DISQUS

Republicans pushed a lot of Libertarians (of both the small l and Big L varieties) into the Democratic camp by the war in Iraq and their free-spending ways. How much bad legslation like the "Stimulus Bill" will it take to push them back to the Republicans? I suspect that many will be leaning Republican by 2010.

I think the libertarians who believe that these occasional government scandals prove that government is irredeemably corrupt are the counterpart to the leftists who believe that the occasional corporate scandal proves that capitalism is irredeemably corrupt.

I was inclined to be sympathetic to this argument. As a kid, I remember watching a rerun of an episode of Barney Miller in which a wife has been prevented from voting by her husband from a number of years. The good cops put an end to this, and tell the woman that it is very important that the woman votes. the woman protests that she does not know the issues, and does not know who to vote for. The cops say this does not matter, she just needs to vote. She decided (as I remember the episode) to vote against the candidate her husband was voting for to cancel his vote out. I remember as a kid thinking that it didn't make a lot of sense for the cops to tell this woman to go out and vote when she was so badly informed.

In the bloggingheads diavlog, Perhaps there is an argument, Brennan takes the position that sometimes knowing the opinion of the informed is enough to be informed, so perhaps there is a possibility that by being informed about what her husband would do is enough of an indicator of what the right thing to do would be, simply by doing the opposite.

Winston my be pondering the emptiness of consumerism, but just try to take that foam bone away from him and he will quickly ponder the joys of consumerism.

I was thinking about this sort of moral paradox recently with the death of David Foster Wallace. The guy had an amazing talent and produced some outstanding work, but he apparently struggled all his life with depression and addiction, ending in his suicide at 46. If you could push a button and give that life to your kid, would you do it? Or would you push the button for the mediocre, reasonably happy life? I suspect i would choose mediocrity for my kid, yet I want to celebrate the life of Wallace, not the mediocrities of the world.

I'm wondering if the choice of a starting point for this analysis, right after the recession of the early 80s, is skewing this at all.

The devil is in (c). It reminds me a little bit of how an economist opens a can on a desert island. (Assume the can opener.)

I wonder if the 21 year old Hillary Clinton would be willing to have a beer with the 60 year old version of herself. Can you imagine what the yound campus lefty ideologue and self-styled intellectual would make of a woman who was reduced to trying to get all the support of "hard working white people" in West Virginia, and throwing back shots in rural Pennsylvania? How did this girl from Wellesley become the self styled voice of the working class, fighting against the college educated? I wonder, now that she has lost, if she looks back and wonders how it all came to that.

It used to be said, and I used to believe, that it was hard to identify any interesting economics principle that wasn't blindingly obvious (e. g., when the price of something increases, the quantity of it purchased decreases.) Over the last several years, I've come to see that the workings of the market economy are profoundly counter-intuitive to people. The human mind evolved to handle simpler face to face transactions. People believe that in order for something to happen, someone must plan for it to happen. If something bad happens, it must be someone's fault, an evildoer, like a oil company, that can be punished to make it stop. Things have a natural price, and deviations from that price are wrong. These are hard notions to dispel.

Will

I stand corrected. Perhaps I was too quick to extrapolate from the one quote, and my own college days of the early 90s.

I'm glad that people are experiencing the joys of liberal arts education again, (even if it makes them poorer in the short term).

Perhaps a traditional philosophy major forces one to reason more strictly than other majors, but it sounds like what is gaining popularity is a watered down version that would not have the same benefits. The current philosophy degree sounds less like wrestling with Kant and Aristotle, and more like venting about the Iraq War, most likely with generous portions of Bush bashing good for an easy A. I doubt this is really mind-sharpening.

I sometimes like David Brooks, and think that he can be very perceptive at times. However, this column was a disaster, start to finish. He spends most of it on the fresh idea of putting education at the top of a Republican president's agenda. Wasn't Bush th Elder the "education president", and didn't Bush the Younger give us NCLB as part of the centerpiece of his domestic program? So the schools must be fixed by now, I would assume. Then Brooks trots out the stale, horrible idea of "National Service", as if giving that large a pool of labor would be used well by the government. Ugh.

I'm on board with the argument that America's middle class, and even working class, live much better than they did not so long ago. I would find this presentation more convincing if comparisions were made to say 1978, rather than 1908.