Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
|
 Posted: Sat Oct 11, 2008 7:59 am Post subject: |
 |
|
FDR's New Deal did not fix the economy. WWII economic spending, followed by Bretton Woods did. See Empire, one of the most Left-wing books on economics out there, for the same argument.
Follow this graph to show that unemployment decreased only somewhat after FDR's reforms, and was highest in 1933 and 1934. But it jumped up again in 1937 and 1938, after FDR implemented his greatest reforms.
| Quote: |
| The period that is called the Great Depression contained two periods of recession. The first began in August of 1929 (two months before the stock market crash) and ended in March of 1933. (These dates have been chosen by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonprofit organization that sponsors a great deal of economic research. They are based on the analysis of a large number of economic time series, and do contain some subjective elements.) In the first recession the value of goods and services that the economy produced fell by about 42% (but only by 36% once the effects of price changes are eliminated). The recovery in the four years that followed was slow and not completed by the time the second recession began. In this recession lasting 13 months from May 1937 until June 1938, output fell by 9% (but only 6% when the effects of changes of prices are eliminated). |
Why do we uncritically accept that FDR saved capitalism? Post-WWII Bretton Woods saved capitalism, insofar as it overturned the disastrous Hawley-Smoot tariffs of 1930, which was instrumental in triggering, if not simply causing, an international depression.
| Quote: |
| Kuros, it would be nice to live in a world where people don't run red lights, and there are, thus, no fines needed for commiting such moving violations. |
Enough with the metaphors.
| Quote: |
The bailout is like the Titanic: the ship would have been better hitting the crisis head on than trying to turn when it's too late. The bailout is like the Iraq war: the Bush administration is trying to ram through plan without proper deliberation. The bailout is like a game of chicken: we need to rip off the steering wheel and throw it out the window to show the bankers we are serious. The bailout is like the Treaty of Westphalia. The bailout is like learning to needlepoint. The bailout is like this really cool cloud I saw the other day that totally looked exactly like Marylin Manson wearing a zoot suit.
One can construct any sort of metaphor (okay, right, or simile) to demonstrate why whatever you oppose is folly. But, as you'll notice whenever you read an op-ed on any subject you actually know something about, 95% of those metaphors are glib hogwash.
If you cannot explain in clear English exactly what all the salient questions and facts are about the bailout, then please do not attempt to convince others that it is best understood in terms of Dirty Harry movies or the time your Aunt Mavis lost her car keys in the garbage disposal. It is possible to have principled and intelligent support for today's vote. But such support cannot be arrived at solely through studying auto accident statistics and the collective writings of Norman Vincent Peale. |
But since you brought up traffic lights, those too are controversial. Read here about an experiment where the traffic lights were removed . . .
| Quote: |
As I watched the intricate social ballet that occurred as cars and bikes slowed to enter the circle (pedestrians were meant to cross at crosswalks placed a bit before the intersection), Monderman performed a favorite trick. He walked, backward and with eyes closed, into the Laweiplein. The traffic made its way around him. No one honked, he wasn�t struck. Instead of a binary, mechanistic process�stop, go�the movement of traffic and pedestrians in the circle felt human and organic.
A year after the change, the results of this �extreme makeover� were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the intersection� buses spent less time waiting to get through, for �example� but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using signals� of the electronic or hand variety� more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous. This was music to Monderman�s ears. If they had not felt less secure, he said, he �would have changed it immediately.� |
To take this right out of analogy-land, this goes straight back to Buffet's point.
| Quote: |
| And they went--wrote 100 page reports, and they said, 'We've looked at these people and their standards are fine and their directors are fine and everything was fine.' And then all of a sudden you had two of the greatest accounting misstatements in history. You had all kinds of management malfeasance, and it all came out. And, of course, the classic thing was that after it all came out, OFHEO wrote a 350--340 page report examining what went wrong, and they blamed the management, they blamed the directors, they blamed the audit committee. They didn't have a word in there about themselves, and they're the ones that 200 people were going to work every day with just two companies to think about. It just shows the problems of regulation. |
Ineffective regulation, and regulation should be presumed ineffective until proven otherwise, creates a false sense of security which is more dangerous than the lack of regulation. OFHEO was a pre-existing organization monitoring Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and it failed to prevent the problem. In fact, the regulating OFHEO immediately blamed everyone but themselves, even though: a) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had complied with all SarbOx reports and b) OFHEO did not recognize a problem until after the symptoms had emerged, and they had to label someone accountable.
Regulations threaten to politicize market performance. And politicization of market performance is exactly what got us into this mess!!! |
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
