Yesterday I recorded a conversation with Paul Marks, a regular contributor here. My purpose was to enable all who are curious about who and what Paul Marks is to learn more. And the best way to learn more about Paul Marks is to listen to him talk not about himself (which we only did for about ten seconds) but about some of the things that he has been thinking about in recent years and in recent months.
In recent years, Paul has been brooding on the impending financial disaster which he saw coming. You know, the one that “nobody saw coming”. Well, he did. How come? More recently he has been pondering the Marxist background and foreground of US President Barack Obama. What, Barack Obama as bad as Ho Chi Minh? Yes, he replied. He didn’t just say it, he explained it and he justified it.
As I said at the end of the convsersation itself, and as I repeated in the posting I did about the conversation on my personal blog soon after it had been recorded, I think it went well. Since then, I have listened to it right through again, and I remain very content with it. If, on the basis of this plug, you feel inclined to have a listen yourself, this will occupy somewhat under half and hour of your time. Enjoy.
Yes, Obama is awful (and very irritating) but is he really any different to George W Bush in terms of bailing out his chums on Wall Street, troops in Iraq & Afgh, fiscal incontinence etc? So it only seems fair to slag off both in equal measure.
Perhaps, Mark, but Bush is gone, and won’t be coming back. What he did is done. Obama’s still doing it.
President George W. Bush belongs to the ages now. Historians and citizens will be arguing years from now about the harm that Saddam Hussein would have done if W had not stopped him — just like people still while away the hours in bars debating if it would have been better if Churchill had just stood down and let the German-speaking United Europe get started a few decades earlier. But it does not matter any more — what happened, happened. Now it is history.
President Barack Hussein Obama is still here. His actions will make live better or worse for many people — just ask the Poles, or the unemployed workers who used to make F22s. That is why it is worth getting serious about Obama.
And responding to any hint that the sun does not shine out of all his orifices simultaneously with a negative comment about the previous president is getting rather old. Really, Mark, it makes you sound quite juvenile.
A quibble with your podcast, I think you should have let your guest expand on his thoughts without your constant interruptions. He had something to say and you should have let him say it.
Maybe Brian can make this a series with Paul Marks as a guest. Make three or four narrow topics to expand on. Also, does Paul Marks see any way to reverse the course and what is the likelihood?
Mark: why? When GWB was in power, he was often flayed ’round these parts. Why should we, when flaying the current president – who richly deserves it, yet doesn’t receive nearly enough of such treatment – constantly make similar reference back to his predecessor? Insisting that we do so sounds like BDS to me.
OK, I retract my comments about GWB and accept that Obama is awful.
What, in practice, are you going to do about it?
As a resident of the UK, more precisely of England, why should I care about him any more than Putin/Mevdevthingy, Karzai, Sarkozy or any of the other awful “leaders” in any other country?
As a resident of the UK, more precisely of England
My condolences, you clearly have plenty of problems at home to occupy your mind. Best of luck!
If you don’t care, then spare us your pointless comment on this particular topic.
Let him speak. for goodness’ sake…!
I ended up shouting at my computer at the number of times Paul Marks was interrupted, not in the furtherance any point but for completely irrelevant purposes. Which is a shame, because I would have forwarded the link to friends in the US, but I can’t bring myself to do it. What a missed opportunity.
“President George W. Bush belongs to the ages now. Historians and citizens will be arguing years from now about the harm that Saddam Hussein would have done if W had not stopped him – just like people still while away the hours in bars debating if it would have been better if Churchill had just stood down and let the German-speaking United Europe get started a few decades earlier”
Sweet Spaghetti Monster Alice. A reference to Hitler in the 2nd comment already.
What ever would Saddam would have done to the world with his tons of now hidden WMD’s (apart from massacre his citizens that is), I mean it was literally almost WWIII ?
Are you ever able to admit that you and the Bush admin were wrong about Iraq and the threat posed by Saddam? Can you admit you were wrong about anything?
