Commenter Archive

Comments by Rortybomb*

On “On How the State Determines That You Have No “Proprietary Interest” In Your Own Tweets

"Roger Pilon was arguing against civil asset forfeiture because it’s an antiquated, even superstitious way to treat persons, things, and crimes."

I need to think this through and read some more (not a lawyer here), but I've always read civil aset forfeiture as a type of "justice in transfer" check by the government.

The government believes that the property in question - hence why it is the US vs. $100,000 or whatever - is owned or has been transfered through illegitimate means, or with other illegitimate contraband property. If any person can't justify how they own the property through just transfer then no property ownership claim is illegitimate.

Prone to abuse for all the reasons you've mentioned, but justifying the distribution of property through a system of legitimate transfers strikes me as comfortable with libertarian ideas (indeed essential?), instead of a "antiquated/superstitious" ideas.

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Right, but those links are primarily about civil asset forfeiture, which is different than criminal (or the summary forfeiture of contraband, which is Stevens' topic). Imagine I fairly bargain as a hit man to receive money to kill someone, do so with a gun, get paid, and get then caught, tried and jailed. Do I have a property right to keep the money? Do I have a right to keep the gun?

We'll obviously we have (vastly?) different opinions of the Commerce Clause - shouldn't get the in way of this important issue!

I always wonder if one reason some progressives get uncomfortable about other progressives who bring up Ron Paul as an important voice on the War on Terror (or libertarians on civil liberties more broadly) do so because they think approaching the issue from a point of view hostile to public power will hit a wall quickly and undermine longer-term arguments. Or because they abandon a lot of the language already buil. I need to build that argument out. Mark Ames had a great post on how human rights groups "lost" worker rights as a human right in the Cold War.

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Thanks for the kind comments! Three things Jason:

1. If there can't be some progressive / libertarian alliances on the current state of the War on Crime, War on Drugs and mass incarceration, it's not clear where (domestically) one could imagine an alliance.

2. If we want to disagree: I actually do think that there is no pre-political property (#teamprogressive !), or at least the government determines the boundaries and relationships of where property rights exists. (I agree in large part with Bruenig.)

But that just reinforces my commitment to having property claims that reinforce human flourishing, exchange and cooperation rather than claims that reinforce authoritarianism and the mechanisms of policing. But when I resist the latter, I don't really think that I'm resisting on terms of an abstract, pre-political "economic liberty" or some such.

3. Do you think Justice Stevens is wrong in his quote from the post that "Congress has decided -- and there is no question about its power to do so -- to treat the interest in 'privately' possessing cocaine as illegitimate; thus governmental conduct that can reveal whether a substance is cocaine, and no other arguably 'private' fact, compromises no legitimate privacy interest" ?

Because it seems settled, though it's all about determining property, and even when I see libertarians resist it it's usually on "there's no perfect sniffing dog" arguments that stipulates Stevens' argument, e.g.:
http://reason.com/archives/2005/01/28/who-let-the-dogs-in

On “The Middle Class Isn’t Dying

Jesse Ewiak is correct. I haven't gone through all the comment, but those four (plus the price of a second car) have swallowed up middle class gains. This Warren piece is the best at it:
http://bostonreview.net/BR30.5/warrentyagi.php

This is middle-class as a consumption basket, which is only partially the story. You also need a insurance/investment basket in there. And you may also want something about mobility, about political power, about debt and inequality. Or maybe not.

On “They’re coming to get you Barbara…

Mike I don't mean to jump at you. I'm just trying to seriously think through all the counternarratives. I think Americans are over-invested in housing, (though I think there are very specific rational reasons for this other than just patriotic duty).

"They were also getting more and more aggressive as time went on, due largely in part to huge demand for the underlying securities. "

And see here is where a "tragedy of the commons" can easily kick in when it comes to lending standards. Did you hear This American Life's episode on the Giant Pool Of Money? They have subprime lenders talk about how the place across town started no-income, so they had to to keep up. Other place had no-doc loans later, and can sell at that volume to the asset market. When the asset market calls them, they don't have that volume, so they lose out. Bad equilibrium.

It may be making excuses after the fact, but I do think this (ramping up the risk of a 'riskless' position) has serious economic problems.

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"As much as 70 percent of recent early payment defaults had fraudulent misrepresentations on their original loan applications, according to one recent study...Applications with misrepresentations were also five times as likely to go into default."

That's not the same as 70% of defaults were caused by a fraudulent misrepresentation. And it isn't at all exogenous. There's no reason to believe that the subprime lender didn't encourage this fraud if he thought the person would pay fees and survive mostly 2 years to grab the equity from rising home prices.

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"The problem is that those markets never should have been opened up to begin with."

Why? The CRA has done very well. Carney admits this.

