Krugman doesn’t realize it, but he just defined Galt’s Gulch:
Talk to conservatives about the financial crisis and you enter an alternative, bizarro universe in which government bureaucrats, not greedy bankers, caused the meltdown. It’s a universe in which government-sponsored lending agencies triggered the crisis, even though private lenders actually made the vast majority of subprime loans. It’s a universe in which regulators coerced bankers into making loans to unqualified borrowers, even though only one of the top 25 subprime lenders was subject to the regulations in question.
Oh, and conservatives simply ignore the catastrophe in commercial real estate: in their universe the only bad loans were those made to poor people and members of minority groups, because bad loans to developers of shopping malls and office towers don’t fit the narrative.
It is a magical place where global warming solves itself, the only thing health care reform needs is more deregulation, if the government would just get out of the way, Wall Street would self correct, and you get to eat Freedom Fries with every meal and never gain weight.
El Cid
Yes, but they like that universe better than this one. I’m sure there are a few people convinced that if you took the Renaissance Fair or a Star Trek convention seriously enough, then our universe would come to resemble the one they prefer living in. Although their preferred universe is some weird, hellish mishmash of 18th century Colonial fantasy, Christianist cult compound life, 1890s style robber baron rule, 1920s era Southern campaigns to commemorate segregation by way of the Lost Cause, and 1950s rigid cultural conformity.
Dave Fud
They actually talk to the shrill one? Who knew.
me
Look out for the Big Daddies.
Carnacki
At West Virginia Blue, we have a resident troll who believes every fantastical thing you cite, so our standard response has become, what color are the unicorns in the fantasy world you inhabit?
Face
Wall Street has, largely, self-corrected.
Ash Can
And they cling to this make-believe world for dear life, cherry-picking factoids (whether made up or not) to support their beliefs, and insisting that anything that contradicts them is simply untrue, just because they say so. Arguing with them is a fool’s errand, because they’ve already countered every one of your points in their own minds, and concluded that they aren’t valid.
And this is why people like John Cole and Charles Johnson, who stop, take a deep breath, survey the entire scene, and say, “Hey wait a minute — I’ve been had!” are such a breath of fresh air.
JenJen
Also in this magical place you describe, the President needs to stop saying mean stuff about bankers. And, the current President has no business talking about what he “inherited” from the former President. I mean, pleaaaaaase stop with the whining and behave more like Ronald Reagan and conservatives, who never ever not even once had a bad thing to say about Jimmy Carter.
(This magical place could be witnessed on “Morning Joe” just today, with Mike Barnicle — spouse of a Bank of America veep — presiding.)
Zifnab25
Why couldn’t more of these jokers move to Dubai. It was the glibertarian paradise. No taxes. No regulations. And when the bottom feel out of the housing market – no bailout.
John Cole
@Zifnab25: Dubai is getting bailed out.
Col. Klink
Galt’s gulch is a lot like Big Rock Candy Mountain.
It’s a place where the earth is flat and 6000 years old, where nutin’ ever evolved from nuthin’, where the Grand Canyon was made by God’s color crayons, and where the only minorities real Americans ever have to see are politely serving them in deep-fat-fry ‘Chinese’ restaurants. Oh’ paradise.
El Cruzado
@Face: Unfortunately what’s ‘correct’ for Wall-Street is a double-plus screwup for the rest of us.
C Nelson Reilly
Where is George W. Bush in this magical world? Never heard of him.
SpotWeld
And when that fantasy is in control of the administration, and the media is willing to play lapdog, you get a “jobless recovery” that hollows out the core dirving force of the US economy that leaves a shell that eventually crumbles under the stress of housing bubble bursting…
whee
MikeBoyScout
Digby has an apropos post Sunday – subject DoubleThink.
arguingwithsignposts
@John Cole:
And … it’s gone!
Meanwhile, Citigroup is looking for some more suckers.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Blasphemy! There’s no such thing as global warming. Look, it snowed in Texas the other day. Everything is perfectly normal.
Svensker
You have to eat them over the sink for that to work.
Kryptik
Free Market, Bitches!
RSA
Does it include hot wenches with Norwegian first names, like Dagny?
Dr. Squid
I thought the point of Galt’s Gulch was that those that went there were irreplaceable – that they had skills that no one else could really get. The morons that run banks – shit, any knucklehead can do what they did.
jcricket
@Dr. Squid: Not true. If we don’t give the mega-uber bonuses the banks won’t keep their current crop, which they describe as the “best and the brightest”!
Two possibilities here:
1) They’re telling the truth – this is the best we can hope for from the private banking sector. In which case we need to shut the whole thing down.