Some here are missing the point Paul has been trying to make for eons here: it is not whether O is better or worse than W as president, or who is to blame for whatever, it is how Obama as a person is fundamentally different from anyone else in any recent major position of power anywhere in the West. As Brian has mentioned, Paul was warning people about the economy long before the crisis and no one listened – unfortunately it looks like the pattern is repeating itself with his warnings about Obama.
Brian is right to focus on the fact that Paul Marks, along with others operating in the “Austrian” school of free market economics, saw this coming. It is often stated by those I know that “no-one saw this coming”. That is just BS. Jim Rogers, for example, has predicted this crackup, as has the likes of Peter Schiff.
Of course, knowing disaster is on the way is one thing, being able to time it is another. That is why even the smartest economists are often just as poor as Joe Schmo in predicting when a particular market will turn up or down.
I’ve hung around here long enough to have heard Paul expounding on his prognostication of doom. Now, I’m not too hot on economics but Paul’s analysis impressed me and just made sense.
And that is the key point. Paul didn’t get lucky in his prediction – he got right and for the right reasons.
And I think he did because he cut to the chase rather than falling into the delusion that sophistry is the same thing as cleverness.
I must admit I have some sympathy with those who scoff at the idea that Obama is a Marxist. It does seem absurd. But Paul’s argument is persuasive. He undoubtedly has a Marxist background and Marxist associates, and if he’d run for President honestly as a Socialist, he’d have lost. Badly. American socialists have to pretend to be “liberals”. We know that. Is it so much of a stretch to imagine that this guy is one of them, given his past?
Then I think of Britain. Thirty years ago, as a Communist, Alastair Darling called for the nationalisation of the banks. Now he’s Chancellor, and what do we have? Nationalised banks. Forget the circumstances – oh, it’s an emergency – those can be engineered, and look at the facts. If Darling had stood openly as a Communist, on a platform of wholesale nationalisation, he’d have lost. (Well, maybe not in the East End of Glasgow – cf. Toamy Sheridan – but he’d never have been Chancellor.)
When the Berlin Wall fell, we thought we’d won. But it was only the beginning of the final push. It freed socialists from the baggage of having to be measured against the utter catastrophic failure of East-European socialism, and allowed them to reinvent themselves. They’re not “unreconstructed”; they’ve reconstructed themselves more successfully than they can ever have dared hope. Ideas that appeared dead twenty years ago are now more respectable than they’ve been in over a generation.
(PS: He does sound like Enoch Powell, doesn’t he?)
What an excellent comment Sam. For those who ask what can be done, the minimum is repeating what Paul and Sam and (unfortunately too few) others are saying as often and loudly as possible. It really is the ‘naked emperor’ situation, only this one makes one wish for the naked fool in the children’s story as a vast improvement over what we have now. Another difference is that in the story everyone actually saw the guy was naked but were afraid to say it out-loud, whereas in the current situation we have to fight actual blindness and ignorance on the part of most of the public. It’s depressing.
Of course, we owe thanks to B.M. for creating this unique addition (supplement) to the samizdata exchange of ideas and reactions.
That said, it was a bit off-putting to have so much of Paul’s thinking cut off and left incomplete. I had thought to go back through the discourse and pick out those that were interupted, and set a series of queries. But, that might be presumptious.
So, I wonder if Paul, or B.M. would go back over the chat and have Paul complete his thoughts on those items which Paul might think merit such.
Would rather have read a transcript, or his own writing,
than try loading an audio file.
Until 30 December 1986, I spent 20 years in banks, 16 at the last. The type of people moving into management was obvious. That was also the time of banking and mortgage fraud and government scandals began, and continued. The Wall Street Journal looked like it had been bought by The National Enquirer.
When corporations, governments, political parties, other social organizations and institutions, act like organized crime, it could be. And, the same plan is in all of the Western nations. coincidence?
My own consolation is that I’m old, and out-of-it. And, that history shows that once power is consolidated, rivals subdued, then half of the loyal followers are killed by the other half. This gets rid of people who know too much and are no-longer needed. It puts fear into those who remain, who then live in fear of one-another
They spend the rest of their lives that way. History cycles.
