Viagra sales were still up, would this not have been used to show how the horrendous salaries of big city traders was being wasted in orgies of excess? This was the sort of tendentious misreading of facts that wrote into the history books the story that Wall Street bankers during the Great Depression embarked upon a vast wave of suicides, when no such thing happened.

Because the economy is going south, so the logic seems to go, every economic indicator must in some way reflect the crisis. Hair shirts for all. Underpinning this is some sort of deep human need to abstract events into fixed and immutable black and white principles when, as the wise Buddhists say, nothing is fixed or immutable. Because speculative trading has so spectacularly failed and the state needs to intervene, every former assumption we had about the world is wrong.

But this desire to talk about bland and largely meaningless abstractions rather than what is actually happening and what we can do about it, and to assess everything in binary terms, is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place. The foreign policy adventurism that generated the oil spike (and presumably helped collapse the housing bubble) was driven by the current Presidents statements about the universal desire for . The errors of deregulation in the financial sector, especially the Glass-Steagall repeal, were driven by equally fatuous statements that the market could solve any problem as long as its limitless energies were not constrained by government on our backs.

As this crisis grows more damaging, we run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater by buying into principles that are at 180 degrees to the foolish excesses of the era of Gordon Gekko. We run the risk of seeing one utopian construct - faith in markets - being replaced by another: faith in the state.

As well as personal crimes which should be punished, we clearly face systemic problems which need to be addressed. At the centre of them is the precise way in which trading operates within our financial system and our dangerous exposure to the centralised decisions of a very small number of ultra-rich individuals. But I'm not sure it helps to talk about these problems in simplistic terms of versus, versus, and so on, except to show that the old-fashioned market mantras were naive or cynical. The left has spent a generation attacking the right wing for this kind of deceptive abstraction, but it is certainly no less susceptible to it.

For instance, is not exactly the enemy. The problem was the crudely self-interested way in which a few key sectors were deregulated to the benefit of special interest groups high finance being chief among them. Increasing the amount of regulation in the telecoms sector or airlines is not going to help the economy recover, and increasing the authority of the state across the board could lead to its unwanted involvement in areas of your life that have no bearing whatsoever on the economic context. Similarly, deficit spending is not necessarily the problem or the solution: it depends whether you spend the money on fruitful, constructive enterprises, or absurd, wasteful, destructive things, and it depends on the impact of that spending on inflation and other issues. And the state is not the solution any more than it was the problem during the last twenty years: sometimes state action works well, when the market does not operate effectively to preserve a perceived sense of public good; sometimes it doesnt, often because it, too, is made up people who can err or be tempted like the rest of us. We live in a mixed economy, and that's where we should stay. The debate should be over specific policies, not fundamentals.

I suppose the reason why the news media seem so particularly vulnerable to this is because of their attempt to segment the market and keep feeding their audiences information they think they want to hear. But now more than ever, we need intelligent, thoughtful, engaged, and perceptive reporters, who are willing to look at the details and how they work. Join the res publica, the world of civic minded people trying to better their society, and raise the standard of debate.

If, as I suspect may be the case, it turns out to be impossible to free yourself from all fixed and tyrannical principles, the best of our public servants would do well to temper their beliefs with the Rooseveltian method: pragmatism. Try and see what works in each situation and keep their minds open, question assumptions rather than trying to adduce generic principles about the way the world is that will only create more problems for us to fix in the future.

Similar posts: effexor drug lawsuits