2) They’re full of crap and there are tons of people waiting in the wings capable and willing to do pretty much any job up the banking chain if the current crop of economy-destroying greed-mongers goes to Galt’s Gulch.
Little known, but illustrative story. Reagan often talks about how the 90% top tax bracket discouraged him from taking on “additional” work – meaning “great movies” wouldn’t get made b/c the top actors wouldn’t find it worth the 10% net diff. in their income. Several economists have pointed out there were hundreds of actors not in that top tax bracket who would gladly have taken (and been capable of acting in) any role Reagan turned down. Thus that money would not be lost to the economy.
At any rate, Ayn Rand’s fiction is, at best, an entertaining yarn. It bears no resemblence to what would happen in real life. Much like the Republican party platform.
Koz
Why should we expect the smarter and politically connected to forgo feeding at the same trough everyone else is? Welcome to crony liberalism.
JackieBinAZ
Let’s not misrepresent what they REALLY believe about what made the Grand Canyon.
malatesta
@Col. Klink: “Galt’s gulch is a lot like Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
At least in the Big Rock Candy Mountains they hung the jerk that invented work. In the gulch they just plain forgot to imagine the underclass whose work they would need in order to Galtify properly.
S. cerevisiae
They really do believe that the whole collapse was due to loaning money to those shiftless brown people. I have had this conversation with some wingnuts I know and no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise.
MattF
And, um, ol’ GW Bush had nothing to do with any of it. Just think of what the White House was like, in the glory days of W, Rove, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Makes me dizzy just to think about it. But not in a good way.
Seanly
@malatesta:
@Col. Klink:
I noticed the similarity to Big Rock Candy Mountain also.
@El Cid: is full of win though.
Sly
@S. cerevisiae
“The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.”
jrg
What’s most infuriating about this is when they finally do allow Wall Street to bring down the economy (and they will), “conservatives” will blame it on thuh librul eleet, and demand reparations for their years of cultural enslavement.
…Then they will levy a 150% tax on pumpkin lattes and arugula. The proceeds will be used to fund an indoor water park for a tax-exempt Wall Street megachurch, and to install a TV evangelist as head of the SEC.
But seriously… It’s time to carve off every state south of Tennessee. Maybe if we let them crash and burn, they will learn some important lessons, like why financial regulation exists.
El Cid
Look, if you don’t believe that our crisis was caused by Jimmy Carter letting black people steal $2 trillion worth of houses and hiding them somewhere we can’t find them, then I don’t know what to tell ya.
New Yorker
Yup. My wingnut uncle sent me some article ranting about this. I eventually followed up with a Business Week cover story about the crash in the CRE market. I asked him if ACORN caused the CRE crash too. He didn’t respond.
thomas
@JackieBinAZ:
It was Paul Bunyon and Babe the blue ox that carved the canyon. Everybody knows that!
barkleyg
johnatparis
It’s a magical place where global warming does not solve itself, but rather, is ingenuously mitigated by the photon phyto-C02 blaster and the methane munching wand, inventions devised by one Mr. Galt.
Rick Taylor
I’m still surprised conservatives could seriously believe that the economy collapsed because banks were forced to make loans to poor people. Huge amounts of wealth disappeared. If that view were true, we’d drive through poor neighborhoods and see towering mansions, incredible displays of wealth. That doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Of course humans tend to believe whatever supports their preconceived world view, but this is extreme.
62across
If we consign the wing-nuttiest of the conservatives to their magical place for all time, we still have to deal with the not small number of independents who have bought into the same fantasy. Moneyed interests have framed the debate and they own Congress (including a significant number of Democrats). Are we truly screwed or is there something to be done?
Xanthippas
Krugman also says this:
He’s righter than he knows. Those multi-million dollar election campaigns don’t pay for themselves. We’ll never get meaningful reform of Wall Street until money stops mattering so much in politics. You say that’ll never happen? Well…yeah, that’s kind of my point.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@S. cerevisiae:
Yeah, I stunk up a family Xmas dinner last year over this one. My shitheel brother-in-law, a scientist for NASA, and someone whose bullshit I can usually ignore, sent me over the edge with this meme. Sweet jabbering Jeebus, this guy uses advanced math all the time. How hard does he have to work to make himself believe this?
BillCinSD
@Face: if by self correct you mean were loaned a bunch of money interest free to continue to do what they were doing before and that the US Government implicitly backed their bad loans so that investors had no risk, then yes they self-corrected
deadrody
Its also a magical place where “Global Warming (TM)” is caused by trace gases emitted by man. So welcome to the party I guess. What does it look like in your magical place ?
Fransisco d'Anconia
Mooches!