Belief obstructs thought. Dogma is unthinking. One may be more accurate. Another, fully bogus. Still the same. Conventional thinking is a contradiction in terms.
Many times I’ve been told “you’re too honest for your own good” Says more of the real nature of things than of myself.
It was an interesting chat, but why do interviewers seem to insist on interrupting the people they are interviewing? We see it all the time on television news interviews and hear it on the radio and I’ve never understood it. Why ask a question if the interviewee isn’t allowed to actually answer. Ask about X, get the answer, and then follow up on any points that need further explained or go on to the next question. Not only does the interruption break the train of thought, but it makes listening difficult. Personally, I was taught that interrupting a speaker is just plain rude.
Paul is the only Samizdata that I have met face to face, and far from interupting him, I find it remarkable that Brian managed to get a word in edgeways! 😉
But other commentators are right. Interviewing is a tricky gig, it isn’t like just a normal conversation, you have to know when to shut up and let people run with the ball.
I suggest that Brian breaks out the video recorder next time and lets Paul run through one topic at a time.
Then put it on Youtube.
We are privileged to have the benefit of his opinions here. He forsaw the collapse of the credit bubble years ago, and he was right about Obama, when many thought him over the top…
Now time for the world to have the benefit of his wisdom.
I’m not attacking anyone personally and I’m just making a broad generalization. I just don’t understand why the constant interruptions. Is it because the interviewer wants the audience to know who’s show it is? Does the interviewer want to appear smarter than he really is? Does the interviewer think he really is smarter and is trying to assert dominence? Is the interviewer really just an oafish boor? Why ask an expert’s opinion when the expert isn’t going to be allowed to finish a thought?
Anyone who claims that ‘Obama is just like Bush’ needs to view this graph
http://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/24/bush-deficit-vs-obama-deficit-in-pictures/
to understand just how amazingly huge President Obama’s budget deficits are in relation to those which President Bush managed to rack up – which were quite bad enough. Even according to his own estimates, President Obama will never preside over a deficit smaller than the largest deficit President Bush ever ran – which was, once again, obscenely gigantic.
Both are (were) obscene and profligate spendthrifts, p*ssing away public money in streams too vast for the average mind to grasp. But President Obama’s spending is far, far worse.
llater,
llamas
Most useful way to study economic systems (non-theoretical) is looking at the doings of those who made it work for them.
Howard Hughes’ life is more than one open book.
Considering what he did during his active years, his being a recluse at the end makes sense.
The alternatives make news often.
I’ve always given Brian the benefit of the doubt in his podcasts because he introduces them as “conversations”. I think of them as sitting in on a couple of blokes down the pub, and that’s exactly the way people who know each other well do carry on a conversation: cutting across each other, going off at tangents and fininshing thoughts. I agree that anyone expecting a professional interview might be irritated, though. And it would obviously be interesting to hear more of what Paul has to say; it’s obvious he knows even more about this subject than I’d thought (and that was a lot).
The identification of Presidents with “defict spending” needs some modification.
The U.S.does not follow the parliamentary system for taxation, appropriations and ultimately spending authorizations (a 3 tier process).
The legisltive branch determines all 3 of those tiers, not the President, who has only veto powers.
Past attempts by Presidents to “hold” actions on actual disbursements (sequestration) have been overruled by the judiciary.
Here, the legislatures create the deficits. Here the legislatures, not the President, create “tax cuts” and decide for whom; but more often create more taxation.
The power of the President in those areas can be no more than what the legislatures determine.
Whilst obviously dangerous in those areas where he does have the executive powers, Obama (and GWB) is not (and was not) the cause of the current economic miscreance – Congress is (and was). Congress has now, most recently, exacerbated these issues by the devolution of its powers on some expenditures to the executive branch.
And who is responsible for the composition of Congress?
Gah! Two “obvious”es in a row. I hate when I let stuff like that slip through. Oh, and thanks, Alisa.
This financial crash has been in the works for over 20 years. You can go as far back as the policies of Reagan and see this was the end result. 30 years of republican control in congress brought us to this. Always pushing for more deregulation. Deregulation brought out all the crooks and now we are paying for our mistakes
The Republicans only took control of Congress in 1994 and lost it in 2006. That’s not quite 30 years.
