I\u2019m sitting at the desk with this book in front of me, not sure if I dare read it.<\/p>\n
Not because it\u2019s 712 pages \u2014 but because, well, I\u2019m flipping through and see that there\u2019s much that I agree with.\u00a0 Stockman details the \u201ccrony capitalist plunder\u201d 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.\u00a0 He further says that Greenspan and others\u00a0intentionally 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.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0on a Scout camping trip) I would agree with quite a bit that he says.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019ve flipped to the end:\u00a0 his 13-step prescription to end the crony capitalist state.\u00a0 Some of these steps seem tangential to his larger argument:\u00a0 single six-year terms for the president, representatives and senators, with no re-election.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But the big one:\u00a0 stop trying to manipulate the macro economy through monetary policy, cease monetizing securities and ultimately return to the gold standard.<\/p>\n
The gold standard!\u00a0 That\u2019s crazy-talk, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 In any case, the genie\u2019s out of the bottle.\u00a0 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\u2019s been broken?\u00a0 Yet at the same time, I\u2019m increasingly skeptical of Keynesianism, having read claims previously that there\u2019s no genuine proof that it works.\u00a0 What\u2019s it called \u2014 non-falsifiable?, when defenders of a theory, in every instance in which it seems not to have worked, claim it wasn\u2019t applied sufficiently energetically, and when an economy recovers without it, claim that the recovery was unnecessarily delayed or weak?<\/p>\n
So when I hesitate to read Stockman\u2019s book, it\u2019s a bit of the feeling \u2014 well, I suppose it\u2019s a feeling of, if I find what he says to be credible, what then?\u00a0 Do I have to sign up with the crazies?<\/p>\n
An update to come, maybe, after the weekend . . . in the meantime, reader(s), what do you think?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m sitting at the desk with this book in front of me, not sure if I dare read it. Not because it\u2019s 712 pages \u2014 but because, well, I\u2019m flipping through and see that there\u2019s much that I agree with.\u00a0 Stockman details the \u201ccrony capitalist plunder\u201d of TARP and the bailouts, and says that a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n