OK . . . I don't know much about economics, but it's important to me to have some strong opinions about it anyway. If I have a strong opinion about something, that gives me a good feeling that I have some minimal understanding of it (which is open to question when it comes to me and economics).
[UPDATE: That paragraph elicited an unexpectedly strong reaction from LemmusLemmus over at Church of Rationality:
I say hats off for writing that. I'm pretty sure that 99% of humans, including myself, are like that, but no one ever admits it.]So hearing this brief comment by Mickey Kaus in the latest "Bob & Mickey" Bloggingheads diavlog was a minor revelation for me. It could certainly provide the impetus for one to shift significantly leftward in one's economic views. The point seems so obvious that he couldn't have been the first to come up with it, but it hadn't occurred to me before.
I'm going to try to notice more instances of this, not just about bankruptcy. It obviously has huge implications for the controversy over the United States government's bailout of Wall Street in the current financial crisis, which is the context in which Kaus brought it up.
Someone should write a whole article based on this insight. Not me! To steal an old running feature that a blogger used to have, I should start "Jalcoh's assignment desk." I assign this to . . . Mickey Kaus! (By the way, the first paragraph in the blog post I just linked to was pretty prescient about terrorism.)
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