Apr 29th, 2009 at 9:56 am
100 Days
The Daily Beast put together a compilation of various folks’ thoughts on Obama’s First 100 Days. Mine is here.
I would also affiliate myself with Reihan Salam’s remarks. Separately, but also at the Beast, I have a column about Obama’s difficulty getting his nominees confirmed and why (a) the Republicans should stop acting like whiny toddlers and (b) the country should rely less on political appointees and more on civil servants.
19 Responses to “100 Days”
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April 29th, 2009 at 10:21 am
the country should rely less on political appointees and more on civil servants
Fire them all instead. All that most of them do is take money from people being paid by others in mutually beneficial arrangements, and blow said money on a series of Tullock Lotteries. “Bureaucrat” used to be a term of disgust in this country, but not in MY’s world.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Wow, Healthy Markup! I used to have left-of-center economic views, but after reading your comment I believe that the fact that people agreed to redistribute goods or money (from the distribution that existed before the agreement) in one way makes that the only functional arrangement for distributing resources as opposed to being just a powerful and positive tool for the possibilities of growth for the economy and dignity for the individual it generally entails. I also realize that when people use bureaucrat as a pejorative it automatically means they share your (and my new-found) beliefs.
Behold the power of comments sections!
April 29th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Not that I expect my sarcasm in the previous comment to convert any libertarians (the themes of libertarianism are a lot better than many alternatives) in this particular medium. I think everyone who disagrees with me is wrong, but they should keep thinking their own thoughts.
April 29th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Gee, Panicker, how generous of you! May I humbly suggest that you may benefit from contemplating wht it means for an individual to “agree” to do something?
April 29th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Matthew, may I also humbly suggest that you endeavor to avoid quasi-disingenuous euphemisms? For instance, let us observe the appointment of a guy to head Treasury and thus the IRS, who failed to declare tens of thousands of dollars in income on his 1040, despite his having signed a document acknowledging it was taxable income from which taxes had not been witheld, who then said the failure was due to his ignorance regarding the taxable nature of the income, and the lack of witholding. Maybe, just perhaps, such a situation is not most accurately described as…
“Ever since embarrassing revelations emerged about problems with the tax forms of some of Barack Obama’s appointees,….”
April 29th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Gee, Panicker, how generous of you! May I humbly suggest that you may benefit from contemplating wht it means for an individual to “agree” to do something?
Kind of fuzzy, ain’t it?
Basics of what I think he is talking about . . .
Libertarians, when they are talking in jargon, assume that any human value exchange is “freely agreed on” by default, without making judgments as to whether said agreements are forced by unequal power arrangments, misrepresentation, etc. Since they do not accept the validity of governments, any government restrictions on any value exchanges are . . . bad . . . in various ways. Morally and/or legally illegitimate. Since government has no moral or legal right to exist or act, any value transfered from an individual to government is illigitemite . . . theft, coercion, or simply wasteful.
Uh. That’s a start.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Can i just say that your pic is soooooooooo much hotter than all the other people’s?
April 29th, 2009 at 12:15 pm
The three men on the right look like they’re pondering some serious ass-kicking.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
“The world urgently needs major polluting countries to sharply and quickly reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. And the odds of legislation robust enough to do that obtaining the 60 necessary votes in the Senate look very bleak.”
Completely agreed. So how about more writing on what we can do at the margins to improve the situation?
April 29th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
Biden and Rahm look like they’re really getting tired of humoring Bill.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Uh, no, Midland. No libertarian I know of fails to condemn misrepresentation, and nearly all believe that the state should take forcible action against fraud. Libertarians, while having varying views of what constitutes the legitimate exercise of state power, are most certainly not anarchists. The see a role for a state, even if it is an extremely, extremely, small state, along what the anarcho-capitalits speak favorably of. At the other end of the libertarian spectrum, there are people who think child labor laws, for instance, are legitimate, because at some point the individual is too young to give informed consent to a contract.
One of the most fatuous notions put constantly forth by left-statists is that being favorably disposed to libertarian philosophy means one favors a Somalia-like polity.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Did anyone else spot the style problem in the first sentence? The modifier doesn’t modify what it’s supposed to modify. But on substance, here here!
April 29th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
Will Allen, like 2X4 McArdle, is a security-state libertarian. He wouldn’t mind if the US government attached a GPS device to his nether regions for monitoring purposes as long as tax rates on income he will never earn are low and the monitoring has been outsourced to a private company.
For an incredibly-illuminating discussion on this mentality, go read the torture-memo thread at McArdle’s blog and revel as the posters try to figure out how to apply the Coase Theorem to waterboarding.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Meanwhile, from the “things MattY, the Daily Beast, and the MSM try to hide from you” department, here’s my categorized 100 days round-up. Click each topic’s link to see the posts about that topic.
P.S. In case anyone replies to this their responses will almost assuredly be ad homs, because providing a valid counter-argument would be difficult indeed.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
I have a lot less rosy view than Matt. Obama gets very low marks on two of the absolute most important items on his agenda: the economy and the Constitution.
1) Obama is screwing up on the economy. His stimulus is too small, in part because he employed the novel negotiating tactic of conceding up front. And he is mishandling the Wall St. bail out in a way that could easily fail, will certainly cost taxpayers much more money than it should, and is fundamentally unfair. I don’t give him a pass because he is a politician. So was James Madison.
2. Obama is screwing up on the Constitution. He is doing less than nothing to counteract the outrageous expansion of illegal and unconstitutional executive “authority” that occurred under Bush. He is weak on accountability for torture and other war crimes. And he is continuing Bush’s state secrets policy, while simultaneously doing nothing to counteract the very dangerous precedents established by Bush. I don’t give him a pass because he is a politician. So was Thomas Jefferson.
He’s doing a good job on Iraq, which is the other major issue he faces. So I give him a D+ on the economy, an F on the Constitution, and an A- on Iraq. That D+ GPA is pretty crappy.
Yes, of course any Republican would be doing far worse, but the existence of an even more disgusting shit sandwich somewhere else in the world doesn’t make the shit sandwich I’m currently being force fed any more palatable.
April 29th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Actually, savage, you are lying about my views of government surveillance, and I have stated from the beginning that torture should be illegal, period, and that I favor indictments for torture. Why do people like you feel compelled to lie so frequently?
Yes, I understand that you don’t think economic liberty is just as important as liberty in other types of human behavior, and that you don’t think voluntary human interactions and relationships are preferred to those forcibly compelled by the state.
April 29th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
[...] http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/100-days.php [...]
April 29th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Most people have little difficulty countering your first point in any argument, but you remain uncountered after that. Sadly, this is because no one bothers reading further. I suggest an endless string of computer generated aliases, so that you can make the most of your name recognition.
April 30th, 2009 at 12:45 am
So if Obama’s health and education proposals, which he is leaving to Congress to actually craft, pass some time this summer then his first 100 days is better than 8 years of Clinton. However, the failure to pass climate change legislation isn’t Obama’s fault but due to political constraints. You have apparently taken Emerson to heart