I’m sitting at the desk with this book in front of me, not sure if I dare read it.
Not because it’s 712 pages — but because, well, I’m flipping through and see that there’s much that I agree with. Stockman details the “crony capitalist plunder” of TARP and the bailouts, and says that a calm examination of the situation should have shown that an AIG bankruptcy, for instance, would not have destroyed the global economy, but that these bailouts and similar ones previously simply benefitted wealthy investors and pumped up the stock market by signaling that the government would step in to protect against risk. He further says that Greenspan and others intentionally created the real estate bubble and the stock market bubble by keeping interest rates so low, irrespective of whether the economy was fundamentally healthy or sick, and brought about deeply unsustainable levels of government and household debt.
So I suspect that if I tacked the whole thing (and I could always let the kids watch a movie or two this weekend while my husband and middle son are off on a Scout camping trip) I would agree with quite a bit that he says.
But I’ve flipped to the end: his 13-step prescription to end the crony capitalist state. Some of these steps seem tangential to his larger argument: single six-year terms for the president, representatives and senators, with no re-election. Abolish various functions of government, from social insurance to deposit insurance to Amtrak, slim down defense spending to the amount required to protect the nation from direct military attack, institute a 30% wealth tax on the super-rich and replace the income tax, subject to crony-capitalist loopholes, with a consumption tax. But the big one: stop trying to manipulate the macro economy through monetary policy, cease monetizing securities and ultimately return to the gold standard.
The gold standard! That’s crazy-talk, isn’t it? In any case, the genie’s out of the bottle. How could we possibly go back to a gold standard, and what, really, is so magical about gold, compared to any other precious metal, now that the old spell’s been broken? Yet at the same time, I’m increasingly skeptical of Keynesianism, having read claims previously that there’s no genuine proof that it works. What’s it called — non-falsifiable?, when defenders of a theory, in every instance in which it seems not to have worked, claim it wasn’t applied sufficiently energetically, and when an economy recovers without it, claim that the recovery was unnecessarily delayed or weak?
So when I hesitate to read Stockman’s book, it’s a bit of the feeling — well, I suppose it’s a feeling of, if I find what he says to be credible, what then? Do I have to sign up with the crazies?
An update to come, maybe, after the weekend . . . in the meantime, reader(s), what do you think?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In