"Venus" - Television
-Good piece by Krugman today on why we should all be rooting for the Super Committee to fail. These concluding paragraphs -- part of yet another shot at Thomas Friedman -- pretty much sum up why these attempts to transcend politics are fundamentally flawed and elitist:
But don’t we eventually have to match spending and revenue? Yes, we do. But the decision about how to do that isn’t about accounting. It’s about fundamental values — and it’s a decision that should be made by voters, not by some committee that allegedly transcends the partisan divide.
Eventually, one side or the other of that divide will get the kind of popular mandate it needs to resolve our long-run budget issues. Until then, attempts to strike a Grand Bargain are fundamentally destructive. If the supercommittee fails, as expected, it will be time to celebrate.
It would be immensely helpful to the state of debate in this country if the mainstream media could internalize this basic point -- politics is the means by which things are supposed to get done in this country, elections are supposed to be meaningful, and the philosophical positions of the parties and candidates important. Implementing a political agenda is difficult in this country because of the many veto points in the system. But generally speaking there are no other major democracies in the world where we expect opposition parties to significantly cooperate in governng other than in times of grave crisis or in situations where no party can command a majority of the electorate -- and then typically as a very temporary measure.
- Believe it or not, Brooks has a half decent column about the failure of Europe's technocratic elite to consider political opinion in adopting the Euro. This is another failed effort to remove politics from something -- in this case core economic functions surrounding fiscal, currency, and monetary policy -- that really should be at the heart of the democratic enterprise. If the Euro eventually collapses in large swaths of Europe -- and I tend to think it will -- it will actually be a victory for autonomy and democratic accountability, things which at this time are still only possible to preserve by means of the nation-state. (Here is an interesting article about a prescient Euro skeptic also featured in the Times today.)
- And this I just found quite amusing -- and impressive in its way. Sadly could not embed, but well worth clicking the link.
What's going on out there? I feel like I have been hermetically sealed in meetings all week.
