Democracy failure

[nancylebov]

I've ranted any number of times about the incompetence of very well-paid people and the subprime mortgage crisis. I've blamed the banks and the investors and (though they're not as well-paid) the financial journalists.

As a libertarian, I'd managed to completely forget there's a government agency which could have noticed something was going wrong.

In late 2006, as economists warned of an imminent housing market collapse, housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson repeatedly insisted that the mounting wave of mortgage failures was a short-term "correction."

He pushed for legislation that would make it easier for federally backed lenders to make mortgage loans to risky borrowers who put less money down. He issued a rule that was criticized by law enforcement authorities because it could increase the difficulty of detecting and proving mortgage fraud.

Read the article for more, more, more about negligence, sloth, and extravagance.

Link thanks to Obsidian Wings.

Attitude affected by libertarian-bashingat Making Light.

Comments

[tnh.livejournal.com]

Not bashing, surely? Not unless it's happened since yesterday evening.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize how bad it had actually gotten until I went over the thread.

More civilized posts on the subject were added late last night/this morning.

It wasn't just going on, a number of posters noticed it.

It wasn't the classiest thing for me to bring this up in my lj rather than at Making Light. My only defense is that it was the best I could manage at the time.

#5 ::: julia :::

I would have thought the libertarians would be thrilled to have this concrete evidence that the government is responsibly not spending tax dollars at the insignificant cost of their civil liberties.

#9 ::: julia ::: April 13, 2008, 11:35 PM:

But, you know, the libertarians, at least the McArdle branch, had no problem with the decisionmaking that brought us to this point. A cop who's told that he or she can't fail and who's not given the staffing to be able to afford discretion is going to err on the side of lack of nuance.

#22 ::: julia ::: (view all by) ::: April 14, 2008, 01:31 AM:

Avram, I'm not applauding civil liberties violations.

I'm saying that this is a road that our small-government friends have sent us down. We're living, all of us, with low-bid functionaries charged with making sure we don't do whatever they imagine stepping out of line is, and we've heard little but applause and dismissiveness from people who have an ideological prejudice against spending more than the least they can when they're most likely not going to be the ones to deal with the consequences.

If there was a libertarian outcry against Homeland Security employees being cut off from job protections and not being given living wages and benefits, I missed it. Teresa Chambers didn't have a lot of defenders.

#28 ::: Lee ::: April 14, 2008, 04:13 AM:

Patrick, #6: I don't think I've ever met a rich Libertarian. Most of the ones I know range from "struggling" to "dirt-poor". I have an untested hypothesis that Libertarianism in poor people is a form of magical thinking -- if they could just get rid of all that "government interference," then they'd somehow be well-off. (There's some support for this in arguments that I've heard some of them make, but it's far from rigorous.)


This isn't as bad as Julia, though.

#57 ::: Lee ::: April 14, 2008, 12:36 PM:

Francis, #29: From where I sit, Ron Paul's money-raising looks like it's driven by the same mechanism that drives televangelism and gambling -- poor people being willing to divert a surprising amount of their limited resources to something that promises Everything Will Be Different in the (indeterminate) future. I don't see a whole lot of difference between "when I hit the jackpot", "when the Savior comes", and "when the Libertarians come to power".

#78 ::: Doctor Science ::: (view all by) ::: April 14, 2008, 03:32 PM:

I think libertarians are people who don't believe that humans are social animals -- as per Margaret Thatcher's "there's no such thing as society"[1]. They may be people who don't feel all that connected to others, through circumstance or brain chemistry, or they may be people who don't *want* to feel particularly connected to others, or they may want to reject the feeling of connectedness because it's so messy, complicated, and vague.

#80 ::: Scott Taylor :::April 14, 2008, 03:42 PM:

Doctor Science @ 78 -
I think libertarians are people who don't believe that humans are social animals -- as per Margaret Thatcher's "there's no such thing as society"[1].

...

Y'know, I think it's time for me to take a break from Making Light for a while.

A reaction like that suggests there's some bashing going on.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

#85 ::: Avram ::: April 14, 2008, 04:16 PM:

Y'know how Patrick said, in ct #6, "Meanwhile, if dimbulb Park Service cops decide to beat up on libertarians, then I'm a libertarian"?

I'm moved by a similar spirit myself, but more along the lines of If commenters are going to dog-pile onto libertarians and reduce them to a cartoon stereotype, then I'm a libertarian. I just stuck Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom onto my Amazon wish list.

So does this.

#94 ::: j h woodyatt ::: April 14, 2008, 05:13 PM:

Now, do I think the "victims had it coming" here? No, of course not. I don't like it when the cops bust up my rave for no good reason, and I don't see why anybody else's rave ought to be a problem for them either.

However... libertarians. I'm trying really hard not to succumb to schadenfreud, and I don't particularly need to join in the dogpile, but I fear I'm not going to be able to come across with enough sympathy if this is going to be one of those salute the flag moments. I'm acquainted with a fair number of Silicon Valley pinhead libertarians, and they are not— as a class— my favorite sort of people with which to work on a project that requires any kind of collaborative spirit.

#96 ::: albatross ::: (view all by) ::: April 14, 2008, 05:46 PM:

Terry #91: I have to say, most of the positions you described there looked really, really different from what I've understood of libertarianism. If you distrust government power, it's hard to see where you'd come to think that including torture in the set of punishments available to the government would be a good thing, frex. If you don't think the state should be interfering in market transactions to achieve social goals, Jim Crow laws are really hard to justify. Pushing the Indians off their land seems similar.

I am supremely not interested in doing the one-man-against-the-dogpile thing here. Enough so that I've hesitated to post this.

albatross has a lot more willingness to argue than I do.

#97 ::: P J Evans ::: April 14, 2008, 06:01 PM:

albtross @ 96

That's a lot of what the 'Libertarian Party' says when they're pushing their propaganda: business regulation and zoning laws bad, etc. (Right up until the guy next door wants to put in a business or build a house that the 'Lib' doesn't want next door, then he'll be organizing petitions against it.)

#101 ::: mjfgates ::: April 14, 2008, 06:59 PM:

Libertarians don't like Jim Crow *laws*, exactly. It's just that if a merchant just HAPPENS to have a policy that some people can only use the special "colored" restroom, well, he's exercising his freedom over the restrooms he owns. If ALL the merchants do that, they're exercising THEIR freedom. And if a mob descends upon the one merchant who doesn't do it, and burns down his store and murders him and his family, he's perfectly free to try to defend himself against them, and when it doesn't work, why, the tree of liberty etc. Very creepy, to hear that particular quote used as a *defense* of rule by the KKK or similar gangs of criminals.

#118 ::: j h woodyatt ::: April 14, 2008, 09:23 PM:

I guess I could expand on my previous remarks by noting that it feels awfully weird to be invited to participate in the deconstruction of the ongoing cultural hegemony of contemporary American authoritarians using a collection of Washington DC Libertarian activists as the illustration. Yes, they were treated unfairly by the cops. Yes, the commenters at The Wreck Of The Megan McArdle are contributing in various classifiable ways toward the furthering of the cultural hegemony that this kind of police mistreatment depends upon. I mean: compare the linked videos to this one that went around awhile back. Underneath it all, I'm having a hard time getting cranked about the Park Police arresting one person at the Jefferson Memorial and questioning them for five hours, never mind that it's someone who probably cheered when I was arrested in San Francisco on January 16, 1991 under terms that were basically a reading of the Riot Act.

Emphasis added.