Douchashov: Coward and Historical Revisionist

"You ask for a proactive proposal. In a word, socialism"

No, Douchashov, no one asked for your "proactive" proposal after the bailout failed to immediately garner all the results you believed it should have--we criticized you for not having one beforehand and then parading around afterwards, pretending you saw this coming. Oh, and "socialism" was the solution you knew would work, but were secreting away from us for some reason?

There's a curious lacuna in your thought process that one often sees in vulgar Marxists: Marx viewed fully-actualized capitalism as the necessary precursor to socialist revolution, though most revolutionaries would choke on that scientific interpretation because it clashes with the moral imperative for revolution (which is really why they're revolutionaries to begin with). Similarly, I have't the slightest idea how you thought a plan of flat out nationalization (which I favor) was even a remote possibility until other half measures (like the bailout) had been tried and failed.

"If the economic problem is truly fundamental, a govt. bailout won't solve it. And as we saw it can't even put a floor under it."

I'm not even sure what your hypothesis is about what's causing this crisis. At one point you say:

"The ideology of living beyond our means is why "faith" will not be restored."

Then you say

"Looking for a quick fix is the cause of the crisis. A nice start in getting on track would be punishing off-shoring and out-sourcing, and that could be done immediately."

Putting aside the fact that "punishing" off-shoring and outsourcing is immaterial and completely beyond the realm of possibility at the moment, you seem to be saying that the fundamental problem is that we spend much more than we make, or can hope to pay back within a reasonable span of time.

That's a great meta-critique of US consumerism and over-leveraging in the financial world, but if it is, in fact, the "fundamental cause" of the current crisis (recognizing how quickly this could become a bottomless semantic debate about the term "fundamental"), then surely what we need to be dealing with right now is the proximate cause, which is 1) the information assymetry, to put it mildy, created by the packaging up and securitizing of good and bad mortgages together, 2) the rapid decline in the property values underlying these mortgages, and 3) the seizing up of the credit markets based on the uncertainty created by 1) and 2).

The credit market problems are beginning to have a huge impact on employment--surely you aren't suggesting that we need to sign the country up for behavior modification shock treatment before we attempt to address that. If you are, then I say to you and all the libertarians fulminating about this on the margins: I understand what an important role punishment and pain play in your psycho-sexual constitution, but this really isn't the place to actualize your fantasy lives.

This is going to be a progressive process of varying levels of government intervention, and it had to begin with the highly-flawed bailout that was, by definition, the one that was politically possible at the time. Doing nothing was not a political option--most of the Republican and Democrat no votes the first time around knew that, but felt free to vote against it because they thought there were enough votes to pass it without them.

Republicans were especially loathe to be seen supporting it because it's exactly the type of issue they specialize in demagoguing: one with a complex interplay of costs and benefits that is difficult to explain even in the time allotted on the Jim Lehrer News Hour.

"You're first mistake was in assuming that the bailout was being considered in the best interest of the country."

Which of us thought that? Your first mistake was making the best the enemy of the good (and by "good" I of course mean the necessary first step). Although, then again, you didn't really even do that, did you, as that would have required making a concrete suggestion without the benefit of your retrospectacles.

Now it appears, as you noted, that straight out nationalizations are being considered. That could only have happened once the more moderate options had been tried. Anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling his socialist self.