Libertarianism and the Walking Dude
Pleased though we all are about the recent uptick in economic statistics, I still think that this is the most important economic story of the week:
Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said US bank loans have fallen at an annual pace of almost 14pc in the three months to August (from $7,147bn to $6,886bn).
"There has been nothing like this in the USA since the 1930s," he said. "The rapid destruction of money balances is madness."... David Rosenberg, chief strategist at Gluskin Sheff [says] ... "For the first time in the post-WW2 [Second World War] era, we have deflation in credit, wages and rents and, from our lens, this is a toxic brew," he said.
It is unclear why the US Federal Reserve has allowed this to occur.
Well, it's not that unclear: the regulators are keen to get the ratio of assets to bank capital to a plausible level, for one thing. The larger issue is the lack of demand, however.
We see news to the same effect from China. That is particularly interesting, because the recent fiat-loans by the banks in that country seem to have had limited effect, beyond generating a few months of "growth" statistics that do little more than register the fact the loans occurred.
All over the world, the dogs are refusing to eat the dog food, however steep the discount.
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If indeed the world's major economies are due for another downturn, that in turn suggests political instability. In the US, according to Julian Delasantellis
writing at Asia Times, this means that the Obama Administration would soon lose control of Congress and then be replaced by another sort of administration entirely.
The writer argues that it is a mistake to characterize the current Administration and its wing of the Democratic Party as socialist. Rather, they are corporatists of the Nordic variety: a party that offers to stand between capital and labor to broker agreements between them in the name of social peace. There is a case to be made for this kind of politics, but the writer notes that it has always been hard to make it in America.. In the US, something quite different might happen:
What if there is an anti-corporatist (President Pawlenty? President Palin?) in the White House in three-and-a-half years? What happens then, at the new president's first meeting with European leaders? To judge by their rhetoric, many teabaggers view the corporatist/socialists of Europe with the same dread and fear that Ronald Reagan did with the Soviet "evil empire" upon his inauguration in 1981. Will some measure of detente be able to be established between these ideological opposites, or will the book on the American century then be finally closed through the development of a trans-Eurasian alliance, consisting of Europe, Russia and China, uniting to deal with a hostile upstart with a philosophical outlook the rest of the world seems quite content to live with?...
On September 16 last year, Asia Times Online published my account of the last weekend of Lehman's life, "Silences say it all". In it, I said that one of the most interesting, and certainly quintessentially New York, things to happen that weekend was that, late on Sunday night, as time ran down low for the venerable Wall Street institution, crowds of average New Yorkers converged on its Manhattan corporate headquarters - seeing all the police cars outside, they thought a celebrity was about to emerge from the inside.
Well, after 7 million jobs have been lost just in America, with the uncountable attendant misery and suffering, the collapse of world trade, and the dire possible future consequences I described above, maybe a celebrity was emerging that night. He goes by many names, Apollyon, Ahasversus, the Serpent, the Wicked One - my favorite is the name of this celebrity from Stephen King's post biowar holocaust novel The Stand - the walking dude.
Sarah Palin, a stalking horse for Eurasianism? This sort of thing passes for humor in Hell.
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Speaking of Hell, William Fahey at InsideCatholic.com (hat tip to First Things) proposes a A Just War Theory of Homeschooling that is actually as fine an indictment of the Libertarian Right that you are likely to find:
The common approach to homeschooling today is inherently dangerous, because it may go against what our entire Western tradition and the Catholic Church herself teach about the education of the young -- that education should not be done in the home, at least not for long, except during a time and place of crisis... Contrary to the Catholic understanding of education, there is a rising individualism that is worming its way into our literature on homeschooling. Homeschooling in this nation was spearheaded by the hippies of the 1960s and has largely been embraced by Protestants; some 95 percent of homeschoolers today are Protestants, and the tone of the literature and materials often reflects that make-up.
More alarming, homeschooling has risen alongside home-churching. The "Non serviam" banner has long been unfurled by those who do not wish to recognize the sovereignty of Christ in the temporal or ecclesiastical order...
The piece goes on to argue that home schooling is permissible in a situation where acceptable public or private schools are not available, in rather the way that war is permissible in situations where peace is not a possibility or would lead to worse results. That's a bit of casuistry that any Jesuit of the old school might be proud of. And the Jesuits were usually right.
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Readers of this space will know that I fully support Our Dear Leader's benevolent plan to federalize every aspect of the management of our precious bodily fluids. Readers will also know that I think elements of the opposition to the reforms measures are a tad synthetic, and that I have no patience with the flurry of disinformation about babies being born on elevators in British National Health Service hospitals. Taken as a whole, though, the whole panoply of fraud and guile deployed by the Right on this matter is less offensive than the attempt by the liberal media in recent days to brand all opposition to the reform as an expression of racism. It was as if someone had thrown a switch: suddenly the suggestion was all over the opinion columns and the Internet.
There are several reasons why this campaign was a bad idea, aside from the fact its premise is false. In my review of Michael O'Brien's apocalyptic novel, Eclipse of the Sun, I note Stephen L. Carter's Massey lectures of 1995, published as The Dissent of the Governed (1998), which dealt with the circumstances that drove the American colonists from political opposition to insurrection:
The starting point for Carter's analysis is a novel reading of the Declaration of Independence. What drove the colonists over the line from dissent to revolt was not the new imperial taxes or the high-handedness of unelected officials. Rather, in the words of the Declaration, it was that "Our repeated Petitions have been met only with repeated injuries." The King (and his ministers) not only gave his subjects no hearing, but responded to their complaints with outrages. This behavior, according to Carter, drove a critical mass of American colonials from protest about perceived injustices to "disallegiance" from a political structure that systematically excluded them and their concerns.... Somewhat alarmingly, Carter goes so far as to suggest that the linkage of reformist liberalism with the extraordinary level of deference demanded by the modern judiciary is quite literally totalitarian. It criminalizes forms of dissent that in other contexts would enjoy a large degree of toleration. Indeed, it speaks to the people in a rhetoric of tolerance that in practice usually means legally mandated homogenization.
People will take "no" for an answer, even on a matter they feel very strongly about. They will not tolerate not being listened to. To the president's great credit, he makes a show of not delegitimizing his opposition. The same cannot be said of the coalition that got him elected.
