From India to England to Japan: Curry

When I was a graduate student, a professor invited a few students--all of us foreigners--to his home for a meal. He himself was from Wales, and his wife was from Japan. One of the dishes there was a curry. Interesting, I thought, and reasoned it was because of the UK connection. Not so. The professor's wife explained to me that making the curry dish from scratch was a mark of expertise in Japan. In Japan!!!

It was about the same time that I discovered that a Japanese fast food joint in the LA area--I have forgotten that name--had on its menu a beef curry with white rice. I would never have guessed, way back in India, that curry would have such a vaulted status in Japan.

These memories have been stirred by a short piece in the NY Times magazine. It notes that:

katsu curry dates to the Meiji era of the late 19th century, soon after the opening of Japan’s borders. Japanese trade with the West led to a national fascination with foreign flavors and textures — a kind of reverse-twist culinary version of the Japonisme that gripped Europe around the same time. (There was until recently a curry museum located in Yokohama, one of Japan’s most prominent ports.)

I wonder if there was any equivalent import of Japanese food habit into the Indian kitchen?

Falling in love with the US dollar, all over again

I told a colleague the other day that at the end of all this crisis, once again America will turn out to be the unbeatable top dog in the world. My logic was/is simple: when things go bad all over the world, it is America that most of them trust (unless you are a Hugo Chavez) and, more than that, they suddenly realize that it is way better to hold to on US dollars than any other currency.

And, guess what? The dollar is going up. In fact, going up so fast that now there is talk of whether its ascent needs to be slowed down by central banks coordinating their action. I am not an economist, thankfully, but I have never seen such wild swings in every aspect of the global economy.

The NY Times reports that "On Friday, worries about how the financial crisis would affect Britain’s economy caused the pound to lose 8 cents against the dollar, falling to $1.53. ... And the downdraft of the pound and the euro — which fell to $1.26 against the dollar on Friday, its lowest level in two years"

$1.26 for one Euro. A 20% decrease in merely 3 months!

The NY Times piece also notes that:

So great are the concerns among policy makers about the turmoil in currency markets that it has prompted talk of a coordinated intervention by the leading industrial countries in coming days, to quell the soaring dollar and put a floor under emerging-market currencies.
Such a move — in which the Federal Reserve and other central banks would sell dollars and yen and buy other currencies — has been used extremely sparingly by the United States in recent years.
“The risk is huge, but it is appropriate at this point, because if the emerging markets go into default, the consequences would be catastrophic,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, an economist at Harvard.
When a developing country’s currency loses value rapidly, it impedes the ability to pay back loans from Western banks. That could cause a rash of corporate or even government defaults — a feature of previous financial crises in Asia and Latin America.

That will be the next round in this global financial crisis--heavily leveraged countries going broke. It won't be countries like India and China, but the same old countries from a couple of decades ago--countries like Argentina, which are already there, for all purposes.

Stupid Britons, and not stupid Americans, for once!

That is what Britons do at home and abroad. They belch, vomit, copulate, litter and barge their way through public spaces, dressed like hookers and louts, defying the police without shame or modesty. British expatriates are some of the worst: overpaid, oversexed and all over the place

Hey, I thought this is what we Americans are supposed to be. No wonder there is always talk of Anglo-American alliance, eh! ha ha ha

The Times columnist goes nuts at how stupid the two Britons were when they got drunk, and engaged in sexual activities on a public beach in Dubai. I have been to Dubai and gone to at least one beach there--just bloody hot it was. And I remember at the receiving end of some hostile remarks even when I was fully clothed and having a conversation with my brother and his family--I was "jokingly" referred to as a terrorist because I was visiting from America. So, my thought on reading the news item a couple of days ago was rather simple: why invite trouble by such acts in the pubic, er, public? :-) The columnist, however, jumps into unnecessary moralizing ....

Is it surprising that so many Muslims around the world despise us for our decadence when we express our sympathy with British men and women who behave like this? There is something clearly despicable in the permissiveness and hyper-sexualisation of western culture; the result is broken families, unwanted children, sexual diseases and a state of agitation which drives the young into chaos and crime.

Oct 24, 1929: Wall St crash

A game-changing presidential endorsement

Guaranteed employment if working for a term paper mill?

In one of the first ever upper-division classes that I taught--many years ago--one term paper came across like it maybe wasn't the student's. It was on a topic that I did not even remotely discuss in class, and the contents were clearly borrowed from somewhere.

I did not go after the student, however. Instead, I examined my course syllabus and how I had set up the assignments. I found that the instructions for the term paper were not rigorous after all--it was open ended, and students could write on a topic of their choice. I met the problem, and it was me after all!

So, the following term, I changed the structure. I required a 2,500-word paper at the end of the term--but, this time it had to be a response to a specific question that I gave them. And, they still had to search for new materials, cite them, .... all the things we typically require in a term paper. Well, there was no "funny" business that term.

