the common sense police

From NY Times:
"John McCain pointed to greed on Wall Street, and Barack Obama linked problems to lax regulation."

I think a good evaluation of a candidate's approach to an issue is whether it can explain both the cause of the problem and define a solution.

On the financial crisis....

Obama seems to believe that greed is to be expected. Given the opportunity, people (particularly highly competitive people in a culture that supports excess) will try to get more. The problem, as he sees it, is that nobody was paying attention to what these companies were doing, and they just kept pushing it a little bit further to see what they could get away with. His solution? Pay more attention; regulate.

For McCain, it's an issue of individuals (collectively) making the wrong moral choice. He sees the economy and the free market as fundamentally sound. He is a life-long deregulator. The problem, according to McCain, is a moral problem. If people were behaving, a deregulated, free-market economy would be fine. Framing issues in terms of morality might rally the people who would like to abolish greed from the human race, but it isn't very useful in writing policy. His solution? A moral shift? No. Apparently, the deregulator is advocating regulation.

Congratulations, Obama. You win the consistency game. Regulation (or lack of it) is a government problem, with a government solution. McCain, you lose. Greed is a moral problem, with no government solution.

While both candidates are advocating more or less the same solution (because it's, ahem, an obvious solution), extra loser points go to McCain for spending 26 years fighting regulation and then today deciding to support it. Extra-extra loser points for calling himself a reformer.

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And just as a side note, I don't understand how people can say things like "I strongly support free markets, but the government needs to step in". Isn't the definition of a free market one in which the government doesn't step in? I would like to see one "deregulator" stand behind that position. Bollocks to the rest of 'em.

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In more local news, Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich issued a statement today saying that he is "not a sociopath." Nor is he "cuckoo". Thanks for clearing that up, Rod.