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March 19, 2008
Around the World Wide Web 54
By Myrhaf from Myrhaf,cross-posted by MetaBlog1. Obama, Clinton and McCain are all ignorant of economics.
2. The conservative Rick Moran reveals his ignorance of economics in "Is Capitalism and the Conservative Rationale for It Dead?"
...the huge investment companies who manage the hundreds of funds that invest in securities were overconfident in their ability to manage everything from the risk of mortgage securities to the effect the bursting of the housing bubble had on the value of their portfolios.
They just got it wrong, that’s all.
Mr. Moran fails to take into account economic distortions created by preexisting government policies.
For decades our government has had a semi-official policy that large financial institutions are too big to fail—and therefore must be bailed out when they risk insolvency—a policy that creates perverse incentives for them to take on far more risk than they otherwise would. "Too big to fail" is implemented through a network of government bodies that protect financial institutions from the long-term consequences of their decisions at taxpayer expense—a phenomenon we can observe right now.
Mr. Moran ends up calling for more of what caused the problem, government intervention in the economy:
Maybe we need new regulation to prevent this from happening again. Maybe we need better monitoring and thus less “free” markets by the government. And what good is “individual and corporate responsibility” if the economy would be prostrate if we followed that dictum and just allowed economic Darwinism to rule the day and watch as millions lost their savings and millions were thrown out of work?
Thus do breezy, half-assed dilettantes like Rick Moran, blithely unaware of the damage they wreak, spread stupid ideas and take America a little further down the highway to hell.
3. Harry Binswanger demolishes two ghastly conservatives, David Brooks and William F. Buckley.
4. Cassandra imagines what would happen if Obama's relationship with a radical preacher were a Republican problem.
6. Hillary Clinton's plan to end war in Iraq:
On taking over the presidency in January 2009, she says she will instruct the Joint Chiefs of Staff to draw up a plan for withdrawal to start within sixty days of her inauguration; she will next convene a regional stabilization group composed of states bordering Iraq, major US allies and other global powers to find an agreement on how to support a durable Iraqi state - a long overdue proposal, first put forward by another Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Kerry, in the 2004 race; and she will ask the most important multilateral organization on the planet, the United Nations, for its involvement as a "neutral, honest broker" to forge political reconciliation in Iraq.
It sounds like a recipe for chaos to me. And one of those states bordering Iraq is Iran. Would it be good to have Iran dictating how Iraq should be run? Can the UN keep peace in Iraq?
Originally posted by Myrhaf from Myrhaf, ReBlogged for Meta Blog
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