Dr. DeLong invests in toxic assets: Tim Geithner, and a compulsive need to oppose left-populism. Will he find a buyer? Or will he need bailed out?
Brad DeLong, a former Clinton official, says that every banking crisis – barring the Great Depression – has been resolved by government recapitalisation of the banking sector, as Mr Obama is likely to attempt in the near future. Nor, says Mr DeLong, is it fair to paint Mr Geithner as a creature of Wall Street. “Hank Paulson is a man who grew up in American finance and cannot imagine a world in which America does well and its financial sector does badly,” he says. “Tim Geithner, by contrast, is a bureaucrat and a policymaker. He has never pulled down a multibillion-dollar bonus. They are not the same type of people.”
Like hell they aren’t, DeLong just refuses to see it. Paulson worked directly for and with the scum who got us into this mess; Geithner, rather like Brad DeLong, worked or works indirectly for them, in government and Academe, charged with inventing scientistic and legal means of enabling the wealthy criminal class’s depredations. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The amounts on their checks are different, and signed by different entities, but they all work in a more-or-less cozy accord [1].
“We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to revive our economy, or do we want to punish the bankers?” says Mr DeLong. “I don’t agree that we can do both.”
[head/desk]
In all other spheres except the one he’s chosen as a career, Brad DeLong is a moralist and humanitarian — and damn good at it. But when it comes to economics, and more specifically to a class sensibility, he utterly fails: just as he refuses to sympathize with the outsourced factory workers whose livelihoods have been destroyed by his beloved free trade policies, he also refuses to not sympathize with the modern robber barons who’ve so fucked-up the country. Functionally, he regards them little differently than does a Randroid: after all, there’s no practical difference between a “Captain of Industry” and a ‘necessary economic engine,’ because what matters is the importance (in moral and utilitarian weight) assigned to them. For DeLong as for the Randroid, such “prime movers” are shiny things which must be saved but the dun-colored little people are more or less expendable. Crazy, huh? But then Brad DeLong is perhaps the only self-described ‘social democrat’ on earth who admires Milton Friedman.
The diagrams of contrived bullshit on the typical economist’s blackboard in the end implore this and only this: be, or abet, evil. Benjamin Jowett, over a century and a half ago, had the profession pegged:
I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that the famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good.
But all the economist sees on that blackboard are laws and “proofs” as pure as those of the physicists and mathematicians — beyond good and evil, baby! And so unlike, he thinks, systems and laws created by, say, anthropologists and identity studies people[2], whom he considers artistic hacks at best and degenerate ax-grinders at worst. Meanwhile, the robber barons thank him for his contributions to “science.” The economist happily accepts, and if he has an utter lack of self-awareness (as it seems most liberal economists, including Brad DeLong, do), never considers himself their tool, employed in a horrifying profession of astounding douchebaggery[3]
- Notes: [1]
Which is to say, under the banner of Free Market and Free Trade Uber Alles. Or in the words of Delong’s and Geithner’s mentor, Larry Summers: “[W]e are now all Friedmanites.”* Not that DeLong is corrupt (he is not); he buys into this bullshit honestly and “intellectually.” Yes, he is one of those dread “Sensible Liberals:” i.e., a conservative, and in DeLong’s case one who has the nasty habit of calling everyone to his left a communist. So I’ll turn the other fist, as it were, and throw his his favorite J.S. Mill quote back on him, for as A.J.P. Taylor wisely if snarkily observed apropos the Tories, “to be stupid and to be sensible are not that far apart.”*Itself a nicely ironic echo of the 37th President’s famous declaration that “we are all Keynesians now.” But then Nixon — yes, Richard Fucking Nixon — was objectively to the fiscal left of some of these modern, so-called liberal economists. It’s not too much of a simplification to say that the extent of Brad DeLong’s “liberal” economic beliefs amount to a higher income tax rate for people in the top bracket, some education and token retraining spending; meanwhile, it’s laissez-faire and enjoy your retail-slavery, peons! How utterly radical! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: When the revolution comes, the first people I’m for Cheneying in the face are “liberal” economists.
[2] cf. Larry Summers’s time at Harvard, and Brad DeLong’s defenses thereof.
[3] It wasn’t always this way, and I’m not just talking about J.K. Galbraith. Once upon a time a few economists were philosophers, not “scientists;” and they took moral duty to humanity seriously, by which I mean that they operated under the assumption that the rich were not only up to no good, but had an abiding interest perpetrating evil. A nice quote of Adam Smith, courtesy of Dr.Dick.
