The Decadent Left In Its Enclaves On The Coasts

The clip’s not available yet, but Bobo was on Charlie Rose last night (that fucker is on that joke of a show all the time), and apparently he used some angry language. Reader J describes:

Charlie Rose naturally had a Republican, David Brooks, on to explain the Democratic president’s news conference and Brooks was beside himself, twice using vulgarities (“pissed off”), because the deficit is so high and potty-mouth prattled on about it being a moral issue.

I’m starting to like the GOP idea/ideal of eliminating funding of PBS.

The Charlie Rose show is the work of the devil. Is there any place that is more relentless in its pimping of right-center, Village conventional wisdom? But many people who call themselves liberals, especially older academics and other pseudo-intellectuals, can’t get enough of it.

Here’s a much less serious person with no knowledge of economics describing the real problems with the proposed budgets (via). Luckily, no one listens to such lunatics.

Nothing has changed since Iraq. The media dynamic is exactly the same. In fact, it might be worse. We have met the enemy and it isn’t the dreaded teabaggers, it’s our fine, Horace-quoting friends on PBS and in prestigious magazines.

I know this won’t sit well with everyone, but I fear that Obama too often takes his cues from such serious people.

Get pissed, destroyPost + Comments (61)

I just talked to a friend who is high up at a big New York bank about my take on the deficit, asking:

Is it accurate so say that (leaving out Medicare/Medicaid and the cost of private insurance, all of which are time bombs) that the logical thing to do with the economy is keep spending/running deficits ’til we’re really out of the recession, then jack up taxe rates on the wealthy and cut spending to bring the deficit down?

He said that, yes, he agreed and that many or most in finance would though with varying degrees of concern about excessive borrowing possibly causing a spike in interest rates and inflation.

This is not an issue that should be discussed in moral terms, but in pragmatic ones. If someone argues that the current deficit is catastrophic, that person should make an argument as to how it is, and not just claim that belt-tightening is inherently moral.

Pundits like to phrase things in terms of morality for a variety of reasons. Movement conservatives, especially Straussians, think it’s the right language to reason with/propagandize the Bieber-fearing proles. Some intellectually-inclined conservatives believe that everything should be argued morally rather than pragmatically/empirically, because that’s how Burke and Oakeshott and Jeebus did things. Villagers like moral arguments because they’re both simple and safe. Condemning a president for getting a blowjob is lot easier than combing through budget reports and you’ll never take any heat for it either.

The run-up to the war in Iraq was phrased in moral terms too. It was all about having the Churchillian resolve to fight evil and spread freedom, not about the pragmatic real-world problems that arise from creating anarchy in a large country with a history of ethnic strife. And so it is with we are all Georgians, Iranians, Egyptians, Algerians. It doesn’t matter whether anything we do helps the situations, what matters is that we’re on the right-side morally, in our minds, which are places that are infinitely more important than the world of other human beings.

I don’t deny that moralists can make certain arguments much better than a pragmatist (like me) can. Moral conviction against torture and for gay marriage is probably more convincing than “it doesn’t work anyway” and “why not?”.

A lot of issues just don’t come down to good versus evil, though, a lot come down to the numbers adding up, or a realistic plan, or an economic theory that is supported by historical evidence. Sure, we should get angry and self-righteous about the fact that we are ruled by sociopaths, but if their decisions were less destructive in practice, it wouldn’t be such a big deal that they are sociopaths.

Beyond good and evilPost + Comments (54)

The same people who pushed the Iraq War on us are now pushing fiscal austerity. Can you name any austerity hawks in this country who were not big Iraq War supporters? The arguments are similar too. We needed to invade Iraq to ward off the looming danger of WMD and spread freedom; we need to cut our budgets to ward off the bond vigilantes and teach ourselves discipline.

Don’t get me wrong, obviously, federal deficits can be problematic. I opposed the Bush tax cuts as well as their recent extension and believe that marginal rates for the wealthy should probably be higher than they were under Clinton (some of the deficit hawks believe the same thing, so I am not saying that they are all entirely crazy). The fact is, though, that we are in a recession and there is ample historical evidence to suggest that cutting spending is not a good thing during a recession.

With Iraq, we were told that we were for it or against it, that if we were worried that it might be an expensive disaster, then we were Neville Chamberlains, or even traitors. Real patriots don’t do nuance! It’s the same here, if you argue that we need radical changes down the road (my radical changes would involve tax rates and the medical system) but not massive spending cuts during the worse recession in 70 years, then you’re just “kicking can down the road”.

The middle part of the country — the great Red Zone that reveres Paul Ryan — is clearly ready for fiscal austerity. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.

Update. Ron Paul is an austerity hawk who opposed the Iraq War. I’d argue that he’s sui generis, given that military spending is one of the prime targets for his proposed austerity measures.

Is fiscal austerity the new Iraq War?Post + Comments (183)