and all the bitches went crazy
so there’s a new policy journal out there, which is exciting news for people who aren’t cool. it only follows that David Brooks therefore devoted an entire column to trumpeting its arrival in yesterday’s New York Times. must’ve been a slow week for him.
but, as I am not cool, I read one of the essays. it is big, and wordy, and not easy to read at work because of its size. but it had some interesting things to say about populism, the rise of the financial industry, the difference between being pro-market and pro-business, and America’s growing skepticism of capitalism in the wake of the massive bailout of ‘too-big-to-fail’ titans of the economy.
I am still of the opinion that we (the torch-wielding mob) should go down to lower Manhattan and tar and feather some motherfuckers. but I can still appreciate a thoughtful reading of the subject, from someone who calls for a bit more restraint.
anyway, here’s a passage regarding giant bag of dicks Henry Paulson that I really enjoyed:
The problem is that people who have spent their entire lives in finance have an understandable tendency to think that the interests of their industry and the interests of the country always coincide. When Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson went to Congress last fall arguing that the world as we knew it would end if Congress did not approve the $700 billion bailout, he was serious and speaking in good faith. And to an extent he was right: His world — the world he lived and worked in — would have ended had there not been a bailout. Goldman Sachs would have gone bankrupt, and the repercussions for everyone he knew would have been enormous. But Henry Paulson’s world is not the world most Americans live in — or even the world in which our economy as a whole exists. Whether that world would have ended without Congress’s bailout was a far more debatable proposition; unfortunately, that debate never took place.
– Capitalism After the Crisis, by Luis Zingales