RRS is absolutely correct in his description of the US appropriations process. However, the President has some involvement (and culpability) in it, since he begins the process by proposing a budget containing spending amounts. Of course, in the Bush years those budgets (bloated though they may have been) were derided as being “dead on arrival”, and Congress proceeded to lard them up with unconscionable amounts of “pork”. I think the Obama budgets won’t be so derided, as they will be larger than Bush budgets by an order of magnitude, but they will nonetheless be bloated even farther by the insatiable Pelosi and her rapacious ilk.
The President can, of course, veto a spending bill, but our modern Congress wraps up all sorts of spending into a handful of “omnibus” appropriations bills which most presidents dare not veto, because they would kill the good with the bad. The only exception I can think of was in 1994 (+/-) when Clinton vetoed an appropriations bill which he thought was too parsimonious. Brilliant politician that he was, when the federal government was forced to shut down for a few days Clinton managed to deflect 100% of the blame onto Newt Gingrich and his “Contract With America” congress, who promptly caved in to his every demand.
So while it’s true that presidents get too much of the blame for deficits, they aren’t totally blameless either.
Doing a little bit more digging, we have to go back to the 80th Congress (1947-1949) to find a time before 1994 when the Republicans controlled both houses. The last time a Republican president had a Republican controlled Congress (both houses) was the 71st Congress (1929-1931) with Herbert Hoover in the White House.
The truth is that any one of the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the President have the ability to prevent any piece of spending. They are all culpable together. Politicians from both parties and both branches have done this together.
As far as the money bubble is concerned. Greenspan was a Reagan appointee who was reconfirmed by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush 2. Bush 2 appointed a man from the same cloth who has been reappointed by Obama. Again, it’s a bit hard to blame one party.
I think Paul is correct and Obama is different in that he is the first president who is actually from and of the hard left. The fact that he is attempting to implement a hard left agenda in circumstances where the government is almost broke already does make things interesting.
I have a feeling that Howard Hughes is not the example of practical Economics that you supposed, cjf.
He inherited a large fortune from his dad, the founder of the Hughes Tool company and then proceeded to reduce it considerably by spending on the Spruce Goose (magnificent failure that “flew” only once) the movies that made no money, and Jane Russels underwired bra for the movie the Outlaw.
He didn’t even get a patent on the bra, which would have brought in a few bob…
So in what way do you think Howard Hughes a practical example of anything, except having fun, more money than sense, and spending it?
Messr. Farrell,
Deregulation brought out all the crooks and now we are paying for our mistakes
In fact, the picture is decidedly more complex. If I may, here is a paper on the topic.
In large part, what we are seeing is the destabilizing effects of the strengthening money markets, which are to a large degree direct competitors with the banking system (even as the banks struggle to exert control over the money markets). The strengthening money markets, in turn, were stimulated by horrible regulation that kneecapped the banks and forced people to look for alternatives.
Indeed, the paper traces the problem all the way back to Glass-Steagall, and then Congress’s ham-handed manipulation of Regulation Q in 1966.
It has only been in recent years that Congress passed a law requiring the President, as part of his Constitutional duties, to draft and submit a budget for review and action.
Even if we accept there was deregulation (which there wasn’t), nobody’s suggesting there was a total absence of regulation, right? Regulation was going on, even if the level and effectiveness of it is up for debate. So what were the regulators doing?
Encouraging reckless lending.
After all, in a free, “unfettered” market, why in the name of sanity would anyone lend vast amounts of money to people he knew couldn’t pay it back in the first place? What’s the angle?
The answer is that the government guaranteed it. “Don’t worry about bad debt,” it said, “we’ll see you right. And the money’s cheap, we made sure of that. Just lend it to deadbeats so we can boast about ‘affordable housing’. Or else.”
That’s what happened. That’s what the regulation – what “little” of it there was, of course – was doing over the last 10-15 years. That’s what politicans of both sides were promising – cheap money and easy credit – and woe betide the heartless libertarian who didn’t want poor people to own their own houses.
