Thomas Barnett is conservative leaning and — ironically enough — is one of those intellectuals who is stupid in exactly the way that conservatives predict intellectuals to be: he tends to trip over his own intelligence. A perfect example is his completely incoherent take on the recent, sudden burst of the housing bubble (“Nice analysis of the sub-prime ‘crisis’,” 13 August 2007):

The only crisis I see coming out of the subprime shenanigans (such new tricks to fleece people will always be with us) would involve governments assuming they should bail out all those hedge funds that long dabbled in this stuff. O’Driscoll makes a great comparison to the S&L crisis of years ago: so long as financial institutions assumed the FDIC bailout was coming, they’d pawn off the risk to the government instead of effectively discounting it themselves.

Really? The only crisis he sees is moral hazard? So we’re courting moral hazard toward no specific end?

Government intervention isn’t bailing out “all those hedge funds”: it is protecting the rest of us — not necessary culpable in the “shenanigans,” but still subject to the consequences thereof — from spreading economic misery. To suggest that this same old moral hazard argument that economic conservatives have been making since 1913 is somehow penetrating analysis of our present day woes is completely retrograde. Moral hazard is real, but people with less pronounced agendas have a lot more interesting things to say about the subject than that in the face of it we should do nothing.

The FDIC, the Federal Reserve, the SEC, punitive, but stabilizing taxes, transparency laws, etc. were created specifically because “foolish” investors engaging in “shenanigans” could be found well before any of these public sector economic institutions ever existed; and further, to protect non-privileged investors who did everything by the book from said “shenanigans” — in other words, to prevent the spread of irrationality. Once a critical mass of people begin to act irrationally — e.g. in a financial panic — rationality flips and the irrational becomes the rational thing to do.

And as if this wasn’t disconnected enough, then there’s this parenthetical aside:

(since finance is–to a large part–a young man’s game, the bulk of the front-line players tends to age out every dozen years or so, which pretty much guarantees you new forms of shenanigans with the same regular frequency)

It’s all fine and good to use pejoratives such as “shenanigans” and “foolish” — as Mr. Barnett does — to describe less than perfectly rational market actors who continue to fall for plaid-out investment schemes such as the housing bubble long after their true nature has become more than apparent, but if less than perfectly rational behavior is in fact systematic, as Mr. Barnette suggests with this theory, then what’s the point of moralizing about it? Systematic problems should be dealt with through systematic solutions — and not systematic solutions that entail mass suffering for all of society.