United Liberty

You, dear reader, all are in for a real treat. Dan Carlin is the host of the acclaimed podcasts Common Sense with Dan Carlin and Hardcore History. Originally from Hollywood, California and born to a family of entertainers, Carlin continues the family tradition while simultaneously educating his audience. This is the first interview with him for United Liberty.

Well, I tend to agree with the conventional wisdom that McCain did not handle himself particularly well during the most nerve-wracking phase of the “crisis’. He seems to have a tendency during this campaign to overreact to events and then ends up looking a bit foolish after things calm down again. I’m not sure Obama did anything positive, but he also didn’t look particularly bad. I think the economic uncertainty probably helps Obama with voters. People associate the current crisis with the incumbent Administration and the normal tendency is for voters to want to change parties when the economy isn’t doing well. I have also heard from people in the financial industry though that are quite worried about what an Obama presidency might mean for the Economy. They think that he will raise taxes significantly.

I would really have loved to have heard his rationale for that comparison.  Maybe he’s comparing the economic situation where the Soviets weren’t able to afford things like the arms race with the USA. This was supposed to be a significant reason for its demise.  I see 1989 though as totally tied up with the bankruptcy of the Soviet system (both economically and in the realm of Human Rights) and the fact that they were militarily holding down unwilling peoples in the Warsaw Pact nations.

In addition, when the U.S.S.R. did fall there was no way their system could have risen from the ashes of its collapse because it was based on a faulty economic model to begin with. Communism was never a great way to make money.

Our system is great at making money…that doesn’t seem to be the problem. I don’t see eventual economic collapse as the end result of all this. I think Wall Street will be back making money at some point. The U.S.S.R. was put permanently out of business.

I see our situation as more akin to the way Great Britain declined from her late 19th Century economic highs. We might have to get used to a somewhat lower standard of living than we have traditionally come to expect.  But that’s a far cry from the U.S.S.R. in 1989 I would think.

Well, it certainly must have had SOME effect.  But I think this problem involves many links in a chain.  No single link, or even group of links brought this problem on.  It is the result of a number of things working together. Certainly people who probably shouldn’t have received loans, got them.  But the system should be able to absorb and work around this problem in any number of different ways. Things like “housing bubbles” require help from a variety of factors before the conditions for the sort of economic downturn we are now experiencing are created.

So, how much credit do you ascribe to the “ground zero” cause of giving people who probably were high-risk borrowers loans they probably shouldn’t have received? I don’t know…I’m no expert. Maybe 20%.  But I would also say that it was not necessarily minority and/or low income people who made up all the “bad debt” people in this story. Many folks in higher income brackets also traded-up to larger and more expensive homes they probably couldn’t afford and many others borrowed against their home’s inflated equity and got burned when the values went down. This recent bubble involved a lot of homeowners to be sure. But it also involved the Fed, the Government regulators, the investment banks. It’s system-wide. I don’t think you can lay blame at the door of any single entity.

Do you think federal spending will eventually come to a head?

You mean will it peak? I don’t know.  That’s hard to imagine. One would think that someday the national credit card would just finally be maxed out. But, like the person who is in the process of maxing out their card, I have a hard time imagining that I would ever be told I hadn’t the money to pay my national bills. It’s really hard to believe that the government would ever reduce the amount of money it spends. I just don’t see it.

It won’t.

It is an appallingly parental act on the part of the local government and I think it is borderline racist. I dare them to do that in Studio City or Calabasas. Last I heard the “low income” neighbors were not out there picketing the local McDonald’s. Those places also provide a lot of jobs to people there. It’s a double-whammy, if you ask me. It is not the role of government to protect people from food they want to eat.

Do you think there is a chance of a paleoconservative and/or libertarian resurgence in American politics?

Yes, I think that anytime you get unsettled times (from war, or economic trouble or any combination of stressful societal factors) you provide the opportunity for things to flourish that would otherwise not have a chance to arise. These things could be good or they could be bad.  Look at the way the era around the Great Depression opened the door to all sorts of radical change (both for good and for ill). Which direction it will go, or what group/viewpoint it will benefit is anyone’s guess.  But I would think that both “paleo-conservativism” or libertarianism could see an increase in popularity.

I think the result shocked the Congress.  I think everyone who voted “no” thought that it would pass without their vote and were chagrined that it didn’t. They all wanted to be able to hide behind a “no” vote and to be able to tell their constituents, who called their congressional offices in record numbers, that they heeded the wishes of the voters.  So many of the legislators did that that the bailout failed.  I think most of them would have voted differently had they known the way the vote would eventually end up.