That’s what the likes of Paul, the Austrian school, Peter Schiff, and, as I recall, Christopher Fildes of the Spectator, warned about for a decade, to the ridicule of the people now whining about “deregulation”.
And there should have been more of that kind of thing?
Sam et alia –
Consider other factors as well –
Take Credit card Debt (not “guaranteed”) bundled up into a security providing better yields; producing extensive defaults.
Mortgages originated by those who had no reason to hold them, but sold them on in one form or another, some “guaranteed” some not.
Credit default instruments. G, holding U S Gov’t obligations, agrees with P who holds commercial obligations that, for a premium, G will swap the security of what he holds for the possibility of default on what P holds. Then along comes J who does not hold any of the commercial obligations, but, for a premium, gets G to agree to hand over U S obligations (or $$) if the obligations held by P default.
Those are simplifications of parts of what bbecame complex transactions. Some kinds were more pervasive than others – but we can’t just look at one area of “guarantees.”
Don’t interrupt all the time – it gets on my tits
Brian, I just listened to the broadcast. Er, you do interrupt a lot and several key points that Paul was trying to make were abruptly cut off. You need to restrain that habit a bit, old chap. Otherwise, it was a good broadcast and I hope Paul can do more.
The criticism of Brian is unwarranted. As a commenter mentioned above, his chat with Paul is billed as a conversation, not an interview.
And, it is most likely have been conducted over the phone, with all the specific challenges of that medium. Still, listeners have the right to be annoyed, I guess:-)
I do think that the description of Obama as a ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ is unwarranted. That is, I can see someone operating from socialist or communist principles being called that, but I can’t see anything in Obama or his allies’ behavior that suggests any principle at all beyond ‘more government, more corruption, more profit for us and ours’. What he is is a corrupt Chicago politician.
Let the guy finish his thoughts next time.
PFP, did you listen to Paul’s reasons for labeling BO (as in “Big Zero”) a Marxist? He went into a lot of detail (education, history, associates, appointments, etc.) which make for a pretty strong case. Your comment reads more like someone merely discussing his own observation of Obama’s overt actions, than as a rebuttal to Paul’s points. Do you have a rebuttal?
Brian, thank you for posting this conversation; I hope you do more of them. I’m sorry so many commenters here seemed more interested in critiquing your interviewing technique (which, by the way, I found fine; I didn’t think there were an unreasonable number of interruptions) than the topics themselves. I guess it just goes to prove the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished.
Laird, my rebuttal, such as it is, is that all corrupt systems are the same: the corruption simply swamps any systemic identifiers. That’s why I didn’t bother reading Paul’s arguments: whether Obama is a Marxist or not just doesn’t matter.
I’ve done a few of these podcasts. There is nothing stopping me, or Paul, or Brian, or any of the other contributors from simply recording our own voices and posting this on Samizdata if we wish. Talking to someone generally improves it, though. I have mostly recorded them talking to either Brian or Patrick Crozier. I usually prefer to be the interviewee rather than interviewer, but when I do I choose the interviewer. There is nothing stopping Paul from doing the same, if he wishes to.
Person: most politicians are corrupt in that most of them are either tempted at some point to take advantage of the system to advance their personal interests (be they power or money or both), or they are in it for that purpose in the first place. There are few who are true ideologues though, and Paul’s point is that Obama is just such ideologue. His corruption of the existing system is not aimed at advancing his personal interests (although this may certainly have been a side benefit), but rather undermining and eventually destroying the current system in order to build a new and better one (in his ideological view). Now, this in itself is not a proof that Paul’s assessment of the man is necessarily correct (and Paul provides plenty of other evidence anyway), it just goes to show that your focus on corruption absolutely misses the point of Paul’s argument.
You may want to rethink the concept of ‘principle’ to include values you may find absolutely foreign and even repulsive. For an example, see Sam Duncan’s second comment above, specifically the case of Darling. Of course if you are determined to move along because there is nothing to see here, then there is nothing I or Paul or anyone else can do.
person
he may not be trying to get any personal benefits as a corrupt politician would, he may be letting his corrupt political allies unwittingly debauch the currency(his actual goal) or he may just be from the shallow end of the pool.never underestimate human stupidity- O’s or ours.What’s the chances Bill Ayers is doing his thinking besides his autobiographies?
