Doubling Down
All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping. And it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity. — David Brooks
What if, however, Obama (mostly) succeeds by accident? Don’t we all know — hasn’t Biden, at least, admitted — that this is a high-powered crapshoot? Aren’t we simply shifting risk around, instead of lowering our risk tolerance? Might we, by centralizing risk, actually be raising our affinity for risk? Isn’t the principle here that the government’s ability to deliberately do more somethings than anyone else, or any collection of institutions, stiffens our spines for an even greater, more momentous, more fateful roll of the dice?
Last night I chatted with a random guy wearing a UVA tattoo on one ankle. “I support Obama on this one,” he said. “If this fails, too, it’ll be even harder to fix than the mess we’re in now.”
‘Success’, such as it is, won’t discredit conservative skepticism — so much as prop up, for another round, the luxury of disobeying it: a luxury so precious we’ll try anything to keep enjoying it.
Conservatism has already failed….epically.
I think this analogy is apt.
“Today, with trillions in economic spaghetti being thrown against the wall, enough will stick, however imperfectly, to avoid a 1930s-style calamity.”
From here
— matoko_chan · Feb 24, 04:17 PM · #
Uh… how can someone claim “epistemological skepticism” and then turn around and make this kind of iron-clad, either/or prediction?
Seriously, guys….
— Freddie · Feb 24, 04:29 PM · #
The issue isn’t propping up the luxury of ignoring skepticism, the issue is lots of people losing their houses and jobs, and what, if anything, to do about it.
Skepticism has a permanent and central place in everyones’ toolkit, but it’s not a policy prescription, and it doesn’t mean that nothing should ever be done for the first time.
— peterg · Feb 24, 04:56 PM · #
Conservatives have deliberately put themselves in the ugly position of rooting for Obama to fail.
Unbecoming AND unpatriotic, Lieutenant.
— matoko_chan · Feb 24, 05:28 PM · #
Isn’t this just a re-write of why/how GWB discredited conservatism?
— Tony Comstock · Feb 24, 10:37 PM · #