I guess that should be Richard A. Posner, because that’s how Dick likes to bill himself on his book jackets. If you read this blog assiduously, you’re probably aware that no one gets my goat quite so often as the learned judge. I never liked his snooty, know-it-all attitude, but it was his little book, Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Presidential Election and the Courts, that drove me over the edge.
Written to defend the Supreme Court’s egregiously indefensible decision to award the 2000 presidential election to George Bush, Breaking the Deadlock propounded the novel theory that we are a nation of elites, rather than laws, and that elite institutions—the Supreme Court, for example—have plenary power in times of crisis to do whatever it is they deem “necessary” to preserve the public safety, regardless of laws, constitutions, or institutions. Posner’s sole criticism of the Rehnquist-Scalia Court’s shameless power grab was that they failed to concoct a cover story clever enough to fool the many-headed, who, after all, need to be fooled if they are to be kept in line.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 pushed Dick even further away from the rule of law, and he eagerly aligned himself with the “torture is a good thing” crowd, manufacturing endless ticking-time bomb scenarios to prove his point. (Though he rarely likes to talk about it, Posner is Jewish, and an ardent supporter of Israel. This is the sort of thing people don’t need to know.) The once-daring free-market libertarian who advocated legalization of marijuana and baby auctions as a substitute for adoption had seemingly metamorphosed into a Limbaughesque ditto head.
But somewhere along the road, Posner bailed, along with David Brooks, whom I also dismissed as hopelessly in the tank for the Bush is God crowd. The sheer incompetence of the Bush Administration, plus the relentless increase in the power of the evangelical base within the Republican Party—symbolized, of course, by the selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate—split the neo-con brigade right in half. Enough is enough, and too much is too much!
Posner has enshrined his disillusionment with the Bush Administration and the Republicans in A Failure of Capitalism, a surprisingly sharp attack on the reign of Greenspan. For the most part, the book is an excellent tick-tock of all the things that went wrong during the Bush Administration, as well as reasons why nobody seemed to notice that things were bound to fall apart until they began to do so, and why once they did fall apart nobody did much about them, making some shrewd observations about group-think and careerism, which tend to keep everyone on the same page until well after the page has turned.
Posner is particularly ticked with Bush, “a lame-duck president who seemed to lack interest or competence in handling economic issues and to prefer reminiscence, retirement planning, legacy-polishing, and foreign travel to directing, and explaining to the public, the government’s response to the biggest economic crisis in three quarters of a century.” We tore up the Constitution for this guy and this is the thanks we get! Don’t blame me, Dick! I voted for Gore!
Posner boots the economics profession around pretty well, blaming them, basically, for not being physicists, which is pretty much true, but is still surprising coming from a guy who made his bones applying Chicago School-style economic analysis to legal and social issues, analysis which assumes that markets are always right, an approach that Posner now says is wrong. In fact, when he’s criticizing the economists, Posner ought to have included a mea culpa or two for himself. For, just like the economists, Posner is now discarding the Chicago School thing and rather awkwardly embracing the tenets of neo-Keynesianism. For all his criticism of groupthink, Posner is a pretty good example of it.
Although Posner trains most of his fire on the economists, he is predictably dismissive of the politicians, who sink so low as to want to help unions when the country is falling into a depression. The one group he doesn’t blame is the financiers. How can you? After all, they simply pursue profits “as lions pursue gazelles.” But don’t politicians pursue votes in the same manner, and economists professional recognition and prestige? By this standard, it’s impossible to fault anyone for anything, even Judge Posner.
Afterwords
If I were being literal, I would not take anything Judge Posner wrote at face value, since he’s frequently asserted that important people like himself have not simply the right but the duty to mislead the public. But in fact the good Judge usually says what he really thinks. Because dearer than all of his theories and tricks to Posner is the sound of his own voice. As long as it’s him talking, everything’s okay.