I think the problem is the way they were opened - they were opened in this very cynical financial way of betting that housing would rise for 2 years, and that the bank and the person could split the equity on this gamble. (This is de facto how the loans look, even if neither person consciously was aware of it.) 2 years of high fees and then a forced prepayment.

This is not a 30-year prime mortgage that the CRA was looking to give. At all.

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Hey thanks for the link - finally, an OG feature!

Mike at The Big Stick,

Carney's argument, that Horse to Water meme, is best understood as a Tragedy of the Commons type event. One sheep grazing = ok, all sheeps grazing = terrible. Seeing the one sheep grazing makes all the other farmers want to run in. That's how I read it.

I think that's problematic because (a) subprime had a different business model all together more akin to cc - different fields (b) the idea that commerical banks in general (much less the CRA divisions!) "went first into" the subprime market, and went in deeper, is factually incorrect, c) the story about underwriting and loosening standards is more complicated than most let on (d) it rests on an assumption that subprime lenders were stupid in a very particularly and narrow way, rather than caught off guard in general by how quick the collapse happened (or incredibly clever in grabbing fees and passing the risk along).

I'd really like to read that Cowen link re: 70% defaults via fraud in loan applications if you can find it.

On “difference/disorder

Homosexuality is a poor choice of comparison; depression is not. Freddie, if Eli Lily came out with a 100% effective no side-effects depression vaccine, would you want children to take it? Be forced to take it?

My nephew is autistic, and I think you are handling this conversation very well Freddie. I think those who want to argue against disorder aren't PC, but instead (rightfully, imho) worried about the closure of possibilities and interventions that come with the medical label. There's a disorder label, but also a disorder procedural - and that procedure tends to be a bit of a disaster in medical science. Especially when the cures that we are finding are less science and more human interaction, therapy and (controversially) diet.

This is not the same fight as deaf people who don't want to be able to hear through science/medical intervention.

On “Weekend League Round-Up!!!

Have you thought about losing one of the columns? Random reader here, terrible at graphic design, but I rarely even look at the columns, and each entry has so much text it gets swallowed in the page; making the center column wider may make it easier to read the long entries.

On “Correctly Political: Tea and Sympathy for the Devil You Know

I like this a lot; it has influenced some of my thinkg in this matter. Wendy Brown:

http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/mellon/American%20Nightmare.pdf

While Frank is clearly correct about the neocon leadership’s hand waving over such issues and its pursuit of policies at odds with the economic welfare of its working- and middle-class base, his analysis assumes rather than queries the “interests” he imputes to this base. Neoliberal de-democratization produces a subject who may have no such interests, who may be more desirous of its own subjection and complicit in its subordination than any democratic subject could be said to be.27 That is, even as Frank explains compellingly how the rich and powerful have exploited the disappointment and frustration of working- and middle-class America, this explanation hews to a model of objective interests on one side and ideological obfuscation and manipulation on the other. Thus it resurrects a certain political hopefulness through the worn figure of “false consciousness” and
eschews the more troubling possibility of an abject, unemancipatory, and anti-egalitarian subjective orientation amongst a significant swathe of the American populace.

To see this more clearly, let us revisit four aspects of neoliberal de-democratization, considering them now as the seedbed of the new political form that I’m suggesting is produced at the intersection of neoliberal and neoconservative rationalities: (1) the devaluation of political autonomy, (2) the transformation of political problems into individual problems with market solutions, (3) the production of the consumer-citizen as available to a heavy degree of governance and authority, and (4) the legitimation of statism.
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Fantastic! Please post again. (though maybe break into smaller posts - I normally skip the longest ones here.)

Re: Marcuse. One of the most important things I take away from the Freudian-inflected Hegelian Marxists is the desire to turn the rational political agent on his or her head. In America especially, politics is centered on the model that a person has an economic interest, and has a social interest. So you can be a (9, -8), and be a libertarian, or a (3,9) and be an evangelical, etc.

Now people who trouble that, say Thomas Frank or Reihan Salam, still use the framework but say that one is influencing the other. But they still assume that the agent is rational, and trying to maxmizing between the two numbers. But what if (a) there is only one impulse, and there is no disconnect? And more importantly, (b) what if the very notion of a political desire rationally mapped onto outcomes can't cover the political feeling we have? What if alienation, subjection and trauma - the language of Freud - are the guiding forces in pushing us towards our political realm?

I always try to at least include that trail of thought when I think something like "but your interests are in conflict!" Interests are what I'm presuming, though they are the very thing in contest.

On “freeing the country from the credit trap

Fantastic post - thanks for bringing this to light.

On “A Critique of the System, or: A Fool and his Money….

I take arguments like Warren's The Two-Income Trap (and more general ideas about Risk Transfer) that the problem with Americans households isn't that we are consuming too much out of discretionary income, but that we are spending more on education and health care, and that is pushing us over.

