- Journalistic naïvete
- Vote for the Crook: It’s Inevitable
- “I have a lot of negative opinions”
- A crack is how the light gets in
- Will Gordon College offer the pinch of incense?
- Family collapse
- Drive-by virtue
- Ringxiety
The financial scandal du jour involves leaked audio recordings that purport to show that regulators at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were soft on Goldman Sachs . Say it ain’t so.
The news is being treated as shocking by journalists who claim to be hard-headed students of financial markets. One especially impressionable columnist calls it “a jaw-dropping story about Wall Street regulation.” The real scandal here is the excessive faith that liberal journalists and politicians continue to put in financial regulation. The media pack is discovering regulatory capture—a mere 43 years after George Stigler published his landmark paper on the concept.
…
Once one understands the inevitability of regulatory capture, the logical policy response is to enact simple laws that can’t be gamed by the biggest firms and their captive bureaucrats. This means repealing most of Dodd-Frank and the so-called Basel rules and replacing them with a simple requirement for more bank capital—an equity-to-asset ratio of perhaps 15%. It means bringing back bankruptcy for giant firms instead of resolution at the discretion of political appointees. And it means considering economist Charles Calomiris’s plan to automatically convert a portion of a bank’s debt into equity if the bank’s market value falls below a healthy level.
Fifty years ago, Stigler described academics in a way that might also apply to much of today’s press corps: “The economic role of the state has managed to hold the attention of scholars for over two centuries without arousing their curiosity.”
(Wall Street Journal, emphasis added)
The Washington Post’s Dana Milbanks notes all the investigations and indictments of GOP contenders for the Presidency in 2016. My irritation kept rising, but then he hinted that he got the fallacy of what he had just written:
There hasn’t been this much corruption around the table at the National Governors Association since Rod Blagojevich dined alone.
This doesn’t necessarily mean governors, or other politicians, are more corrupt than they used to be; there has always been some sense of entitlement among elected leaders, a belief that the usual rules don’t apply to them. Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, adds that “unfathomable amounts of money flowing through the system” have increased the opportunity for misconduct, while the proliferation of media and electronic paper trails makes it more likely to get caught.
To Sloan’s list, I’d add one more: the criminalization of politics that has become routine since Bill Clinton’s impeachment. That case, in which a president was impeached by the House and tried by the Senate for what was essentially a personal indiscretion dressed up as a perjury and obstruction case, created new norms: Politicians decided they could use legal means to settle political disputes. If you can’t beat your opponent at the polls, take him out in court.
Both sides play this way, but there’s some rough justice that Republicans, who popularized this criminalization of politics in the 1990s, now find at least three of their top presidential prospects being hoist with the GOP’s own petard.
When corrupt Edwin Edwards ran for Governor of Louisiana against former Grand Dragon David Duke, a bumper sticker appeared “Vote for the Crook. It’s important.” These days, it’s beyond important: it’s inevitable.
Abbot Tryphon of All-Merciful Saviour Orthodox Christian Monastery blogs devotionals daily and also posts them on Facebook. Monday, he blogged about the prevalence of sexual sin.
One Facebook commenter is all alone as I write this, but probably speaks for many others: “I sadly have a lot of negative opinions about this.”
I’m glad to see that Christianity Today, which seems still to occupy the pinnacle of Evangelical publishing, can gingerly suggest that Rapture theology just might be, according to some people who are not entirely outside the tribe, rubbish.
For this policy, Gordon College may lose its accreditation. I thought you should know. More here.
God forbid that Gordon should offer the pinch of incense.
We may have no choice between the Benedict Option and the Dominican Option. We’ll be driven to the former by intolerant progressivism.
[S]ince the 1950s, marriage and the family, outside and inside the Church, have been plunged into an ever-growing crisis—to the extent that their nature, and very existence, are threatened by total collapse.
If I had to sum up the causes of this crisis in one factor, it would be this: marriage is no longer approached as a family enterprise. It has become basically a “you-and-me” affair. It is essentially a (tentative) commitment of two persons, one to the other; and no longer a total commitment of love, where a sexual love-union is expected to lead to, and be cemented by, the children that this union should naturally give rise to.
In the secular view (which has become so widespread in the Church), marriage is basically an à deux arrangement, while a family is a possible annex that can be added later on, if convenient. Children, instead of being the natural fruit of married love and the glue that holds it together in times of stress, are reduced to the category of minor accessories to the personal happiness of each of two fundamentally separate people, and so dispensable (like the marriage itself), if they do not serve each individual’s happiness. Under such a view, marriages open-to-divorce, or simple cohabitation, become valid and even preferable options.
What is needed is a more natural, noble, and generous response to the family ideal that should inspire every healthy decision to marry. What we have instead, and it has been growing powerfully over the past 50 years, is a calculated individualistic approach to marriage and the family. Such an approach can only increase solitude and sadness, never overcome them.
Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns interviewed Eric Jacobsen, a sort of Evangelical New Urbanist, recently. Much of it was ho-hum if you’ve been around New Urbanist thought for a while, but Jacobsen made one interesting observation about virtue and place.
He’ll sometimes find himself intending to do something nice, or charitable, for someone he knows is in need “next time I run into them.” Then he gets up, gets in his car, opens the garage door, drives to work, and virtually guarantees that he won’t run into them. It’s not conscious. It’s how we live in suburban sprawl.
Am I the only one with a smartphone equivalent of phantom limb syndrome – imagining that my smartphone just vibrated in my shirt pocket (when it’s on my desk or in my pants pocket)?
Duh. I guess I can Google that.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 