"It's pretty disappointing to see that given that the government is now plotting the single largest power grab in our lifetimes, the Libertarian blogosphere is hardly as up in arms as one would expect."
I suspect the bailout is a bad idea, on a variety of grounds. Hans Bader has a summary of, and links to, many plausible objections. (link corrected.)
On the other hand, as distasteful as the bailout is, if (and that's a very, very, big if), as a practical matter (i.e., even if there are better alternatives, this is the best we are going to do in practice) the alternative is a complete meltdown of our financial system, friends of liberty are in a bind; the bailout is awful, but the current power grab by Washington is nothing compared to what we could expect if, say, commercial lending virtually ceased, and the stock markets fell an additional 50%. I suspect that this dynamic explains why opposition in the libertarian blogosphere is relatively muted; we bloggers don't know how big a threat there really is to our financial system, nor do we know whether, if the bailout fails, whatever winds up happening instead, including future legislative action, will actually be better.
But does it work if libertarianism is about, you know, liberty?
Boy, if that's so, this must be one unobjectionable bill!
It's similar to, say, security measures against terrorism that violate libertarian principles. Such measures may be troubling, and they may not be necessary. But let's say that gov't tells you that "if we don't do A &B, terrorists will sneak nuclear bombs into the country and blow up several major cities." IF the gov't is correct, you'd much rather have, say, security cameras on every corner, and a national i.d. card, then whatever much worse measures the gov't would take if a couple of major American cities blew up (not to mention the terrible harm from the bombs themselves)
Put another way, crises are not good for liberty, and the worse the crisis, the more infringement there will be on liberty most likely. So you'd rather intervene before a crisis gets out of control.
This particular crisis is obviously partly the result of government, especially Fed policy and Fannie and Freddie, and sometimes gov't may be needed to clean up gov't. I'm not convinced in this case that it's true, but I'm not confident enough in my lack of conviction to focus on opposing the bailout.
Maybe. Or maybe not. Who knows?
I'm more or less against the bailout -- if we're giving away billions, I'd rather see them given directly to the people being foreclosed on, or lent by the feds directly to the people who need credit.
However, knowing that Hans Bader is against the bailout does somewhat reconcile me to it, since I cannot recall his being right about anything. Yeah ... affirmative action caused the present crisis.
When literally everything that happens reinforces your worldview, you don't have ideas, you have an ideology.
Other libertarians, however, _are_ about liberty for its own sake. I consider myself one of those. But David B. is right that crises engender further regulation -- that's an inherent feature of politics, and one we're not entitled to ignore. (Not all libertarians believe that -- Rothbard would say we should do the right thing, and if someone else takes bad actions later, that's their fault. That's actually a common view, and it has stuff going for it, but I reject it.) So, as David B. says, regulating some now to prevent greater (and politically unavoidable) regulation later could be justified. But again, this depends on how likely we are to have a financial meltdown... and see what I said above about financial markets being really complicated.
Third, this involves hard second-best questions. For example, maybe we should never have had Social Security at all, or maybe we should never have gone into Iraq at all. Given that those questions are now moot, it doesn't necessarily follow that immediate abolition of Social Security, or immediate withdrawal from Iraq, are called for; others may have relied on our actions in ways that are morally relevant (e.g., saved less for their retirement, or taken personally risky political positions). In the financial context, if this whole thing was caused by wrongly guaranteeing bad loans, maybe we should never have guaranteed them, but given that we did, and people acted on that basis, maybe some "fixing" is appropriate as long as we continue on a better basis going forward. There are good arguments against this, but again, very complicated.
Arguments about the drug war or the FDA or price controls or abortion or religion, and suchlike, are quite a bit easier... at least given my level of knowledge and expertise.
It is available but I doubt that it will be used. The Banks and such want cash for their bad paper. That way they can buy stuff from those who aren't helped.
This is going to go down as a stab in the back to Bush. Bush trusted his advisors and they played him for the Democrats.
Want to bet against the Democrats having put ACORN and such in the Bill, just hidden? Remember Dodd and Frank were the main people writing the bill.
I just pointed out in one of my many blog posts about the bailout bill that time-consuming affirmative-action mandates are contained in Section 107 of the bailout bill.