Since then, I don't think I have ever set up a syllabus where students can write papers on topics of their own choosing. More so since the deluge of resources on the web--not only can students be tempted to doing a whole lot of copy/paste, they can do worse things: turn to a term paper mill for help! Now, the only problem I get every once in a while is when a student doesn't think carefully and brings in paragraphs from a source, and pretends that those sentences were his. Even this, I think the last I had such a problem was two (three?) years ago.

One might argue that this severely cramps the free thinking of students. That is exactly why I phrase the question such that there is still enough latitude for them to follow-up on an issue that really revs up their curiosity.

When we faculty give generic term paper tasks like "write a paper on the Chinese economy", we should not be surprised if some students resort to unfair practices. Because, there are plenty of "term paper artists" like this one who has written an interesting, and funny, piece on it. (I don't think he outsourced this one!) He writes:

Term paper work is also extremely easy, once you get the hang of it. It's like an old dance routine buried in one's muscle memory. You hear the tune — say, "Unlike the ancient Greek tragic playwrights, Shakespeare likes to insert humor in his tragedies" — and your body does the rest automatically. I'd just scan Google or databases like Questia.com for a few quotes from primary and secondary sources, create an argument based on whatever popped up from my search, write the introduction and underline the thesis statement, then fill in the empty spaces between quotes with whatever came to mind.

This "inside scoop", so to say, further confirms my view that open-ended term paper guidelines are increasingly disasters waiting to happen. Anyway, the author adds that it takes special skills to be a term paper artist--to never get into writing a "real paper" because that is way too much work!:

The secret to the gig is to amuse yourself. I have to, really, as most paper topics are deadly boring. Once, I was asked to summarize in three pages the causes of the First World War (page one), the major battles and technological innovations of the war (page two), and to explain the aftermath of the war, including how it led to the Second World War (page three). Then there was this assignment for a composition class: six pages on why "apples [the fruit] are the best." You have to make your own fun. In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source. My own novels and short stories were the topic of many papers — several DUMB CLIENTS rate me as their favorite author and they've never even read me, or anyone else. Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups

Note: because it is about how term papers can be easily sold to multiple students, well, I have cross posted this on all my three current blogs :-) No, seriously, the cross-post is because of the relevance.

The bastard--well, the English language, that is!

It is that time of the academic calendar when one of my tasks is to grade papers. That is also when I am reminded of the stark difference between people like me, who are not "native" English speakers, versus people like my students, for whom English was the first language. It shows up in interesting ways. Here is an example. One student writes about an "imanent" threat. I know the student refers to an "imminent threat", and the student probably even knew the word without knowing how it is spelt. Or, was the student was thinking of "immanent?" Or "eminent?" aaaahhhh!!!! :-)

I, on the other hand, probably knew these words from coming across then while reading something, and then tried to figure out their meanings. I never ran into such problems in Tamil or Sanskrit, or even the three months of German that I did, because in all these languages one pronounces the word the way it is written. That simple. English, as Bernard Shaw famously pointed out with his satire on how to pronounce "ghoti", is awful. Because it is a bloody bastard language.

In writing about a bunch of books on the language itself, Christine Kenneally notes that

Perhaps more than any other tongue, English has been decisively shaped by the series of intense geopolitical events that mark its short but vivid history. In its first 600 years, English was the language of the invaded; later, it became a language of invasion. English began in 449 when marauding Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Frisians sailed from their homeland (now Denmark, northern Germany, southern Norway, and Sweden) to invade a small island in the North Sea. The tribes settled there, replacing the land's Celtic languages with their own. The word English itself comes from Anglisc, the dialect of the Angles.

So, given the bastradization that has gone on for centuries, and given how English continues to import words from all over the world as it marches into every remote village, is it fair to torture students about spelling?

Satirizing book promotions

When a satire satirizes itself, it is simply way too good. Here are Jon Stewart and John Hodgman:

Salaries: academic versus football

I have blogged a lot about the horrible minor league football that college football really is. But, I suppose a picture is worth a thousand words:

Could this be true?

Marx is back

A great follow-up to the blog entry on how ideologues don't just die nor fade away.
This might seem like a believe it or not report ....