Speaking of stupidity or otherwise, I don’t think that Obama is either some kind of evil genius, rubbing his hands in glee in the Oval Office when only his evil genius wife can see him, nor is he stupid or incompetent. The guy is reasonably intelligent, probably quite above average, although he is not the brilliant politician some like to make of him (if he were not black none of us would have ever heard of him, and a young and relatively good-looking guy beating McCain after 8 years of Bush, with supportive media – really, big deal). To me he is like a carefully pre-programmed robot equipped with a fairly high-level AI. It’s the pre-programmed part that is the problem.
PFP, that’s not a rebuttal and, in fact, is totally irrelevant to the present discussion. If you can’t be bothered to listen to the podcast save your remarks for a more appropriate thread.
Quite so RRS – if Congress had done its job it could have prevented TARP (under Bush) and it could have prevented the “Stimulus” (the ones of Bush and the Obama one) and so on.
Of course, in the end, the majority of House and Senate (once they have been suitably bribed by pork projects) go along with just about anything the leadership (both of the Executive and of Congress itself) propose.
Does all this matter to people in Britain – yes it does.
America may not dominate the world economy as it once did (it has gone down from half of world production back in the late 1940’s to less than a fifth of world production today), but it still matters a great deal.
I find it hard to believe that the West can stand if America falls.
Barack Obama.
“A lot of politicians were Marxists in their youth”.
Quite so – but how about “a lot of politicians spend almost all their lives as Community Organizers working with Marxist front organizations and then appoint active and present Marxists to various behind the scenes posts in their Administration”.
I started to rant on about Obama’s Marxism last year – but it is true that Glenn Beck does it better than me sometimes.
“This film [of yet another Obama person demanding the extermination of dissent or the control of everything] is from back in the mists of time – March”.
And then April and so on.
The present “New Labour” lot in Britain may have been Marxists in university (although actually Mr Brown was not), but they were not making such speeches (sometimes under the mistaken impression that no one was recording them) a few months ago.
“But Obama did not plant any bombs like Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones”.
No he was too young – and would most likely always have been a Gramsci like organizer and politician (not a bomb planter) anyway. But this has never been a mainstream position in Marxism anyway (“Lenin” and the others used to snear at the left S.R’s with their doctrine of almost random bullets and bombs).
But if we are dealing with the question of direct terrorism….
It was Bill Ayers (and his partner in terror wife) who annointed Barack Obama back in Chicago (they were impressed by his ability to mask his thoughts and feelings, to give a performance, and instructed their “friends” to support him).
And Bill Ayers has never repented his terrorism. And that has not stopped him getting senior positions in the Chicago Machine (Daley Jr deciding to make tactical alliances with people his father faught on the streets) or his “social justice education” becomming mainstream in American teacher training establishments (yes I know that Karl Marx himself did not like the term “social justice” – but it was coopted many years ago, and do not sneer at the unimportance of teacher training colleges, Mao got his ideas from one).
Neither has the other leader of the Weather Underground – Jeff Jones, he has gone from ordering the bombing of the family homes of New York police officers to being a senior adviser to the Governor or New York State and a top man in the “Apollo Project” (the alliance of corrupt, and stupid, big business people with radicals) – these are the people who wrote the “Stimulus” Bill (almost a trillion Dollars).
“But what does any of this matter Paul”.
If people can not understand why it is important to understand why the President of the United States is an enemy agent (not doing bad things because he is ignorant, like Bush, but doing as much harm as he thinks he can away with – on purpose). Then it is hard to explain it to them. But I will try.
Even a very ignorant man (someone like George Walker Bush) can only do so much harm by his blundering about – vast harm certainly, but only to a limit.
An intelligent man (and Barack Obama is highly intelligent) who is trying to destroy freedom as a deliberate aim can do much more harm.
And not just to the United States.