Conservative Donnybrook

First read this outstanding article about media bias.

Then look at the card carrying democrat who wrote it.

I never thought one of their own would get it so right.

Jacob Weisberg has written an extraordinary piece at Slate placing the blame for the financial meltdown on libertarians, and claiming that libertarianism is therefore discredited forever, end of story. Note I didn’t say that he was “arguing” for this proposition; he basically proclaims it to be self-evidently true in the second paragraph, by which time he is already comparing libertarians to Communist bitter-enders during the fall of the Soviet Union.

There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong.

Oh, thanks for summarizing! “To summarize, I’m right.” Why waste time having an actual debate over the causes of the in-progress financial collapse when there’s fun to be had sneering at these nerdy, doctrinaire libertoids and their nutty-yet-dangerous theories?

It seems that in Weisberg’s view, the financial crisis is, at its root, about the failure to regulate credit derivative markets. Weisberg places primary blame on three people:  Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, and SEC chairman Christopher Cox. However, in the linked Washington Post piece about resistance to increased oversight of the derivatives market, Clinton’s treasury secretary Robert Rubin emerges as one of the chief head-in-the-sand villains. That’s funny, why was he never mentioned in Weisberg’s article? Oh, by the way, Rubin in 2004 wrote a paean to his own brilliance in managing the Clinton economy called “In an Uncertain World,” ghostwritten by one… Jacob Weisberg! So I guess that means Rubin, Rubinomics, and Jacob Weisberg are discredited forever!

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