On Apr 3, 2008, at 6:55 AM, Seth Ackerman quoted Dean Baker:
> Now Congress is jumping into the act. Remember way back in the fall
> when
> they couldn’t find $7 billion to expand the State Children’s Health
> Insurance Program? Well, now Congress can finds hundreds of
> billions of
> dollars to support a housing bubble. It’s a worthy goal. After all,
> the
> Wall Street crew might lose their shirts if the housing bubble
> continues
> to deflate.
Maybet Dean is trying to promote his book on the Conservative Nanny State, but what in this piece offers a hint on "how it sould be done"? No serious person thinks that housing prices will stop falling, or that the bubble will resume. His point about the priorities of the bourgeoisie is absolutely correct, but as the Scandinavians showed, you can have both social democracy and a bank bailout. They're not mutually exclusive. Of course in the USA they are. But what's the conclusion? That we shouldn't bail out the financial system just to make a point about intellectual consistency? Dean seems all too willing to concede the philosophical point to the right, perversely enough.
Doug