Matt Taibbi lands another roundhouse in his ongoing (and horribly mismatched) skirmish with David Brooks, this time over Brooks’s ridiculous argument that attempting to hold Goldman Sachs to some sort of account for their myriad, massive and ongoing crimes can be reduced to a “populist pose.” Or, more ridiculous still, that to discuss the crimes of Goldman Sachs is to ignore the culpability of ordinary homeowners, or the role of China, or the position of Venus, or any one of a hundred other tangential issues that Brooks hurls spaghetti-style at the wall in his hare-brained column.
Taibbi hits Brooks especially hard on one of the most infuriating assumptions underlying most discussion of the financial sector in general and pending financial regulation in particular: that the best thing for all of us ‘average citizens’ to do is to just sit there and look pretty while the great thinkers who got us into this mess get us out of it.
What’s so ironic about this is that Brooks, in arguing against class warfare, and trying to present himself as someone who is above making class distinctions, is making an argument based entirely on the notion that there is an lower class and an upper class and that the one should go easy on the other because the best hope for collective prosperity is the rich creating wealth for all. This is the same Randian bullshit that we’ve been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting — this idea that the way society works is that the productive ” rich” feed the needy “poor,” and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for “excesses” might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve.
I think the time to regulate the banks and other financial institutions was before you gave them the money. We can’t give them the money without preconditions (like bonus limitations), and then be shocked, shocked that they made a lot of money when the economy was (artificially) improved and then distributed that money as bonuses, which is what they seem to do, as private, for-profit financial institutions. I’m not “pro” financial institution. I’m saying we as a government should have bought into these companies as part of the bailout (which would have given us a better return on the money) AND gotten them to abide/accept new regulations.