Colbert On “Going Galt” Meme
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in History, RepublicansFrom the moment I heard Republican hacks like Michelle Malkin start referring to the themes in Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’, I knew it was destined to fail. After all, to think that they don’t understand that the selfishness of the few led us to where we are today conveys a particularly acute brand of ignorance.
Still, who would you rather see tear this meme apart? Me or Stephen Colbert?
I thought so…
I wonder if all of these Republicans know that Any Rand was a devout atheist.
Hmmm…
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March 18th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Without speaking to the thrust of the main topic, I need to say that I for one see a human confederacy of selfishness that is far more widely spread than “the few.”
Sure it’s easy to single out the most outlandish cases for special approbation, and I have no problem at all with that. I would be fine with tossing the names and addresses of AIG bonus beneficiaries from the financial products division into a hat and then starting a pitchfork mob to achieve recovery.
But let’s not shy away from looking at folks that, for example, chose to believe that they could afford a 600,000 house on income of $900 a week. Unless such a person is truly mentally handicapped, then they have indulged themselves in a special form of selfishness constructed of willful ignorance. Obviously other people helped them along the way, and in fact almost certainly promised them that they could have what their heart desired. Those folks deserve reprobation. Cheerfully granted.
But one can clearly see from the various personal accounts in the media that these overborrowers invariably questioned the feasibility of such loans, wondering “how could this be so?” And then, out of (let’s face it) selfishness, they made a conscious decision to trust the folks making these outlandish promises. Why?” Because they were being promised their dream, their heart’s desire.
It’s truly a fool who lets his or her heart’s desire override the need to employ judgement. To understand human nature in the real world, we all ought to be aware of how often the truly fatal moment in a story with an unhappy ending is the moment when the protagonist chooses to simply trust without verifying.
Whatever else these singularly bad times are, I know one thing for certain. They are a teaching moment. And the lesson is do the math. Not to mention caveat emptor.
Here’s the thing: if it sounds too good to be true, then the odds are that it IS too good to be true. If instead we let the overriding lesson be something else, humans will repeat these escapades. Boy do I ever wish I could invest in THAT eventuality, because I sit here convinced it’s a sure thing.
March 18th, 2009 at 9:18 am
From the moment I heard Republican hacks…
Hi! When do start hearing about Democratic hacks at Donklephant?
Because you’re so non-partisan, open-minded and independent, right? You’ve got the whole “half-donkey, half-elephant” thing goin’ on?
I’m just wondering, because every single post seems to be either lip-service to some liberal pet project (or an effort to absolve dems of some bad decision), or an indictment of conservatives.
March 18th, 2009 at 9:28 am
SD3…
There are republican hacks and democrat hacks.
Justin is referring to the republican ones.
March 18th, 2009 at 9:31 am
In other words, I don’t read him as calling all republican hacks.
There’s not many republican ideas to be excited about, ya know?
March 18th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I appreciate that, Eric.
I’m asking when Donklephant’s overwhelming sense of even-handedness and objectivity will result in a “gottcha” posting on democratic hacks, instead of the endless litany of conservative bashing?
March 18th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Looks to me like a troll got booted, and has nothing better to do but sneak back in under one different username after another.
Good riddance.
Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com
March 18th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
I didn’t get booted, Agnostic. Renowned centrist Justin Gardner asked that I truncate my blog name because it was choking his website.
How about addressing something substantive for once in your life?
March 18th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Does Colbert, or democrats realize that the only people who saw this economic meltdown coming were members of the Austrian School of economics?
When Democrats were championing Fannie & Freddie and the housing boom, and the Republicans were championing the Bush economy, It was guys like Marc Faber, Jim Rogers, and Peter Schiff who accurately predicted the real-estate bubble bursting, & the stock market crash, warning us as far back as 2002!.
Now they are all saying Obama/Bernake are on the verge of completely destroying America through an inflationary collapse of the dollar. Maybe Pundits and Comics like Colbert should listen to these actual prophets (who are all inspired by Hayeck, Rothbard & Rand) and might want to interview them on their shows first before making fun of them.
But of course they wont, because they remain complicit in the greatest lie ever sold to the American people – that the free market and “deregulation” destroyed our economy. They too emotionally invested in social-populism and the Obamessiah to examine the truth.
March 18th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
So in 2002 these geniuses predicted a collapse that occurred in 2008? Did they predict it would happen in 2008? Marc Faber’s been shorting US stocks since 1999. If you’d carefully followed his advice you’d have had no money left to lose in 2008/09. Peter Schiff is in the same ballpark.
Here, I’ll play prophet now: There’s a boom coming! It will be followed by a bust! And then another boom! Hear my words and fall down before me.
You know what else? War is on the horizon. I see a bad moon rising. I see trouble on the way.
Every prophet is right until you ask them put dates on their prophecies. Nostradamus is right as long as retroactively date everything.
Jim Rogers thinks we should all move to Asia because that’s the future. Maybe he’s right, but I doubt it. I’d rather be holding our cards than theirs. China has an export-driven economy at a point when their markets (us and Europe) are narrowing. Add to that a very, very long history of Chinese political instability and incompetence.
More prophecy: there will be dark times at some unspecified future date. Booga booga booga.
March 18th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Thats all nonsense and you know it, mike. They knew that stocks were bid up to rediculous prices in the 90’s and they knew it would pop, as they knew the same thing was happening in real estate over the next decade. Everyone is saying this now. The Austrians were the only ones saying it then. It means something.
