Hey look – it’s the Goodyear blimp!

My mother tells a story of a neighbor of her family during the 1950s whose basement flooded during heavy spring rains. Overcome by rage, the neighbor could only manage to growl, “Roosevelt!”

There’s something kind of charming about this variety of craziness — it’s sort of nostalgia gone awry. I’d like to be able to work myself into a rage about the French Revolution or the Teapot Dome scandal sometime. Perhaps I’ll howl “Gutenberg!” next time the laser printer jams.

P O’Neill: oh, they’re all around, including a lot of self-styled libertarians and the odd “leftist” (both of whom should know better). It’s certainly a handy marker for knowing that you’ve wandered into a conversation that’s guaranteed to be unproductive.

what do you mean “policy flippancy in the White House these days”?

Americans learned this last week that Colin Powell spent a whole two and one half hours–150 minutes!–trying to talk Bush out of launching a needless war that has killed hundreds of thousands and cost America at least a half a trillion bucks.

Can you imagine the grave, unflippant sobriety, the solomonic seriousness, of talking for a whole two hours to keep someone from destroying your country? And then the even more immense, heroic, seriositude of shooting the shit for another half hour after that didn’t work? I mean, good lord, did Abraham Lincoln ever ponder a decision for an entire two and a half hours? Did Truman? Surely not.

And we also know that every previous White House has had the following totally serious rule: if a policy advisor cannot talk the President out of lying and cheating his way into a disastrous foreign-policy debacle on the first attempt, then they’re never allowed to bring it up again. No re-dos–that’s exactly what Washington said to his cabinet back in 1791.

So, I mean, what could Powell do? Really, I mean, what could he do? He had tried talking with the President for almost as long as, say, a shortish graduate seminar lasts, or an extended lunch. And that didn’t do the trick. So clearly he had to go before the UN and do his best to lie the rest of us into the same insane, self-destructive war.

But it was all very sober and deliberate on all sides, of that we can be sure. And there was no flippancy involved whatsoever.

“Franklin Delano Roosevelt chose the price of gold using the same methods with which you or I would choose PowerBall ticket numbers.”

Whereas the market prices gold with millions of people chooosing PowerBall ticket numbers.

Roosevelt chose the price of gold by a formula set to include the birthdates of his wife and kids? (or, sometimes, from the numbers in a fortune cookie?) That really is something to learn.

Will’s column

“The Depression’s persistence, partly a result of such policy flippancy, was frightening.”

Yeah, 8% average annual GDP growth from 1933-1940. Saint Ronnie never managed that in a single year.

Shorter Will: Why can’t Democrats clean up the messes Republicans leave behind faster?

(I think we’ll be seeing that one again)

Have a look at Kevin Drum’s reaction to Redstate’s wingnuttery.

If Drum is right, there was a principled and sensible reason for FDR’s choosing the day’s price in a semi-random way:

he wanted the price to go up gradually, and he wanted it to go up in an erratic and non-predictable way so that speculators would not be able to predict its moves.

In other words, he was not being flippant by using family birthdays. He was just doing some ordinary pseudo-randomizing, and for a very good reason.

If Drum is right, and if Will and then Redstate were really so clueless as this makes them sound, then by gum I’m going to spring out of my chair and pace around in abject belief.

(I think Henry has used a version of this argument before.)

I even saw the lights of the Goodyear Blimp, it said Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was a pimp.

I ran into a less sophisticated version of this (is such a thing possible) while teaching last year. A student of mine got in a tizzy–several times–reciting what a terrible person Roosevelt was. How he took away freedom and property and ruined a lot of people’s lives, but no one’s alive from back then so we’ve forgotten it. Really. She got very upset.

I’m sure all you people know a lot.
Me?
I like my gold.
It is yellow metal, heavy shiny and reassuring.
Play any game you like.
I make money when I choose to play with it, but really I just like owning it.
And if you have a problem with that, blow it out your ass.

Has pietr secured the color or has the color secured him?

And if you have a problem with that, blow it out your ass.

You’re a charmer, Pietr. Walking your streets, fantasizing about “take[ing] a swing at one one of these creeps.” Very precious that gold.

Hmm, gold seems to have hitherto unsuspected neurotoxicity, as well.

I know it was the culprit on an episode of House

Jacob,

Are you sure your student hadn’t confused FDR’s tenure with Teddy Roosevelt’s? (Presumably mixing up the dates; less plausibly, but more entertainingly, conflating the substance of their administrations.)

Actually I am a charmer.
My blog is one place where I don’t have to be, but ‘fantasising’ about taking a swing at somebody isn’t something I devote time to; obviously if I did I’d have been ‘blowing it out my own ass’ years ago in some lock-up or other.
Equally obviously I actually did take a swing a couple of times in my youth, but when you realise you are up against the majority of life-forms in a country like Britain, a more systemic approach is called for.
Hence the writing.
And the occasional escape to North America, where despite any contrary argument, things really are better and a guy has some kind of chance.

Neurotoxicity? Not as toxic as you, mate.

It’s this kind of historical obsession that played a key part in my giving up on libertarianism, actually, along with facing up to the realities of health care. Libertarian economics might work if you had a basically sane corporate culture, with a lot of decision-making power in the hands of people who understood that their social position can become fragile, that optimizing short-term and local profits isn’t an unlimited good, that cooperation with the rest of the society helps promote long-term opportunity for business too, that gratuitous social stratification feeds into unrest that ends up hurting the business environment, and so on. Say, business as conducted by people like Jim Henley and Neel Krishnaswami. :)

Unfortunately, far too much corporate power is in the hands of people who genuinely do feel personal hurt and anger over things that FDR and Theodore Roosevelt did, and who really have been planning their political and social strategy to roll back the New Deal and the Square Deal for decades. These are the people who subsidize the individuals and groups like Frum who will tell them that a scared and helpless public is good for liberty and morality. The lesson they’ve taken away from a century of public response to the excesses of their class is that they need slicker PR and more jackboots. The lesson for the rest of us has to be not so much “oh no, not again” as “always and ever”.

I didn’t think that there were any Gold Bugs outside the editorial offices of the Wall Street Journal.

Returning to the gold standard is actually part of the official platform of the Texas Republican Party. Not that this should be particularly surprising. In fact, it’s one of the sanest parts of the document.

…radically different internal cultures…

Sure, but Google and Halliburton live in different environments. Like cockroach and shrimp. They are different in that sense. But I’m sure Google is not that different from, say, Adobe or Microsoft circa 1980s.

Redstate is off his rocker. Were I to choose Powerball tickets, in the uncommon event that the Powerball lottery was offering an overlay, I would carefully choose my numbers to all be greater than 12, so as to significantly reduce the likelihood that I would be sharing the prize with someone else. Since each number combination is equally likely, but more people pick number combinations that include dates (like birthdates and anniversaries), number combinations that don’t include dates result in a higher expectation value (EV) per ticket than those that do include dates.

Or perhaps we don’t hate corporations as such at all, but regard them as enjoying inappropriate privileges under the law and framed by social and legal expectations that make it too easy to do stupidly harmful stuff and insufficiently reward either competence or excellence. Tell me, do you question whether the victims of muggings and assaults might really just be jealous of their assailants’ superior wealth and strength?

pietr: I say old bean, when was the last time a corporation mugged you?

Hah, you are a Canadian! No USian who has ever dealt with one of our for-profit hospitals or HMOs could ask a crazy question like that.

Gold is, after all, the metal with the broadest shoulders.