Letters Top Five
October 13, 2008 | 1:00
am
Each week, your Letters Maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.
After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems), she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, from which she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper.
Last week The Times received 955 usable letters, 736 of which were in our Top Five Topics:
- The debates: 307 letters, reacting to the Palin-Biden and McCain-Obama faceoffs. For the first week in a month, Sarah Palin did not receive her own category in the Top Five;
- Presidential election, other: 232 letters, many opining on the nasty tone of this year's election season;
- Economy: 116 letters responding to what was arguably the biggest story of the week;
- Immigration: 49 letters, reacting to this story, this story, this editorial, and this editorial about immigration; and
- California government: 32 letters, mainly commenting on the state's budget woes.
Berlinski gives us platitudes (Times, 10/21). The free market is an abstract idea, like the social contract or a personal God. Nobody has ever seen one. We've known for centuries that debt and lending are a two-edged sword, creative but prone to excesses. That goes back to John Law and his 1718 Banque Royale, or even earlier. Paper currency adds flexibility, but is often corrupted. We need regulation because those who create debt plan only for boom times. However, the regulators are easily distracted and corrupted. Think of the automatic Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget cuts that were supposed to keep the federal budget out of deficit: would a college freshman defend such a scheme as credible? Did those fictitious budget cuts stop Greenspan?
Modern governments control interest rates and the economy in many ways. Our government now prohibits shorting financial stocks- that's market manipulation. We have the plunge protection team (the real name is more mundane- Google it if you don't know about it), which Reagan created to slow stock market declines. Nobody is serious about restraining upward excesses. The rich love bubbles. Those of us who own stocks are to some extent favored by these government measures which increase stock prices whereas those at the bottom end have no stocks and can’t take advantage of money creation. Periodic market crashes inevitably follow Greenspan type bubbles and wipe out many working class people. The plunge protection team, operating secretly, plays favorites.
All governments manipulate markets; this has been true for centuries. Russia and Zimbabwe have regulators; some governments are more corrupt than others, none are free of corruption. Success and militarism increase corruption.
The idea that hundreds of millions of people can be governed fairly without the regulators shoving money to their pals is a fairy tale, like the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act of 1985. Who regulates the regulators? Power corrupts and concealed power is the worst of all.
Posted by: Bob Snodgrass | October 22, 2008 at 08:23 AM