I appreciate arguments that our current levels of consumption are unsustainable - but I also realize I get food and clothes much, much cheaper than my parents did. (They wore suits, to like the movies!) However my education and health care costs, as well as housing, are bounds above theirs.

I'm curious as to your reaction to this line of inquiry; if you have mentioned it before, sorry.

On “It may a horrible, terrible, no good, rotten and dirty plan but it’s the best we have for now…

Sorry that was long. Last note. There are unexpected consequences of forming public-private hybrid monsters, and giving banks the impression that they are too-big-to-fail, and we are already seeing this. See how AIG is using the government's credit card to fix prices

http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/yet-another-reason-why-the-bailout-was-a-terrible-idea.html

And then realize we are going to do the same thing, on a larger scale, with a handful of the largest, globalized banks. We don't know how they are already using their implicit taxpayer bonus to expand and crush their competition, but I know they have their best minds on it.

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"However, as we move forward and rewrite the rules governing financial markets, simpler, smaller and less dangerous is something worthwhile to consider...Second, no one is expecting a return to the original market conditions he speaks of, at least no one I know that understands this business. "

1) If this plan works, why would we rewrite the banking rules? Isn't the underlining assumption that the banks, as is, are fine except for this one minor problem off to the side? What we are doing here isn't showing off how much we have the banking industry over a barrel but how much they have us over one.

2) Re: nationalization. I understand not liking the AIG flap (though I did), but are you disgusted when FDIC takes a bank into receivership? The public noticing that it was having a large transfer from it's taxes to connected financial insiders and being upset with that doesn't colors my impression of a citi takeover.

3) I'm so glad I didn't push to go work at the FDIC - those guys are going to get left holding the bag on this giveaway.

4) Brad Delong makes an excellent case that with the taxpayer subsidy and the long-horizons and risk neutrality of the government, the mortgages may be worth something. But as ED Kain notes, mid-sized banks that made responsible choices also have those horizons, as does Warren Buffet (famously). The fact that nobody is looking to pay what is need is worrisome to me.

* Click through to my blog; that email that is circulating around started as a blog post I linked through to - it is an blogger sending an email to the FDIC.

On “Watchmen

Late, but: Speaking of masochism, why would you have gone to see the movie if you didn't like (to put it gently) the comic? You knew the movie was going to be worse....

On “Redefining Prosperity

What's your take on "Shop Craft as Soulcraft"? Perhaps an OG reading group when it comes out? (I would be in!)

He quotes, from the initial piece, from Sennet's The Culture of the New Capitalism, and I like his description of the new (last?) man:

"Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience."

Independent of how good or bad your tv's or toys are, there's something about the personalities the 21st century workforce creates...

On “Capital not Trade Regulation

"Namely since the ability to make loans comes from the social trust"

It may have been developed elsewhere, but what work is 'social trust' doing here? Is it, as a vector of our money supply (and perhaps as a result of moral hazard in the business model) and depending on savings accounts from the commons to make loans requires people trusting their savings accounts are going to be there - they require the government and people to trust their actions? If so, they already pay to the commons (interest on your savings account) and pay a large fee in time/energy/wages to assure FDIC that they are properly capitalized. It's not a small amount of money.

Or is it a more radical critique - that the idea of an interest rate is really just a proxy for communities and social interactions?

On “Hollow Men

Curses wrong thread!

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Seperately re: Donnie Darko - one of my favorite things to do at a hipster bar with an internet jukebox is to play the original Tears For Fears version of "Mad World", and watch all the arty girls get pissed off that it isn't the Gary Jules version.

If you haven't heard the original, it is terrible in a great way.

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Explain Limbaugh to me. I listen to him from time to time, but listen to Sean Hannity more; I wouldn't trust either guys as the vanguard of a movement. They are, in Derbyshire's words, carnival barkers.

I think it is fairly established that a Limbaugh platform would look to skip the first time as tragedy and get straight to the farce:

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=07&year=2008&base_name=limbaugh

But maybe that platform is more principled than the platforms I am used to seeing.

On “my blog post titles demonstrate my ironic detachment and caustic verve

There's an Oxes album where people are protesting the band, and someone is holding up a sign that says "Sarcasm Does Not Equal Irony!" It's pretty awesome.

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Speaking of whitness and lack of, I just realized the abbreviation of Ordinary Gentlemen is "O.G."

Crap Email From a Dude, via Jezebel, is one of my favorite things on the internet, for whatever that is worth.

On “Jindal: debt is bad when we say it is

Freddie, everytime someone comments "If you have read...by Charles Murray" an angel gets its wings.

In defense of Jindal, giving the retort speech is always a terrible thing to do; it's the political equivalent of playing the Globetrotters. I'm surprised Jindal signed up for it.

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