Crazy Talk

It seems there is a petition going around asking Congress to not do anything rash to our economic system:

As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:

1) Its fairness. The plan is a subsidy to investors at taxpayers’ expense. Investors who took risks to earn profits must also bear the losses. Not every business failure carries systemic risk. The government can ensure a well-functioning financial industry, able to make new loans to creditworthy borrowers, without bailing out particular investors and institutions whose choices proved unwise.

2) Its ambiguity. Neither the mission of the new agency nor its oversight are clear. If taxpayers are to buy illiquid and opaque assets from troubled sellers, the terms, occasions, and methods of such purchases must be crystal clear ahead of time and carefully monitored afterwards.

3) Its long-term effects. If the plan is enacted, its effects will be with us for a generation. For all their recent troubles, Americas dynamic and innovative private capital markets have brought the nation unparalleled prosperity. Fundamentally weakening those markets in order to calm short-run disruptions is desperately short-sighted.

For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.

We ask Congress not to rush…carefully consider…wisely determine…???

Don’t these people know there is a crisis?? As such the American people require, nay! the American people demand that Congress run around like a chicken with its head cut off.

To do otherwise is clearly the mark of insanity.

(h/t to Volokh)

“It’s A Miracle!”

So the Dow Jones jumps up 2.5% this morning. Could it be that folks are realizing that the defeat of the sellout bailout doesn’t mark the end of Western Civilization?  Even the credit markets are easing a bit. Of course, that is impossible. People on television told me so.

I’m gonna sprain my eyes by rolling them so much.

Noblesse Oblige Declined

Over at The Glittering Eye this piece by David Brooks get quoted approvingly:

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

TGE adds:

I believe that what he characterizes as destroying the Republican Party is, in fact, the triumph of ideology over pragmatism and the consequence of the attempts to transform our catch-all parties into programmatic ones that are going on in both parties. Ideologues can’t agree; they are peculiarly unsuited to democratic republican government in which compromise is mandatory.

That’s what James Madison warned against in Federalist #10

Well, not really. I think what we are witnessing is just how much we have forgotten what the House of Representatives is supposed to be like. As I said over in the comments at TGE:

“Uh, what if they simply thought it was a crappy bill? Maybe they didn’t want to be stampeded into doing ’something!’ at the expense of doing ‘the right thing.’

“That is what makes Brooks’ statements so silly. Sure, average people feel anxious about the economy, but that doesn’t mean they want Congress to do something stupid just so they can say they did ’something.’

“And hell, if the Democrats actually believed this was the right thing to do they might have tried fighting for it. Obviously, they didn’t…so what does that say about the legislation?

“Besides, does Brooks really think that the calls, letter and emails that were flooding into elected officals offices (running 100-1 or more AGAINST this bailout) were really just the ideological wing of the Republican party? Thats just stupid.

“As for Madison, he didn’t have ideologies in mind because ideologies, as we think of them, were not an intellectual category back then. The idea of ‘faction’ is much more closely related to ruling political coalitions, in the Roman Republican sense. Indeed, Madison was a better (small ‘d’) democrat than you give him credit for. I really don’t think he would have had a problem if members of the House listened more closely to their constituents than other branches of government. Hell, if we are going to base this on the Federalist Papers, shouldnt we expect the Senate to go forward in a more august and thoughtful manner? (The answer is ‘yes’ they are supposed to do just that.) But did they? NO! They refuse to even begin the process by voting up or down on this measure. And why is that? Basically they are cowards who don’t want to get exposed during an election year.

“It is the ruling elite, as a whole, of this country that is failing us so badly and not this or that party or ideological wing. Brooks will never recognize that because he is so emeshed within the elites’ pattern of thinking. For him the elites ARE the country, so what they say should go, and the rest of the American people should feel themselves lucky that the elite lower themselves to do our thinking for us.”

I could have gone on. There were spontaeous demonstrations against the bailout all over the country. Did you hear or see one break out in favor of it? The notion that it is illegitimate for the most representative body in our national government to pay attention to the people writ large is deeply anti-democratic. Indeed, we are being asked, yet again, to suspend the normal process of making legislation because the elite want the money quickly. When people starting asking why, the response amounted to, “You wouldn’t understand ‘why.’ But trust us, its for your own good.”

Brooks still isn’t sure why that wasn’t good enough for us.