arlier this month, I took part in an online debate for U.S. News & World Report about whether Europe or the United States was in deeper fiscal trouble.
I wrote that Europe faced a bigger mess, though I warned that the United States was making the same mistakes of costly and inefficient welfare-state policies and that we would follow them into fiscal crisis if we didn’t reform programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.
More important (at least to my fragile ego), I asked people to vote for the best presentation and I’m happy to say that I now have a huge lead in the voting.
Now there’s a new debate topic. I have squared off against a statist on the topic of bailouts. Here’s some of what I wrote.
The Bush-Obama policies of bailouts and regulation have been bad for taxpayers, but they’ve also been bad for the economy. A vibrant and dynamic economy requires the possibility of big profits, but also the discipline of failure. Indeed, capitalism without bankruptcy is like religion without hell. …Especially when the government adopts bad policies that cause a housing bubble, such as easy money from the Federal Reserve and corrupt subsidies from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. …Some people argue that America had no choice but to bail out Wall Street and the financial services industry. …Either through ignorance or corruption, they falsely assert that company-specific bailouts were necessary to recapitalize the financial sector. Nonsense. It is a relatively simple matter for a government to put a financial institution in receivership, hold all depositors harmless, and then sell off the assets. Alternatively, the government can pay a healthy institution to absorb an insolvent institution. This is what America did during the savings & loan bailouts 20 years ago. It’s also what happened with IndyMac and WaMu during the recent financial crisis. And it’s what the Swedish government basically did in the early 1990s when that nation had a financial crisis. …If this policy makes sense and has worked before, why does the crowd in Washington prefer bailouts? At the risk of being cynical, the politicians don’t like the FDIC-resolution approach because it means no giveaways for shareholders, bondholders, and senior managers. And that would require stiff-arming big campaign contributors.
If you agree, you can vote for me by clicking the “mic” button near the top of the page. And, to be fair, you can also vote for bailouts and regulation on the page featuring my opponent’s article.
The debate just started yesterday and I’m currently trailing 14-12 (as of 8:57 EDT), so get your Chicago voter registration cards and vote early and vote often.
If I can win this debate, it will help ease the trauma of losing the stimulus debate in New York City.
Though I’m not sure what this would say about me. I got a big win last year in my US News & World Report debate on the flat tax, so perhaps the lesson to be learned is that I should only take part in online debates rather than appear in person.
Sort of like having a face for radio, I guess.
