their station in life. We should never underestimate how important women are as wives.

President Spencer W. Kimball has given us this encouragement:

“To be a righteous woman is a glorious thing in any age. To be a righteous woman during the winding up scenes on this earth, before the second coming of our Savior, is an especially noble calling. The righteous woman’s strength and influence today can be tenfold what it might be in more tranquil times. She has been placed here to help to enrich, to protect, and to guard the home—which is society’s basic and most noble institution” (Ensign, Nov. 1978, p. 103).

Lopez should embrace the weirdness of the Twilight fans and the books' depiction of obsessive love, abstinence, dominance and submission; she has the same beliefs about women's roles in society. The only difference is the thin Catholic veneer that makes such beliefs acceptable to The Littlest Missionary. Slap a crucifix on Bella and K-Lo would be stocking up on Twilight merchandise just like every other female who is emotionally thirteen years old.*

*No offense to actual 13-year-olds, who are sometimes very shrewd and could probably think rings around our K-Lo.

The Poor Man's MoDo

If Kathleen Parker is hoping to be a right-leaning Maureen Dowd, she's going to have to do a lot better than this.

If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.

Phew. That was fun. Now, if you'll just keep those hatchets holstered and hear me out.

That was Parker's first mistake. Dowd just calls him a girl and damns the consequences, which are nil.

No, I'm not calling Obama a girlie president.

Really?

Barack Obama may be our first woman president.
he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit
It is that his approach is feminine in a normative sense
he's not exactly causing anxiety in Alpha-maledom
Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse? [of acting like a man]
Obama displays many tropes of femaleness
I don't think that doing things a woman's way is evidence of deficiency but
Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman

So Parker is a liar as well as a provocateur.

The BP oil crisis has offered a textbook case of how Obama's rhetorical style has impeded his effectiveness. The president may not have had the ability to "plug the damn hole," as he put it in one of his manlier outbursts. No one expected him to don his wetsuit and dive into the gulf, but he did have the authority to intervene immediately and he didn't.

If he couldn't plug the hole, who would he turn to to plug the hole? The people who made the hole and were trying to plug it? Parker knows her readers will not follow her logic to its conclusion, so she can say anything she wants.

Instead, he deferred to BP, weighing, considering, even delivering jokes to the White House Correspondents' Association dinner when he should have been on Air Force One to the Louisiana coast.

[...]

Granted, the century is young -- and it shouldn't surprise anyone that Obama's rhetoric would simmer next to George W. Bush's boil. But passivity in a leader is not a reassuring posture.

Comparing Obama to Bush is not a winning tactic, as Bush passively ignored the "Bin Laden Trying To Hijack Airplanes And Kill Us" memo and passively let thousands of our people die before actively letting thousands more die in half-assed invasions.

What evidence does Parker offer to support her Obama-is-a-girly-man thesis, besides her gut? Parker states that men and women "communicate differently," and offers as proof an article on a study that shows men might have a better sense of direction than women because of biological factors. [The shape of the inner ear.] The article does not support Parker's thesis in any way.

Her second bit of evidence is the use of passive voice in an Obama speech. Parker assumes that women are passive and men are active, and therefore the use of the passive voice is feminine. Fortunately we do not have to accept Parker's sexist beliefs, and therefore her bit of "evidence" is useless. Her other bit of evidence, she freely admits, conflicts with actual data.

Campbell's research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my own theory. She insists that men are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy -- clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and preempting opposing positions.

Parker chooses to reject any conflicting studies because she prefers her own version, in which everyone agrees with her.

I'm not so sure. The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell's argument that "nothing prevents" men from appropriating women's style without negative consequences.

Indeed, negative reaction to Obama's speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

Tucked away in the general stupidity are a few pro-Sarah Palin points.

Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks (with the occasional rogue exception).

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, "like a man."

And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman's turn.

Poor Parker can't even openly support her fav because nobody in her tribal sub-section has any respect for Palin and now that Parker has made it to the Show, she's not about to jeopardize her status. She's a poor man's MoDo, with weak arguments, irrelevant data, knee-jerk conservative leanings, and neither MoDo's wit nor cojones. But she seems to be good enough for the Washington Post, so no doubt we can look forwards to many, many more columns calling Obama a whiny-assed weak bitch.

The Happiest Billionaires

I've said that Chris Hayes is authoritarian. Since then I've tried to be aware of his work, in case I was unfair. Then I read this.

The only way to wake the American elite establishment out of its complacency about the slow motion disaster of the great recession is for the people getting hammered by it to organize and to interrupt this ruling class idol, to remind the people in power that the crisis isn’t over and the real danger isn’t overreaction, it is the sin of forgetting, the threat of failing to use this moment to fix a dangerously broken economy.

Does he really think that they don't know they are throwing us into poverty? Does he think it was an accident, and if the elite were made aware of the consequences of their actions they would change those actions? The crises is over; it was over a long time ago. Now the consequences are working themselves out on our families and friends and neighbors, and the only concern of the elite is that their propaganda organs, that they set up so long ago and paid so much money to maintain, continue their work of deflecting blame.

The elite are too powerful to be stopped. They have beefed up the police state all across the country in the name of fighting terrorism. They have harassed, isolated and demonized any active, physical protest. They have used the economic crises that they created to push wages lower and eliminate benefits. They have not cut the military budget, although the economic crises is now so severe that they are actually talking about it. Our elite are citizens of the world, and know that life is very good for the rich no matter where you are. Who cares if America becomes a Third World country?

The only thing they don't have is numbers. The next fight will be for the soul of the masses. The elite will win this fight too, because we still don't realize that they despise us and don't care if we live or die. We still look to authorities to save us instead of turning our back on the desperate, futile grab for just a tiny amount of power from the Democratic Party. Meanwhile the power of the desperate, angry, frightened masses will be co-opted by the elite for their own use, to turn the poor against each other instead of uniting them against the elite.

If we do not empower the poor we will lose our country forever.