Sunday, September 27, 2015

No Brains In Washington — Paul Craig Roberts


Paul Craig Roberts was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration and one of the developers of supply side economics. He was also associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. When he starts agreeing with Noam Chomsky and Michael Hudson about "neoliberal economics" being the problem, you know that something is up. This is not supposed to happen in a normal world.

No Brains In Washington — Paul Craig Roberts

8 comments:

Dan Lynch said...

PCR is always shrill and claiming the sky is falling. The sad thing is that I can't disagree with him.

Tom Hickey said...

He has been an insider and knows how things work there. When he says that there are no brains inside the bubble, it's not a complaint as much as a warning. These people are loose cannons on deck — and those cannons are loaded with nuclear weapons.

Tom Hickey said...

@ Mike

Agree with PCR's take on econ. But he often says intelligent things about the political side.

Matt Franko said...

"The concentration of US income and wealth in the hands of the very rich is a new development in my lifetime. I ascribe it to two things. One is the offshoring of American jobs. "

Then he should support Trump...

John said...

Anyone who was part of the political elite and is now frightened by what passes for the political elite is worth listening to. PCR's economic analysis of what ails the US is half-decent: out sourcing, financialisation, the bloated Pentagon budget, regulatory capture and cronyism, student loans, consumer debt, the nature of the jobs being created, the hollowing out of manufacturing cities, trade agreements, etc. He lets himself down with all the austerian stuff about the national debt and deficits. To be fair to PRC, though, I think he's started to rethink a lot of his own beliefs on neoliberal economics and the policies he once forwarded. After all, he has a book out called "The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism".

His political analysis is also very good at times. That is to say, he's a generally honest observer of the political scene, although he's easy to discount because of some of the conspiracy theories he champions . What's interesting is that PCR is a Reagan Conservative and yet is so far removed from current Republican thinking. Another interesting figure in this regard is another Reagan Conservative Bruce Bartlett, who is forever banging on about the sheer "stupidity" and "craziness" of the current Republican Party. It really is something when two prominent Reagan administration staffers state outright that the Republican Party is "stupid" and "crazy", as is a good deal of US policy.

It's very odd, to say the least, but you can learn a great deal by listening to eighties Conservative Republicans like PCR and Bartlett, and in the military and foreign policy sphere people like Andrew Bacevich and Michael Scheuer. Some of the best analysis I've ever come across came out of the books of Chalmers Johnson, a hardcore Conservative cold warrior.

Tom Hickey said...

Add Pat Buchanan to that list. When you lose these folks and they don't all have the same constituency in the GOP, the party has a problem with relevance.

Anonymous said...

"Then he should support Trump..."

I suspect he's too intelligent and experienced to support any of such mediocre candidates.

Donald Trump: A different shade of green
https://www.rt.com/op-edge/311346-trump-polls-republican-money/

Matt Franko said...

Escobar: "It was up to the Pentagon to elucidate a clueless John Kerry; these are for “force protection”."

Force Protection is the first thing that suffers under the fiscal morons.... everything ELSE gets funded.... this is revealing about Kerry et al...