The Watcher’s Council has announced its picks for the most outstanding posts of the preceding week. The winner in the Council post category was The Razor’s post, “American Whining and the Culture of Dependencyâ€. Second place honors went to Wolf Howling for “Identifying Obama’s Real Position on the Second Amendment (Updated)”, for which I voted.
The winning non-Council post was Bishop Hill’s “Is Gun Control Behind Our Loss of Civil Liberties?”. Second place honors went to Pajamas Media’s “Former CIA Agent in Iran Comes In from the Heat”. In my view this interview with an individual claiming to have been undercover in Iran for the CIA is without question the post of the week. If even half of what’s revealed here is true, it’s incredibly important.
The complete results are here.
Thanks for the vote, kind sir. You seem to be up on economics – more so then me with my bare two semesters of it (plus reading everything ever written by Milton Friedman). If you have time, I’d be curious to solicit your thoughts, or a post, on EJ Dionne’s requiem for capitalism today.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR2008071002264_pf.html
I read Dionne’s column, thought about posting on it, and then thought better of it.
I’m not so sure I’d declare it a “requiem for capitalism” so much as an acknowledgement that both Democrats and Republicans and practically everybody else in government these days is a Fordist, i.e. they believe in the compromise hammered out in the 20’s and 30’s among business, labor, and government in which business accepts a little regulation, labor takes a friendlier attitude towards management, and government functions as a referee and standards organization.
The problem with this is that the Fordist compromise is collapsing under the effects of globalization. Alan Greenspan noted this in a speech not long ago in which he mentioned that the tools he used were just not as effective now as they used to be.
I agree wholeheartedly with the points made about risk. The people who create the condition of risk need to assume the costs of failure. Incentives in the financial industry are completely out of whack. It used to be that financiers were compensated based upon the experience over the life of a loan. Now they’re compensated based on the volume of loans sold this year. That’s nuts.