Comments on: The Consensus Fallacy

By: steve s

steve s — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:43:00 +0000

Republican governance was an utter disaster. You'd have to be a kool-aid drinking Beltway Insider like Friedman to think that the GOP signing on to your policy means you have a good policy.

By: OttoDog

OttoDog — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 16:01:25 +0000

Mark Cuban's comments about Obama's team reminded me of Rodney Dangerfield's character in "Back to School"...

By: DaveinHackensack

DaveinHackensack — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 01:09:05 +0000

Tom Friedman is best when he stays within his circle of competence, as I argued elsewhere last month, Circle of Competence in Punditry .

By: Ottovbvs

Ottovbvs — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:28:54 +0000

Actually there are a bunch of entrepreneurs and active businessmen involved with the administration not least the big Kahuna "The sage of Omaha." The fact is on the economic front the admin is faced with dual but related problems. In the real economy it's fairly straightforward... demand has contracted. Over in the financial system it's much more complicated and only understood by a tiny fragment of the population most of whom haven't the faintest idea of the difference between a CDS and a CDO. Fixing the real economy is relatively easy....it's just a question of pumping in enough demand until the system gets moving again. Despite the protests of Republicans this is happening. On the finance front the key men Summers/Geithner/Bernanke/Volcker have forgotten more about this stuff than anyone likely to post here and they are feeling their way towards a fix. And don't knock feeling in this context, they're dismantling an unexploded bomb. They're clearly not going to adopt any of the populist notions going the rounds like nationalizing banks. At the end of the day if Obama and these guys pull it off Obama is going to be FDR II and the Republicans are going to be out of power for a generation. If he fails he's going to be out on his ear.....but we'll all be in the soup.

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 14:28:12 +0000

I am long since convinced that Tom Friedman sees himself as a commissar in some brilliant, pristine, perfectly organized technocracy. The problem with his proposal is that the financiers in such a committee would undoubtedly include Bernie Madoff, Ken Lewis, and Vakram Pandit, the industrialists would include Ken Lay (if he were still alive) and Rick Wagoner, and the politicians would be more likely to include Rod Blagojevich, William Jefferson, and Ted Stevens than they would Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams.