Matt Tabbai’s occasionally overwrought channeling of Hunter S. Thompson can sometimes obscure the quality of his reporting, but mostly, he’s just dead on:
For what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.
Nicely said, no? Next paragraph gets better:
That is a terrible story and it is also sort of a taboo story, since we don’t really have a system of media now that is willing or even able to digest that dark and complicated truth. Instead, our media — which has always been at best an inadvertent accomplice to these messes — is basically set up to take every revelation about the underlying truth and split it down the middle, feeding half to one side of the political spectrum and one half to the other, where the actual point is then burned up in the useless smoke of a blame game.
I’d just step back and admire that last sentence if, you know, it weren’t so painfully true.
Warren
“the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess…”
That is EXACTLY why our Founding Fathers gave us a FEDERAL government (destroyed by the 17th Amendment) with limited, enumerated powers. Most of the government largess cannot be defended Constitutionally. Congress simply does not have the power, under the Constitution, for most of the spending they do.
MB
Eh. The founding fathers were cool with calling some of us 3/5ths of a human being. So my inherent deference to them is kinda limited, you know?
As to the limits of Federal power, well, there’s more than a century of jurisprudence (not written by idiots) that disagrees. I understand that one can intellectually disagree with the result, but the facts on the ground (paper?) remain. And the American population, whether one likes it or not, has approved by a massive margin (how many people on Medicare, again?). So I find arguments about where we go from here – instead of where we wish to be – more persuasive.
Warren
Don’t be disingenuous about the 3/5ths, MB. The northern states did not want the slaves counted, and the southern states did. It was actually the slave-holders that wanted them counted.