My bigger point, and perhaps I didn’t make it that clearly, was just that the implication Ezra was drawing is too simple: the need (or “need”, depending on how you look at it) for massive federal intervention certainly shows that there was a serious financial collapse, but the fact that Paulson ended up going with the sort of proposal that had been pushed by liberal economists doesn’t show that those economists were right all along. Maybe they were, and I’m happy to discuss that question. But the move to nationalization doesn’t prove it.

Thanks for tolerating me, as I said before, I enjoy the dialouge here. As the Hittchins story illustrates, Conservatives don’t have much respect for differing opinions or the toleration of such on their blogs. Thanks for taking the high road on that.

With all due respect I think Klein may have been talking about the issues in general, and NOT JUST the Paulson plan as evidenced by this line in the same post:

“The liberal understanding of the economy and its problems has been, in recent months and years, superior to the conservative understanding of the country and its problems.”

Please notice that he says in recent months AND years. Some of us liberals have been talking about the issue of deregulation in the markets for years and the need to reverse that trend.

And this for Adam (please note he does not think that the “affirmative action mortgage” issue is very viable. In fact he thinks that argument laughable.):

“And this has only sharpened in recent weeks, as the Republican Party has spun off into the Gamma Quadrant with laughable theories about ACORN and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Their argument isn’t wrong in the sense that it’s a serious engagement with the situation that happens to be less empirically sound than competing theories. It’s just nonsense.”

Those policies were not the downfall of the market, it’s just that the Market wanted a piece of the pie in regards to CRA mortgages and decided to offer the ARM loans as an alternative. No one mandated that they expand into this type of loan. They got greedy and thought the market would sustain this stuff. Stricter regulations and oversight would have put a decent check on that greed. At least from this liberals perspective.

If everyone was so correct, how, exactly did we end up in this mess?

Because the Center never listens.

If everyone was so correct, how, exactly did we end up in this mess?

I take it that Ron Paul thinks the solvency crisis is linked to the devaluation of the dollar (see e.g. the post I link here), and the national debt is a part of that, no? And I agree that it’s unreasonable to insist that better regulations wouldn’t have helped (the TAC cover story this week argues just that), though I remain skeptical as to whether, given that the banks will probably be the ones who end up writing the damn things, whatever regulations we end up with will actually work.

As to your final point: yeah. But you were also making a distinction between “liberals” and “Democrats”, so obviously non-mainstream conservatives and libertarians are free to do the same sort of thing – perhaps this just shows that there’s plenty of credit to go around, though I think it would be more sensible to say that what we know right know underdetermines the answer to the question of who, if anyone, really got things right from the beginning. I’m glad, of course, that we can agree on Mitch McConnell.

Some of the pieces in the AmCon were, as you say prescient (though mostly on questions of the strength of the dollar and overconsumption, not on financial deregulation). But that’s sort of coming at this from the fourth dimension of political time/space. The Republican government and Republicans in Congress have had a rather different take on this over the years, and that’s what other solutions are going to be judged in contrast to. I think a good case could be made that that party would be better off with more of your opinions and fewer of Mitch McConnell’s opinions, and I encourage you to make the case!