I just highlighted the idiocy of Congress spending lots of time dickering over side-issues like affirmative action in government contracts while a purported financial emergency requires a massive government bailout of the entire financial system -- a bailout that Congress, citing urgency, has left to the almost unlimited discretion of the Treasury Secretary on almost every issue BUT affirmative action.
If the world is about to end, does it make sense to dicker over affirmative-action rules, the way Section 107 of the bailout bill does?
Wouldn't it make more sense to spend time thinking about how to protect taxpayers instead?
My most recent blog post, which David Bernstein now cites, articulates more substantive reasons to be concerned about the bailout bill.
Funny, I might have missed something, but I haven't read any accounts of the negotiators "dickering" over affirmative action -- or even that it was a matter of contention that consumed any precious time at all. It does appear, however, that this modest, unremarkable and standard-issue requirement in the midst of the most substantial government market intervention in our lifetime is an interesting litmus test of the sort of government intervention that is most objectionable to certain segments of the libertarian blogosphere.
Then the environmentalist and financial positions are clearly distinguishable. In the first place, I'm more confident that environmentalist doomsday scenarios will not come to pass than I am about financial doomsday scenarios. (In brief, I have some knowledge of the relevant environmental stuff, whereas of the different economists I've read who seem to know what they're talking about, there have been ones that seem credible to me who are very concerned.)
In the second place, I think the stabilize-Wall-Street constituency is more powerful than the prevent-environmental-damage constituency, because a lot of very rich and powerful people have a lot of money riding on financial markets. So if things get worse, I'm more concerned that we'll get worse results in the future because of those people's (wrong) decisions.
This is not to deny that if I were czar, maybe libertarian would require me to do nothing. Libertarianism has content as a political program, at the very least, as something to be done if we could choose the policy forever, and as something to convince people is a good thing to be done. Once you get into the question of preventing worse action in the future, libertarianism still has content as a way of evaluating what's better and worse for this purpose, but it's true, it may seem less distinctive. This is not necessarily a bug. I see libertarianism as an approach to issues, i.e. as a way of posing questions, not as a source of unique answers.
I find it a lot easier to explain why affirmative action is bad than to explain why some more complicated things are bad. Similarly, if the bailout included restrictions on abortion, or included school prayer provisions, or increased arts funding, I would be commenting about those. Not because they're more important necessarily in the grand scheme of things, but because it would be easier for me to understand and express what I find wrong with them. Just a matter of comparative advantage.
"principles" ??
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"Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
-- Julius Henry {Groucho} Marx
Bailout Bill Is Unconstitutional Delegation
Posted by Hans Bader
Constitutional experts have concluded that that the $700 billion bailout bill is an unconstitutional delegation of power, in violation of constitutional separation-of-powers safeguards. I earlier reached the same conclusion in pronouncing the bill “dangerous, inflationary, unnecessary, and unconstitutional.” One of the experts calling its constitutionality into question is Civil Rights Commissioner and Heritage Foundation scholar Todd Gaziano, a separation-of-powers expert who, as a Justice Department lawyer in the Clinton and Bush administrations, “developed the argument adopted by the Supreme Court in Weiss v. United States, 510 U.S. 163 (1993) to uphold the constitutionality of judges detailed to hear cases in the military court system.” Gaziano and Andrew Grossman argue that the bill is likely unconstitutional because it lacks meaningful standards and bars judicial review.
As we noted earlier, the bailout may risk creating future bubbles, and it ignores less costly ways of rescuing financial markets, like the RSC plan, and fails to consider reforms of burdensome regulations that might reduce the need for a bailout. Why should we trust government officials with $700 billion to buy up bad loans, without any clear standards, given that government incompetence and regulations (like affordable housing mandates) helped spawn the crisis? Many economists oppose it.
CEI has been warning of the need for reform of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for years, as Michelle Malkin noted back in 2004, but Congress turned a deaf ear to our pleas, and taxpayers are now paying the price.
I tend to trust Bernanke as an expert on the financial systems and credit market, so I am going along with his judgment. I think that is what Bush did, too.
Paulson, I would trust to broker a deal, and also he is someone who is tapped into Wall Street, but that doesn't make him an expert on the larger economy.
I guess you could say that those libertarians who are not speaking out against the bailout are being either pragmatic (forsaking ideological purity so that an immediate problem can be solved) or self-interested (they are invested in the stock market too, and think this may save them money).
