Good Intent, Bad Faith

Obsidian Wings is one of the best liberal blogs on the internet. It not only has writers that try to focus on facts and nuance, but (especially Hilzoy) tries to give the benefit of the doubt to political adversaries and assume they have the best intent. I’d have to say that I actually find myself in agreement with them more than just about any other blog.

Except on the economic crisis. Part of it is that I don’t subscribe to economic orthodoxy very much, but part of it is that they fall back to pure moral outrage and heart strings tugging. One post of Hilzoy’s showed a lot of pictures from the Great Depression [sorry I searched but couldn’t find it, if someone can point me to it I’ll update]. I think it is immensely important to remember what that time was like, not some fairy tale image, (and on a grim note, I find a lot of them to be almost “artistic” in how they are capturing a part of life that is inconceivable to me) but it was clearly an attempt to twist emotions into supporting the bailout.

Meanwhile, on a lot of economic oriented blogs they were pointing out factors of the bailout bill that would mean things would likely be worse with it. I am going to have some more posts about this in the future, but the point of this post is actually not about economics but decency.

While I was frustrated that Hilzoy wasn’t being her usual self, I understood. I could tell that she was sick with the amount of callousness bordering on indecency that passed for “conservative” thought. The anti-bailout discussion was largely driven by blind ideology and indifference to suffering. And it’s back, big time.

Today Publius talked about a post he finds very indecent. It’s not the author simply disagrees with the bailout, it’s that he talks about the wreckage almost completely abstractly, as if millions of people are mere toys to be swept aside when the game goes wrong…and that they will be saved through the invisible hand.

It really comes off that he couldn’t care less about people. I’m not sure whether the author really believes this, or merely thinking so abstractly that it comes across like he does. God knows I can suffer from the same problem. [After I wrote this I noticed in the comments he explicitly talks about supporting unemployment insurance and the like.] But quite honestly, this is how 95% of the conservative approach comes across on the economic crisis. And it’s almost always by people that don’t have much of a personal stake; there is no hint of self sacrifice to help others. There isn’t even much of a reflection about individual circumstances that might change the calculus. This indifference drives even highly principled liberals completely insane. And so Hilzoy/Publius spend an inordinate amount of time on moral outrage rather than digging up great graphs and studies that I frequently reference and am too lazy to find on my own (such as this that helped me argue from both a liberal AND conservative standpoint that McCain’s tax plan was far worse than Obama’s).

For the record, I am tentatively against the bailout of the automakers and will write about that in the future. For the record, I’m even a radical and for a highly deflationary environment that will most likely lead to a Depression (or more accurately, I’m against trying to stop it at all costs, which is the current consensus) and I’ve explained my reasoning on this site and over the coming months will go into more depth about how I think we can do it without being indecently callous like the last one was.

But I’m also willing to make sacrifices when I feel that they are helping. I have thought about quitting my job and trying to convince people en masse that a certain path is inevitable, and it will take cooperation, determination and sacrifice from us all if we are going to alleviate the suffering. I’m still unsure what to do because it would require giving up on my current dreams, and in the current environment I’m just a single salmon.

I agree more with the “free marketers” at this point, that we shouldn’t bail things out ad hoc — not because of faith in an ideological construct, but because I have studied the different schools of economic thought and feel that the evidence strongly supports the idea that we cannot simply throw money at the problem. And I’ve been weary that most of the same “free marketers” either supported the bailout for the financial industry because it is somehow “different” (there is so much wrong with the phrase “It was used to save the capital markets on which the process of creative destruction depends” I don’t know where to start) or without any foresight at all. However, a lot of the people I read (e.g. this) that convinced me of this inevitability obviously care about their fellow man. Even though they are ideologically opposed to government intervention, they realize that requires having a different system entirely [I’ll talk about historical and theoretical monetary/economic systems at some point] and in our current system it is inevitable. Thus, the key should be how the government intervenes, and on that point it should be to encourage the unwinding of bad policy and offer some basic level of support for workers.

Our current policies do the exact opposite and yet enjoy wide support because the language we are using in the debate is infantile and distracting.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that in the trying times ahead (and the trying times of the past) policy aims should not be a goal in themselves. And when you disagree about policy, you should listen to the fears of the other side and attempt to see if your policy can address it. I loved it when Obama said that he was for progressive taxation not because he felt that the rich were obligated to support those that don’t make as much, but that it made it easier for people with big dreams and personal responsibility to build wealth for themselves. Unfortunately he didn’t really run with it, but I’d like to look more into how accurate that is in the future.

Instead I fear we’re in an environment where policy has become a representation of morality and the common op-eds and discourse only are strengthening that perception. That makes it very hard to analyze how well things are working and makes it a no-brainer that both Obama and McCain ran highly-populist campaigns that played into mass group dynamics. If even Hilzoy is too distracted to look up facts, that augurs bad omens.

What’s even worse is that at this juncture it’s hard to tell how much of the difference is from true disagreements about morality (I’ve had friends that plain out state they don’t care about other people and if they suffer then who cares) and how much is falsely assumed because the arguments are so cliché. If we don’t even know what outcome the nation as a whole wants to produce, how can we get there? Of course as I noted even moral conversations are hard to have. But supposedly this particular topic is one that we all should hold roughly the same moral reasoning about, so it’s a good place to start.