14 Replies to “Ezra Klein's China Envy”

1. Squid says:

   October 11, 2011 at 9:31 am

   Of course not. They don’t want to squish our freedoms; they just want to reprogram us so that we all use our freedoms in the ways that are best for us.

   Oh, and incidentally, they’ll be happy to define what’s best for us. Not because they’re totalitarians at heart, but because they are so generous and loving. Even though we don’t deserve it.

2. sdferr says:

   October 11, 2011 at 9:38 am

   We all notice how and why it is that China never deigns to issue verbal assaults on egregious killers like Syria’s Assad or Libya’s Qaddaffi. The Chinese know they’ve done worse and may find occasion to do so again, so why condemn themselves?

   So it does give one pause when Obama can’t muster the words to indicate — early on in events — that he understands the meaning of tyranny, identifies it when he sees it and condemns it as anathema to American practice and belief, but waits months to mumble useless inanities, emptied of consequence.

3. geoffb says:

   October 11, 2011 at 9:50 am

   Klein puts a summary of his conclusions in a WaPo piece.

   Let’s begin with the stimulus. It needed to be bigger.
   […]
   [I]t could have been longer.
   […]
   If the White House had better understood the likely length of the recession and designed the stimulus funds to be spent over four years, it could have included a larger and smarter infrastructure component and tied the size and duration of the tax cuts, unemployment benefits and state and local aid to the unemployment rate.

   In all likelihood, however, Congress would have objected to setting fiscal policy for 2012 in 2009. Waging and losing a battle over the structure of the stimulus might have helped President Obama shift blame for the country’s current condition when the stimulus that did pass proved inadequate,
   […]
   Housing is a clearer case of the administration failing to get anything near the boundaries of the possible … In this area, the two clear missed opportunities were the administration’s failure to move quickly in appointing a friendlier regulator to lead Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac … and to push legislation allowing bankruptcy judges to reduce mortgage principal.
   […]
   The game changer, however, would have been massive debt forgiveness.
   […]
   we could have taken a page out of the German playbook and launched a program to pay employers who cut hours rather than fired workers. In the second case, the government could have provided more help to state and local governments, which have lost more than 500,000 jobs, and tried direct-employment schemes like Christina Romer’s idea to hire 100,000 teacher’s aides.

   Very #OccupyWallStreet all in all.

4. Mikey NTH says:

   October 11, 2011 at 10:21 am

   It has ever been All The Rage on the Left, like black is the new black.

   Although their description of the caressing hand of the nanny-state suspiciously resembles that of a highly polished jack boot.* They need to work on that messaging a bit, I think.

   *The wearer of said jackboot in no way resembles Christina Hendricks and never will. Pity, that.

5. Spiny Norman says:

   October 11, 2011 at 10:41 am

   Let’s begin with the stimulus. It needed to be bigger.

   How big is big enough? If $1.4 Trillion in “stimulus” has not been enough, $3 trillion, $4 trillion, $5 trillion won’t be either. Apparently Solyndra failed because the half-billion dollars the government gave them wasn’t enough…

   Someone should remind young Mr Klein that the Underpants Gnomes’ business model is not a viable one…

   …the government could have provided more help to state and local governments, which have lost more than 500,000 jobs, and tried direct-employment schemes like Christina Romer’s idea to hire 100,000 teacher’s aides.

   Gotta save those government jobs! And more teacher’s aides!

   This smug little twerp sounds more like a 7th-year graduate student than a “professional” economist.

6. Roddy Boyd says:

   October 11, 2011 at 10:45 am

   Jeff,

   No, they don’t.

   “Fascism” has been a handy debate-silencer for more than 40 years when they encounter classical liberals or traditional conservatives in the wild. Jonah Goldberg’s book was especially useful to this end.

   It would never strike them as ironic that the only places in the US where free speech is proscribed or limited are places run entirely by the Left, nor that the only political movements in the US attempting to expand the freedom of the individual–by limiting the power of the (Federal) state economically and legally–are on the Right.

   I know as much about the “Media Left” as anyone and these are concepts that are rank heresy, so they are discarded at first pass.

   They have one card (albeit a fine one) to play against the right and that is “Corporatism,” as in how capitalism has been allowed by too much of the GOP to morph into corporate-friendly rules, regulation and the like, at the expense of the individual.

   Beyond that, Klein–like Liberals everywhere–have nothing.

7. sdferr says:

   October 11, 2011 at 10:50 am

   Well, they still have their masks Roddy. They can choose to put them back on.

8. Mueller says:

   October 11, 2011 at 12:23 pm

   “Let’s begin with the stimulus. It needed to be bigger.”

   That kind of shit is what happens when you give an idiot a keyboard and a venue.
   I can’t imagine how far to left of the peak of the bell curve his editors are.

9. DarthLevin says:

   October 11, 2011 at 12:44 pm

   This article has a nice summary of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in Economics, and points out the problem with the Keynesian model that Our Betters™ seem to treat as Gospel. Two key ‘graphs (my emphasis):

   That behavioral assumption was the point of attack for Sargent and other proponents of the “rational expectations” school. This assumption that people behaved in reliable, predictable ways was often equivalent to assuming that people in the economy were stupid and could be repeatedly fooled. If you wanted to spur the economy, just apply a burst of stimulus spending or pump up the money supply. When the economic agents in the economy—say, gullible store owners—saw customers coming through the door, flush with the new cash, they would conclude that happy days were here again and ask their suppliers to ramp up production; the economy would then spring to life. Those store owners wouldn’t stop to ask whether the stimulus would be paid for by higher future taxes, or whether the newly printed money would cause inflation, thereby undercutting its value. They would just suffer the rude surprises later on.

   In rational expectations models, the people are smarter; they know what’s going on. If you offer them goodies today, paid for by taxes tomorrow, they look at both sides of the ledger, not just one. To the dismay of graduate students, this makes the math much harder. It also undercuts some of the old verities. At a dinner with Sims, when I was just coming out of graduate school, I made some mention of aggregate demand. He asserted that there was no such thing. This was deeply unsettling, even after my exposure to teachers like Sargent and John Taylor. More importantly, the rational expectations approach implies that the challenges are much greater for the economic policy maker, who now needs to worry about savvy economic counterparties who understand the game.

   Kinda sums up the difference between Precious Ezra and TEA-party types, eh?

10. Mikey NTH says:

    October 11, 2011 at 1:33 pm

    #10. I found this sentence from your excerpt interesting:

    “This assumption that people behaved in reliable, predictable ways was often equivalent to assuming that people in the economy were stupid and could be repeatedly fooled.”

    Perhaps another way of looking at it is that people do behave in reliable, predictable ways – just not the ways the Keynesian economists say they will (because that would really mess up their beautiful theory). Looking at both sides of the ledger sheet would be a reliable, predictable behavior for those people who do not believe in free lunches.

    I am not endorsing my suggestion as right or wrong, but merely me starting to mull things over.

11. DarthLevin says:

    October 11, 2011 at 2:00 pm

    Mikey, I was thinking more along the lines of “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

12. batboy says:

    October 11, 2011 at 2:30 pm

    I can’t find it on google, but I seem to remember once reading an Orwell quote to the effect that a socialist is a power-seeker without power.

    Fits the lad perfectly, methinks.

13. Squid says:

    October 11, 2011 at 2:35 pm

    Ezra Klein’s China Envy

    Martha Stewart had a list of 27 Pretty China Patterns for brides-to-be to consider for their wedding registries. Maybe Ezra could get a nice set from Michael C Fina or something.

14. Ezra Klein’s China Envy | Tea Party Courier says:

    October 11, 2011 at 4:17 pm

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