Its not about predicting the exact dates or gambling with the market. These guys don’t tell their clients to speculate. The entire U.S. stock market was speculation for 15 years. Perhaps you wouldn’t have had the huge portfolio of overpriced stocks in 2006 but you wouldn’t have lost everything when the market crashed either.
They knew that the economy was phony when everyone else thought the good times were here to stay, for all the precise reasons that everyone else overlooked at the time – and thats the key. And its not over yet.
March 19th, 2009 at 12:17 am
Jimmy:
Prophecy is only prophecy if it is consistently true and not hit or miss. If you predict disaster you’ll eventually be right. Like a stopped clock is right twice a day.
You’re seeing correlation where there may only be coincidence.
Look at it this way: for the last dozen or so years a bunch of people predicted the market would go up. It did. So they were prophets, right?
Your boys predicted (wrongly) for years that the market would go down. Now, this year, they’re right. But the lack of specificity makes them no more “right” or prophetic than all sorts of other people. And since it’s starting to look like the market may have found a bottom, they may end up being wrong yet again.
March 19th, 2009 at 7:57 am
I dunno Mike, I think reasonable folks do need to lend a fair bit of credence to the view that the just-past boom years were fueled by cheap credit that allowed folks (and nations!) to live beyond their means.
When you see the story of the guy making $900 a week who bought the $600,000 house, it’s easy to see that the guy was a fool who deserves little sympathy, and also that he was preyed on conscienceless enterprisers. Those parts are obvious. But you have to follow the money both ways. That $600,00 that never should have been loaned encouraged a lot of economic activity that we all benefitted from.
Ultimately, I think the future holds a long-term ruthless return to the sort of conventional economic wisdom that was dismissed by go-go idiots.
We all must ask ourselves what its like to live within our means. I grew up very middle class. Neither parent went to college, Dad got into lower management, mom cleaned houses, and the family did pretty well, but without the sorts of frills that came to be taken for granted and even viewed as necessities by the next generation. I think most of us of an age of 40 or 50 could easy make a list of the sorts of things we would never have dreamed of enjoying as kids that have become rubber-stamp items for a substantial segment of families.
It bears thinking on, that’s all I’m saying. It doesn’t seem like you to traffic in so blithe a dismissal as you are here.
Jimmi suppose folks like Schiff deserve prophetic regard. I don’t see how one performs the leap from that to the contention that current circumstances are unrelated to unethical and even fraudulent behavior in a poorly-regulated home-lending market, as you seem to be suggesting by taking about a liberal myth.
It seems to me that even if the current admin’s policies are utterly mistaken, it still makes sense to place a substantial share of the blame for the nature of this collapse upon unscrupulous profiteers.
March 19th, 2009 at 9:42 am
KK:
They look “right” right now. They’ve been “wrong” for years. If the market and the housing market finds a bottom and the banks start making loans again in 6 months or a year will they be “wrong” again?
Prophets profit (ahem) by careless analysis and by short memories. Winston Churchill was right about Hitler, and insane to suggest that we should promptly go after Stalin. He’s credited as a visionary but he was as wrong as he was right.
March 19th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I don’t buy it Mike. Here’s the thing: over the long-term, home prices have to correlate with income growth, or else folks become less and less able to buy homes. At its core, its a mathematical issue of sustainability.
Sadly, we’ve now lived through several bubbles in the past 15 or so years. The hallmark of these bubbles always seems to be that the salesmen profiting the most get out front with a convincing story about how the old tried and true fundamental rules don’t apply. And that therefore current practices are in fact sustainable even though simple basic easy-to-understand fundamentals dictate that they cannot possibly be sustainable. Once most folks buy in, you know the pop is imminent.
remember AOL buying time-warner? Remember idiot bulls telling us that in the new economy you didn’t need a product, or that a company need not show a profit before we paid a pile of money for a share? How’d that turn out? All those turds in the punchbowl and “drain-circlers” turned out to be right about sustainable business models, viable products and so and so forth, all that tedious old-fashioned stuff.
So I’m thinking in terms of a bubble, which smart sensible folks predicted. And you seem to be saying that during the time when the bubble was growing, the folks who said it MUST pop were “wrong.” This makes no sense to me.
When housing values return to the value predicted by their correlation to income growth, then we’ll see a stabilization of the market, and perhaps growth. How soon I have no idea, nor does anyone else, I think. Too many variables. But when that point is reached, Schiff et al won’t be wrong, because they’ll understand that circumstances have changed to place real estate on a sounder footing.
I had 100% confidence that housing price growth of 6 to 8% a year was not sustainable over the long-term. I had no clue precisely what would cause the bubble to burst or when, but I knew that when interest-only and no-equity and balloon payment loans became popular, it was approaching. Does anyone think that its a coincidence that the bubble burst around the same time when unsustainable loans began reaching the point when the borrowers could not meet the higher terms that were built in like little time bombs?
The notion of continued growth based on people buying things on credit that they could not afford to purchase, simply becuase someone else would allegedly pay even more for it down the road was always doomed to failure. Precious few folks capable of doing math that is not especially complicated would disagree. It is in essence a ponzi scheme based on the unsustainable nature of exponential growth. Quite a bit like a game of musical chairs. Maybe Schiff et al didn’t know when the music would stop, but they sure knew that when it did, not everyone would have a safe seat.