by Blue Stockings | So here is IOZ, a king in the land of the disaffected, tilting back his chair and raising his eyebrow at the valiant physicians of the left trying to pump some life back into the economy while brushing a fleck of the gold standard off his velvet sleeve. In a post called Bail. Out, he writes:
At this point, shouldn't we take the economy out back and put 'er down? I hate watching anything suffer.
I know, I know. Liberals think that they're going to take over and do something rational or sensible or Seussical or whatever, but the great waxy ball of truth at the center of this Tootsie Pop is that nobody anywhere has any idea what to do, in large part because there is nothing to do. The pooch is screwed. The egg is scrambled. The cream is whipped. Constructing vast and expensive monuments of atavism will not restore things to the way they once were. The problem with the economy is that it was full of phony money. Now it's gone! These things happen. Poo-tee-weet. Jesus Christ, people, even fucking stars blow up. Nothing is too big to fail. (More)
Tragically, it is true.
Regarding the auto industry bailout---which even I know makes no sense---he wrote:
Hey, you know, maybe the reason that GM is in such trouble is that it made such shitty cars for so long, that it kept adding features to a signature line of vehicles that consisted of an inefficient engine and a big heavy box on a cheap-ass pick-up chassis. Maybe if the central operating assumption of their entire business hadn't been that things were going to remain exactly as they were forever, only better, they wouldn't be in such a fix. This is really the central and unaddressed issue in the whole economic clusterfuck--not that no one saw it coming, but that no one thought it prudent to plan in general for contingencies. None of the finance firms thought it wise to have some backup just in case there was a downturn. No one at the American automakers thought it smart to have a rainy-day plan just in case there was a tightening in the energy market or a rise in commodity prices.
And (elsewhere), this response to Tom Friedman's think piece:
[In] the penultimate paragraph...Friedman suggests that Detroit's future will be best served by beginning a ten-year-plan to produce the cars it should currently be making. Meanwhile, the idea seems to be that if only we all drove hybrids, our energy and pollution woes would be over. This conviction, that technological innovation will obviate the need to make any actual changes in the domestic economy and human geography, paralyzes intellects across the whole of American politics and culture. They imagine the future as a sort of Jetsons pastiche, where everything is the same, except that it flies.
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