Assault of Thoughts - 11/15/2010

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

- Yglesias puzzles over why politicians aren't running to Keynesianism. I'm not sure why he's having so much trouble with this. A lot of people argue that Keynesian theory was God's gift to politicians, but that argument never really made much sense to me. The fact is, run of the mill conservative "take responsibility and act serious" solutions are what's political gold - and when voters are really angry populist/libertarian versions of the "take responsibility and act serious" argument even pay off politically. That's why nobody is going for Keynesianism, and when they do it's tepid and heavily qualified and compromised. Not to mention the fact that Yglesias apparently doesn't understand that two people can play at the "uncertainty" game. He appears to have no sense of this at all.

- Andrew Sullivan shares P.K. O'Rourke nailing it: "We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there." Unfortunately, I don't get the sense this is true at all of the incoming class of Congressmen. To be clear, it probably wasn't true in 2008 either. O'Rourke goes on: "In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked."

- Mark Vernon on time and the implications for this guy we call "God".

- I (and others) yap about the 1920-21 depression in the comment section of this post.

- I (and others) yap about externalities in the comment section of this post (caution - more condescension from Kling here while he simultaneously accuses others of condescension... still seems completely oblivious to this tendency of his).