| sebastian_dangerfield |
02-25-2009 12:30 PM |
Re: The center cannot hold.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Not Bob
(Post 382247)
Dude, you know I love you like a younger brother who ate too much paste in second grade, but you are just wrong in so many ways in this post that I will only point out a few:
1. Carter, an ideologue? You are stoned. Do not confuse the Jimmy "Israel is an Apartheid State" Carter of today with the know-it-all technocrat who was actually president from 1976 to 1980. He failed as president not because he was a soft-headed leftist; rather, his greatest sin was probably that he thought that he knew better than the "Washington Establishment," and tried to steamroll his agenda through Congress without getting House and Senate leadership buy in.
If he were an ideologue, the left wing of the party wouldn't have rebelled, and Ted Kennedy wouldn't have run against him in the 1980 primaries, and Tip O'Neill wouldn't have hated his guts.
2. Clinton. If by "knew enough to keep his hands off the economy," you mean "passed a tax increase and stimulus package his first year in office without a single GOP vote" to fix the fiscal and economic mess that he inherited from your hero GHWB, and "he pushed NAFTA through a reluctant Senate," well then I guess he kept his hands off the economy. (Your belief in free trade is an ideology, by the way. You and Spanky may like to believe that it is the natural state of things, and that it is the result of some sort of historical law, but the GOP of 1900 felt the same way about the tarriff and gold standard.)
3. Reagan may have been an ideologue, but he was able to work with people who disagreed with him and was able to push forward a great deal of his agenda. He knew what he could get done and what he couldn't, for the most part, and that his why he was able to increase defense spending (actually started by Carter the Leftist after the Reds rolled into Kabul), but never bothered pushing for a Human Life Begins At Conception amendment to the Constitution.
4. Saying that you are a centrist is meaningless without saying what you are in the center of, and asserting that the "people on the poles" are the idiots in the game is just as meaningless. What is the pole? The one that says that "property is theft"? Or the one that says that the writers of the Constitution "conferred as against the government the right to be left alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men"?
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1. Carter never met a regulation he didn't like. He was an absolute believer in strongly interventionist oversight. Looks wise now, but ask anyone who knows how easy it was to get a mortgage back then. Carter was the other side of the deregulation-fixated pendulum we're emerging from now. Maybe that's not a pure ideologue, but it's closer to extreme than it is to the center.
2. Once the economy started rolling, Clinton took his hands off the wheel and let it go. He was, and will remain for a long time, the last fiscally conservative, true Rockefeller Republican to have held the office, and citing his passing of NAFTA only further proves that point. You're right free trade isn't necessarily "natural," but it is the inevitable state in which the world has been moving. Bush said a lot of dumb things, but one point on which he was always right was his response to backward protectionists like Buchanan: "You're going to take the pain sooner or later. Might as well start addressing it now."
3. On deregulation, Reagan might as well have been Milton Friedman. His Solomonic posturing on social issues is irrelevant.
4. The Poles, for purposes of simplicity in this context, are on one hand, the people in National Review or the Journal Oped pages who have no solution but more tax cuts - those who still cling to the notion that this crisis was caused by too much govt interference in markets. On the other hand, its the people claiming we need onerous, hyper-strict regulation which would bring hedge funds and private equity under scrutiny akin to that given banks, that we need confiscatory tax codes to redistribute wealth from concentrations to the govt, to be doled out in the form of services to ever increasing masses of those who only survive by the grace of Uncle Sam's pocketbook. It's people like Krugman, asking us to bet another trillion on top of the two already in play, on the idea that growing our Federal Leviathan will somehow magically spend us out of this disaster (I'm all for funding shovel ready projects and doing the infrastructure stuff, but all lot of what I see in that package appears to be the funneling of cash into bureaucratic beasts better left to starve to death).
Generally, however, Obama seems right now to be resisting the usual pendulum shift from one extremism to another. I hope it holds. |
