Every once in a while I feel like I’ve succumbed to partisan madness and need to back off and assume a bit more good faith and sincerity from thinkers and activists on the other side. I need to treat conservative arguments with a little more respect and a little more generosity. But then I read a story like this, telling me that the four Republican members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission have refused to agree to a bipartisan final report and will instead issue their own minority report:
During a private commission meeting last week, all four Republicans voted in favor of banning the phrases “Wall Street” and “shadow banking” and the words “interconnection” and “deregulation” from the panel’s final report, according to a person familiar with the matter and confirmed by Brooksley E. Born, one of the six commissioners who voted against the proposal.
I don’t even know what to say about this. I could write a hundred words about it or a thousand. But what’s the point of pretending to take this stuff seriously? They’re not, after all.
POSTSCRIPT: OK, I’ll say just a wee bit more. Let’s take those phrases one by one.
I could live without Wall Street. We can just call it the finance industry instead. That works fine and spares delicate sensibilities. I could even, at a stretch, live without deregulation. You have to talk about prudential regulation and leverage rules somehow, but maybe there’s a way to do it without actually using that word. It’s a stretch, but maybe.
But interconnection and shadow banking? It’s just literally impossible to usefully discuss the financial crisis without mentioning those things. They’re absolutely central to the whole story, and I don’t even know what kinds of words you could replace them with. It’s like writing about the New Testament without mentioning Jesus. I guess you could do it, but what’s the point?
