Dakota Beacon

The arrogant liberal intellect has a knack for putting on a show. Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz is a showman. I have dissected Stiglitz's illogic once before, in an early 2009 column titled "Clowns behaving badly."

Presently, we treat the matter of Stiglitz's recent proclamation in Financial Times that:

The blame game continues over who is responsible for the worst recession since the Great Depression–the financiers who did such a bad job of managing risk or the regulators who failed to stop them.

After this opening line, Stiglitz proceeds to argue that nothing short of a "new economic paradigm" can set the world right. The wizard spends 865 words pontificating on economic modeling but dedicates not one word to the biggest cause of the recession: irresponsible lending to irresponsible borrowers driven by liberal government ideologues.

To the liberal, when people mess up, it's one oppressor or another, one victimizer or another, that has oppressed, victimized, and goaded the people into messing up. Stiglitz lays the blame for our economic condition at the feet of "financiers" and "regulators." Foolish people who accepted unaffordable mortgages don't make Stiglitz's list of suspects.

Even more noticeable, the Barney Franks, Chris Dodds, Bill Clintons, and other home ownership "fairness" mongers who pushed lenders to lend to bad risks do not appear on Stiglitz's list.

Stiglitz's statement is most telling about the liberal mentality. Libs are all about central planning. The authoritative mentality holds that government "regulators" could have stopped the greedy "financiers." Never mind that the politicians in charge of the regulators were the same politicians who pushed the financiers to make bad loans in the first place.

In the FT article, Stiglitz carries the silliness further by insisting that if "economists" had come up with models that more emphasized government control of markets then the financiers would never have been allowed to act in the greedy manner than caused massive mortgage defaults. The financiers could have been controlled.

It's all about control--centralized big government control of every aspect of our lives.

We could analyze the rest of Stiglitz's Financial Times article. But we have already covered the main theme. One can take only so much "intellectual" nonsense in one sitting.

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© 2010 Chuck Rogér