Home // 2011 // April

A chill runs down my spine

I know that I’ve been distracted recently, so can I digress from my usually scholarly and restrained well-spoken self and say: I’m just a tad scared?

Seriously. Ben Bernanke seems to have adopted Kevin Bacon’s first movie appearance as his guide to holding a press conference, gold bugs look prescient as the dollar slides toward Weimar territory and Donald Trump … holy shit, Donald Trump?

It’s as if we’ve entered the period of the decline of the republic — but without the reliable money that kept the Gracchi brothers fat and happy. And without the cool architecture and classy duds, of course. It’s the fall of civilization, but with everybody sporting wife-beaters in a strip mall. Come to think of it, it’s the fall of something, but maybe not civilization.

I know that “the end is nigh” is a reliable fall-back for everybody who really means, “things were better when I was a kid,” but do we really have to flirt so closely with stupid and disastrous just to call me out as a false Cassandra?

Actually, I don’t think “the end is nigh” – but I do thing that suckage is here, and likely to stick around for a good, long while. Good times more often end with a whimper than a bang, and I expect that we’ll slog through the same. Our kids will be heading out in our cast-off suits for long-shot job interview number 197 — at a Tongan corporation (the new superpower in 2031) — and we’ll still be telling them that things will likely turn around soon.

Well, they could turn around, but we’re idiots.

I don’t feel optimistic about the future, if that’s not obvious from the above. But I think I and my progeny are relatively well-positioned to slink in the future — scathed, perhaps, but not destroyed. Family history records that we’re pretty adept at slipping across borders: Spain to Italy, Germany to Serbia, Italy to Argentina, Serbia to America, Argentina to … well … the Bronx (we don’t always choose well).

So descendants of mine are likely to skulk through the future, ignoring the powers-that-be, making their own way and prospering on the margins.

But, damn it, I’m stuck here and now!

Hayek schools Keynes on recession economics

Remember that rap video in which F.A. Hayek and John Maynard Keynes faced off over their economic philosophies? Well, they’re at it again — and this time it’s over the causes and cures of recessions. Yes, it’s good, well-produced and worth sharing.

Did we really have to wait until rap music to find a way to make economics fun and understandable?

Elegy for Peter McWilliams

Persuading people of the value of freedom can sometimes be surprisingly difficult. Those of us who favor freedom are habitually painted as selfish when we demand liberty for ourselves, and (bizarrely) callous when we insist on it for others. So let us never forget Peter McWilliams, an author and advocate who had a talent for framing freedom in terms of compassion and aspiration.

I remember covering McWilliams’s death for Free-Market.Net in 2000 when he succumbed to AIDS and cancer — and to the denial to him by authorities, under threat of the loss of his mother’s home, of the medical marijuana that he was using to control the side-effects of his medication.

Now, a talented (but anonymous) singer-songwriter and curator of the online Peter McWilliams Museum has produced a video tribute to McWilliams that effectively captures the man’s spirit.

Privacy ain’t dead, but your brand is confusing

My latest post for When Falls the Coliseum is up at … well … When Falls the Coliseum. I posit that our concerns about the death of privacy in the online age have less to do with privacy than with keeping the lies we tell about ourselves straight with their intended target audiences.

Check it out here.

Obama for … Pope?

Renegade historian Thaddeus Russell forwards this delightful little tidbit from White House cheerleader … errr … journalist Kevin Drum of Mother Jones.

Obama has been a disappointment on civil liberties and national security issues, but since I frankly don’t think any modern president can buck the national security establishment in any significant way, I haven’t held that too deeply against him. The escalation in Afghanistan has been unfortunate too, but he did warn us about that. The scope of both his conventional escalation and his soaring use of drone attacks in the AfPak region have been disheartening, but it’s hard to complain when he made it so clear during the campaign that he intended to do exactly that.

But now we have Libya. ….

So what should I think about this? If it had been my call, I wouldn’t have gone into Libya. But the reason I voted for Obama in 2008 is because I trust his judgment. And not in any merely abstract way, either: I mean that if he and I were in a room and disagreed about some issue on which I had any doubt at all, I’d literally trust his judgment over my own. I think he’s smarter than me, better informed, better able to understand the consequences of his actions, and more farsighted. I voted for him because I trust him, and I still do.

So, let me get this straight. Drum disagrees with Obama on virtually everything the president has done regarding civil liberties and foreign policy — with the shiny, new war in Libya being just the cherry on top — and he still deferentially bangs his head on the floor because he “literally trust[s] his judgment over my own.” This is basically the doctrine of papal infallibility, isn’t it? The words and policies coming out of the man may be monstrous, but we have to go along because of his direct line to righteousness!

Oh yeah, that kind of tribal, follow-the-leader deference is just inspiring to watch.

Note to any remaining Bushies: Your fanatical devotion to Dear Leader is no longer an embarrassing national outlier.