Daily Archives: 19 June 2009

‘Craven bumlicking ass-goblin’ calls Hank Paulson a national hero

Fantastic catch by trueslant.com:

“

By Evan Newmark

Hank Paulson is a national hero.

I said it last October and I’m sticking by it. And now, there’s actual evidence to back me up. The TARP bailout worked. The Wall Street crisis is over.

via Mean Street: It’s Time to Enshrine Hank Paulson as National Hero – Deal Journal – WSJ.

So here’s the letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal after reading Evan Newmark’s paean to Hank Paulson last week:

Dear WSJ,

Just out of curiosity — did Evan Newmark ever work for Goldman, Sachs? And if the answer to the question is yes, don’t you think that might have been a good fact to disclose before he fellated Hank Paulson in his “Mean Street” column?

Sincerely,
Matt Taibbi

I didn’t get an answer, which I guess is not surprising. But in the interim I found out that Newmark did, indeed, work for Goldman. I find it funny that a business journalist has to disclose if he’s invested in this or that stock, or short this or that security, before a newspaper will allow him to have an opinion about anything even distantly related to that company — but you don’t need to disclose anything if all you’re doing is kissing your former boss’s ass.

Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you’d have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a ‘national hero’?”

The power of Economists and Politicians, right or wrong

I found this quote of a quote in Art Carden’s essay on mises.org:

In the late 1940s, a group of classical-liberal scholars formed the Mont Pelerin Society with the goal of carrying the liberal tradition through the storm of post–World War II interventionism, and a speech from their first meeting, in which Friedrich Hayek quotes John Maynard Keynes, suggests an answer:

It is more than likely that from their point of view the practical politicians are right and that in the existing state of public opinion nothing else would be practicable. But what to the politicians are fixed limits of practicability imposed by public opinion must not be similar limits to us. Public opinion on these matters is the work of men like ourselves, the economists and political philosophers of the past few generations, who have created the political climate in which the politicians of our time must move. I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes, but he has never said a truer thing than when he wrote, on a subject on which his own experience has singularly qualified him to speak, that

the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.

Mr. Carden concludes:

“Thus, I follow the advice of others who have come before me and I try not to get too caught up in or depressed by current events. Things are what they are, and there is little if anything I can do to change them over the very short run. My hope is that today’s political disasters will spark a passion for ideas, a passion for truth, and a passion for justice. These are dark times, but the foundation has been laid for a classical-liberal renaissance. Policy after policy threatens us with short-run malaise, but I for one remain hopeful and optimistic.” (Read more from mises.org”>Read more from mises.org)