The secret of his failure

I finally understand David Brooks.

It's not that he doesn't believe the things he writes, or that he is constantly looking for a way to suck up to the powerful (though he is.) It's that he is basically a functional amnesiac, who doesn't even understand the basic concept of intellectual consistency, and has no reason to want to put it into practice.

"In the past two decades, the United States has become a much more interesting place. Companies like Starbucks, Apple, Crate & Barrel, Microsoft and many others enlivened daily life."

One of the things David Brooks loves to do is insult latte sipping, Crate & Barrel shopping effete liberal elites. In THIS column, however, he claims that the very symbols of effete liberal elitism make the United States more interesting and enliven daily life. There seems to be a conflict here, until you realize that David Brooks has, for all intents and purposes, never read a David Brooks column and doesn't know what David Brooks thinks. His memory is wiped clean every evening when he goes to sleep. Where some of us might look at things like, say, the growth of Starbucks, and see complex difficult to parse trends, David Brooks glances at them, spots one facet, comments on it, and then the next day takes another glance, spots another facet, and comments on that, without ever having to resolve the conflict between his beliefs. Through this method he manages to say a host of conflicting things that all contain a grain of truth but are, fundamentally, wrongheaded because they fail to take into account other facets of the phenomena he's describing (E.G. The fact that chain stores have driven interesting local stores out of business, which homogenizes American life rather than enlivening it, and the fact that there is not a single thing at Crate & Barrel that a sane healthy person would want to purchase.)

Let's continue.

Despite decades of affluence, longstanding issues like health care, education, energy and entitlement debt have not been adequately addressed.

But David Brooks, you support a party that does everything it can NOT to address these issues. Oh right. You don't know that. You're unaware of your own history of advocacy. Sorry. Yeah. These are serious problems. Thank you for discovering them, David Brooks.

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats [who elected Obama] will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.

In other words they will have to deal with all the stuff that the Republicans let slip by the wayside for the last 8 years (as opposed to Bill Clinton who worked on balancing the budget and took a shot at health care, even though he was unsuccessful.) They will have to deal with the horrible fallout from the disaster that your chosen party visited upon America.

But you've already forgotten the Bush administration and your place among the pundocracy that supported it. You're just looking at how things are now without wondering how we got here, and whether there are any lessons we can learn from the past to help us act more wisely in the future. Because you're David Brooks. And that's what you do.

Thanks for the buck, I'll be sure to pass it.

People are demanding that irresponsible borrowers should shoulder the blame for this financial crisis along with the lenders.

These people are wrong. And they make me very angry.

First of all, lenders must take full responsibility for the people they choose to lend money to. The problem here isn't that a bunch of good bets (People who are statistically likely to pay back their mortgages) didn't pan out for unexpected reasons. It's that mortgages were given to people who they shouldn't have been given to, and then those mortgages were bought and sold with dishonest ratings by people who were making longshot bets to pad their current quarter results and obtain higher bonuses. Furthermore, if it were JUST the mortgages we were talking about then the financial crisis would not be nearly as deep and as wide as it is. There's also the matter of credit default swaps, which nobody seems to understand (I think I have a decent handle on them) but which really didn't have anything to do with the mortgages, except that they made sure that if some banks failed due to buying bad mortgage debt then ALL the banks were going to tumble down with them like a house of cards.

Totally on the shoulders of the fat cats.

Getting back to the people who shouldn't have been getting mortgages, not only were they given mortgages if they asked for them, but frequently they were lied to about the terms of the mortgages and upsold on bigger mortgages than they initially wanted. If you went into a car showroom to buy a used Honda and the salesman told you he could work out financing for you on a new Mercedes, and you end up buying the Mercedes, you are responsible for your pain when the car gets repossessed, but you have zero responsibility towards the showroom or the salesman. They told you this was alright. They tried to take advantage of you.

It has always been the responsibility of a lender to vet the people he is lending to. While people shouldn't take on debt they can't afford, it's not because they have a moral responsibility towards the bank (Though they do in an abstract sense) it's because eventually the debt will come due and you'll be screwed. The responsibility for the bank's money rests on the shoulders of the officers of that bank and they abdicated that responsibility. They couldn't have foreseen that lots of people would lie (especially when explicitly encouraged to do so) on applications for what were known as "Liar's loans?" Really? The Wall Street geniuses couldn't see that coming?

We don't all share in the blame for this financial collapse. The blame rests on two groups. The bankers who utterly failed to act responsibly because of a perverse incentive system (I'll include the creators of that incentive system in this group, because they were mostly goddamned bankers) and the government, which not only failed to properly regulate the situation but exacerbated it through terrible housing policy, encouraging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make bad loans on the theory that it would somehow lead to housing for the poor. It didn't. In fact thanks to the housing bubble it's harder than ever for the poor to find anywhere to live. Pouring money into the housing market perverted it, Wall Street preyed upon this perversion, then created insane insurance schemes to make even more money, and it all eventually blew up in everybody's face like these things always do.

Let's keep the blame where it belongs. On the bad guys. On the irresponsible thieves. On Wall Street.