For example, I'm against gun control for two reasons, one is a matter of libertarian principle and the other because it doesn't really work. But what if we replace "gun control" with "nuclear weapon control"? Wouldn't libertarian dogma point to not restricting access to nuclear weapons? But doesn't almost everyone agree that we should work to control nuclear weapons? It seems to me that every libertarian has a certain point that they'll support libertarian policies up to but not beyond. There's a pragmatist in all of us that takes over at some point.
That's how I feel about the bailout *assuming* that Paulson and Bernanke are correct and that doing nothing would cause a collapse of the financial system. I lean libertarian, but I'm not willing to threaten my job and my family with 10 years of a depression in order to prove a point and say "I told you so!". The pragmatist in me says lets save the economy first and then when we look back on the causes we can start thinking libertarian again as we design the rules that will govern us in the future.
If someone puts a revolver in their mouth and pulls the trigger, it might or might not kill them. Who knows?
Moreover, to the extent that the current crisis is fundamentally an unintended consequence of prior government regulation (from mortgage interest tax deductions to the creation of Freddie/Fannie to the CRA to the post-SOX accounting changes), then we're really looking to solve a regulatory mess by creating a new regulatory mess. If government is allowed to grow in size and might in order to fix the problems that it has already created, then government is really just a vicious cycle of self-perpetuating growth.
In short, a libertarian might object to the bailout on the basis of the complexity, but not because the libertarian is modest or economically-uneducated - instead, it may be because the libertarian, more than most, should be cognizant of the broader limits on human wisdow and intelligence, and thus may suspect that the government - and its bureaucrats - really cannot provide a better "solution" than anyone else. The solution is to let the market function, and, to the extent that congress should be doing anything, it should be removing the regs that contributed this mess, and should be looking at clawbacks of executive pay at Freddie and Fannie (OK, that may be too ex post facto).
If libertarians did understand the power of morality, which most never have, they would be storming the Bastille. Since they don't, they're not.
If they don't, then the question becomes "what are the circumstances under which different approaches work best?" There must be a plethora of historic data to analyze.
Applying a "one size fits all" approach has simplicity and ideological purity to recommend it. Nevertheless, if it doesn't stand the test of reality, then it is time to develop a more complex model.
Most of the previous comments on this thread seem to reflect a more ambivalent attitude towards government's role in this crisis. Does this ambivalence translate into broader philosophical implications? Or does this reflect an ad hoc reaction to the current situation?
If pure free market principals are indeed invariably right, then what is happening now is a beneficial (though perhaps temporarily unpleasant) correction.
Additionally, the market-ideologue in me wants to lay the blame at the regulators' feet (Freddie/Fannie/CRA, etc.), which is satisfying in a visceral sort of way, but what I really worry about is whether the upstream will be repaired in a way to stem the tide of pollution that has made so many (junior tranche) MBSs toxic. That is, we risk throwing good money after bad if we put bandaids on Wall Street's dam while ignoring Freddie/Fannie's negligence or recklessness that allowed so many bad loans to be hidden in the REMICs.
With that said, I say "bully" to those in the House who voted "no". Let's have an election that focuses on what-went-wrong and let the voters decide which side had the better argument!
Compounding the problem, we keep keep letting in tens of thousands of peasant goyim each week that likewise are looking for jobs founded on the phantom economy (e.g. house building).
We have a FIRE economy right now -- Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. It will not keep any country afloat no matter how much Wall Street would like to believe it.
Some libertarians believe this -- the strong version, with the invariably thrown in.
A great many libertarians believe a weaker version with a "usually" instead of the "invariably." Libertarians vary along a continuum depending on their view of "usually."
Other libertarians prefer free-market approaches independent of economic outcomes. (I tend to be this way.) They would tend to not care about the economic outcome -- unless, as I indicated above, they feel it's morally O.K. to anticipate foreseeable actions by other people, e.g. worse policies later on. To the extent they care, that would make them into "usually" types rather than "invariably" types.
So... if you go onto the blogs of the hard-core libertarians, for instance anarcho-capitalists or Austrians or Objectivists or similar, you'll find a very hard-core opposition to the bailout. If you read the blogs of more mainstream libertarians -- some of them "moderate" or "pragmatic," others not -- you'll find more ambivalence, but not necessarily because they're changing their mind; rather, it's because their libertarianism was never this hard-core caricature that some people like to portray. The caricature is philosophically defensible and does describe some people, but not the bulk of mainstream libertarians.