The Monstrous Stalin

I have a very hard time understanding how someone as high up in the Obama administration as Anita Dunn could ever have any kind words for Mao. I don't think that makes her a closet commie, and I'm not joining Glenn Beck's new McCarthyism, but it does make her a clueless, morally bankrupt lefty – the kind who wears a Guevara t-shirt or a CCCP ball-cap and expects to be taken seriously. Of course, the cluelessness is on both sides, as Scott Horton reminds us in this dispatch from Chon Tash in the Kyrgyz Republic:

The crimes of the old regime were on exhibition to those swearing an oath to uphold the new order. In the museum at the site the possessions of many of the victims were displayed with some biographical details. Documents from the archives of the NKVD/KGB showed the trappings of legal formalism that accompanied the brutal deeds, every murder judicially authorized with a sentence stamped and sealed. The execution of the sentence was scrupulously documented. And on one wall was a simple display that spoke powerfully: a portrait of Stalin, and below it a skull, resting on stones taken from the pit.

In America today, the name and image of Stalin are invoked heavily by fringe critics of Barack Obama.

The critics disagree with his policies on health care and see in it the basis for increasing power of the state. The role the state will play in the healthcare system is a legitimate political issue on which well-informed citizens can have different views. But the comparison to Stalin makes clear that these critics really have no inkling of who Joseph Stalin was, what he did, and why his name lives in special infamy at hallowed spots like the pit at Chon Tash. This frivolous use of his name and image cheapens our nation’s political dialogue, and it is also a mark of disrespect to his victims. And it points to the fundamental crisis of which Aitmatov wrote so powerfully: the failure to know the past, to be informed by it, and to distill guidance from it. The age of the mankurt, alas, has not passed.

Godwin's law has become a form of Internet code. It's worth recalling that resisting silly analogies to the evil that Hitler, Stalin and Mao perpetrated is also a moral duty – to the victims of all those monsters.

Break Up The Banks?

Richard Posner floats the idea:

I said that the separation of commercial banking from other financial intermediation should be considered–not that it should be ordered forthwith. It would be a formidable undertaking, fiercely opposed; and the argument that separation would sacrifice significant economies of scale and scope, while unsubstantiated and rather implausible (think of Citigroup and Bank of America, whose travails seem to have been amplified rather than diminished by the scope of these banks' activities), would have to be carefully appraised.

Merely reenacting the Glass-Steagall Act (and repealing the statute that repealed it)–the New Deal statute that separated commercial from investment banking–would not avoid the complexities involved in divestiture. As explained by Robert Pozen ("Stop Pining for Glass-Steagall," Forbes, Oct. 5, 2009, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1005/opinions-glass-steagall-on-my-mind.html (visited Oct. 13, 2009)), "Even under Glass-Steagall commercial banks could invest in bonds, manage mutual funds, execute securities trades on the order of their customers and underwrite government-related securities. The main thing they couldn't do was underwrite corporate stocks and bonds…The main impact of repealing Glass-Steagall was to allow banking organizations to become more active in underwriting." So a greater rollback of financial deregulation than merely re-enacting the Glass-Steagall Act would be necessary for a clean separation of commercial banking from other financial intermediation. (Greater, but in one respect lesser, as there is no good reason to forbid commercial banks from underwriting securities issues, a central prohibition in Glass-Steagall.)

Such a rollback is conceivable, if barely…

Try This For A Stimulus

Derek Thompson unearths a point from Bruce Bartlett's chat with Ezra Klein earlier this summer:

Suppose you had a 10 percent VAT and we said we weren't going to collect it for the next 10 months. People would buy like crazy. They'd buy toilet paper, they'd buy anything they could get their hands on that they knew they'd need in the future. We're depriving ourselves of a great stimulant tool by ignoring this.

How Soccer Explains The World

Erik Voeten is delighted that researchers have picked up on the political implications of the sport:

My favorite example is a working paper by Edward Miguel, Sebastián Saiegh and Shanker Satyanath that uses evidence from professional soccer (football) matches to evaluate whether exposure to civil wars increases the propensity of young men to behave violently. They find that players from countries that have had more exposure to civil wars are much more likely to get yellow and red cards (cautions) than are players from countries that have had little or no recent exposure to civil wars. The findings are substantively strong and robust to a host of controls. The evidence comes from the main European football leagues, which are very cosmopolitan. This strikes me as an example of research that is both clever and important.

Why Don’t Customers Leave The Big Banks?

James Surowiecki asks:

[W]hy, given the broader backlash against the big banks and the less-than-inspiring performance they’ve turned in over the last couple of years, are people still sticking with them? What makes this even more curious is that the big banks, which have historically offered their customers worse deals than smaller banks, have not changed their ways: they pay less for deposits, charge more for loans, make billions from overdraft fees, and have jacked up credit-card rates.

He points to two factors: the cost of switching banks is high and "reputation (which is often reduced to market share) has a major impact on winning deals."