Marx is back
Hasan Suroor
LONDON: With capitalism in crisis, Karl Marx has become fashionable again in the West. Das Kapital, his seminal work, is set to become a best-seller in Europe.
In his native Germany, copies of Das Kapital are reported to be “flying off the shelves” as failed bankers and free-market economists try to make sense of the global economic meltdown.
Jorn Schutrumpf, head of the Berlin publishing house Dietz, is reported as having said that the sales of the works of Marx, and Friedrich Engels, have trebled. “Marx is fashionable again…We have a new generation of readers who are rattled by the financial crisis and have to recognise that neo-liberalism has turned out to be a false dream,” he told The Times.
A dramatic rise has been reported in the number of visitors to Marx’s birthplace in Trier. And film-maker Alexander Kluge is planning to turn Das Kapital into a movie.
Western leaders who once sneered at Marx’s dense tome, breezily dismissing it as a “doorstop,” have been seen flaunting Das Kapital in recent weeks. French President Nicolas Sarkozi has been spotted “flicking through” it, German Finance Minister Peer Steinbruck has said nice things about it, and even the Pope has praised the book for its “great analytical” quality.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams recalled Marx’s analysis of capitalism , saying: “Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves.”
Free-market cheerleaders such as The Times and The Daily Telegraph have become interested in Marx. There has been a wave of soul-searching analyses of whether he was right, after all.

Indian-Americans break out

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said his deputy, Neel Kashkari, will be in charge of the bailout passed by Congress, and almost immediately Time magazine dubbed him the “$700 billion man.” However worrisome and complicated the crisis and the bailout, Kashkari’s appointment was personally exciting for one reason: he is Indian-American.

According to reports, the 35-year old Kashkari is the son of Indians who immigrated to the United States from Kashmir. It’s a long way from the scenic Himalayas to the waters of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, where Kashkari was raised.

Kashkari joins an impressive list of Indian-Americans who burst onto the American public sphere in quite a hurry over the past few years. I used to joke that we will know for sure that we have arrived on the U.S. scene when one of us got enmeshed in an embarrassing, high profile controversy. Well, not anymore. It has been simply fascinating to watch Indian-Americans exercising a remarkable level of influence.

It was an Indian-American who led the legal fight that profoundly changed our treatment of Guantanamo detainees. Neal Katyal, who is a law professor at Georgetown University, was barely 36 years old when he won Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld — a Supreme Court ruling that challenged the current administration’s interpretation of executive powers.

Another one almost became a vice presidential nominee. Bobby Jindal, who is the 37-year old governor of Louisiana, was a serious contender for the second spot on the Republican ticket.

Readers of Newsweek may be familiar with Fareed Zakaria, who also hosted a news show on PBS. A friend once described Zakaria as being sexier than Omar Sharif, and with brains on steroids!

Jhumpa Lahiri makes us think about profound issues through her award-winning narratives that are often about Indian-Americans. And director M. Night Shyamalan scares the daylights out of filmgoers with stories that are deceptively simple.

On the other hand, it was absolutely depressing to read that an Indian-American family was one of the first who lost their lives because of the current economic crisis.

Karthik Rajaram was a former employee of PriceWaterhouse Coopers and Sony Pictures in Southern California, but had been unemployed for a few months. He committed suicide, after killing his family — his wife, mother-in-law, and three children aged 19, 12 and 7. It is unfortunate that this Indian-American resorted to guns, reinforcing the notion that guns and violence, too, are as American as the oft-repeated apple pie and mom.

All these are absolute contrasts to the stereotypes that we run into on television and movies, where the typical Indian character is either a motel owner or a physician, both with accents far stranger than mine. After all, even from a statistical perspective, one would expect a lot more than just these two stereotypes when the population of India itself is more than a billion, and when a few million with Indian origins are scattered all over the planet!

Perhaps I am not different from other “ethnic” immigrants in getting pumped up. I clearly remember a fellow student in graduate school who was from Canada.

He was acutely aware of Jewish players in professional baseball, and his interest in this came from his passion for the game and from his Jewish background. To him, Sandy Koufax was not merely the best pitcher ever, but was almost a god. There is no Indian-American equivalent of Koufax. Yet.

There is no denying the fact that Kashkari, Katyal and others are fantastic testimony to the idea of America.

More than in any other country, it is in America that there is a high probability of anybody making it big in whatever they choose. It is that idea, an ideal even with its own blemishes, that continues to draw immigrants from all over the world, from thousands of miles away.

So, I don’t get depressed about the multi-trillion-dollar global economic crisis. After all, an Indian-American is in charge of straightening things out!

Published in the Register Guard, October 21st

Tenure as a 30-year contract

I have blogged a few times about tenure and the increasing number of years we hold on to faculty jobs. This is an issue about which we can be in denial for as long as we want--the downside is that external forces are then going to shape the discussion and the eventual decision as well.

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, who is the chairman of the higher-education practice at Korn/Ferry International and a president emeritus and university professor of public service at George Washington University, adds his views in an essay in the Chronicle. He opens with:

Something is wrong with tenure, and we need to make it right. Abolishing it altogether is not politically or culturally feasible, or even likely. Any such attempt would set the many academic constituencies against all the rest simultaneously and, like the famous circular firing squad, leave everyone at least grievously injured and possibly some higher-education institutions dead.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't at least consider changing some of the ways that tenure works.

Yes, I would love to discuss this with colleagues, if it were not the fact that I will "not be given the same level of consideration" because I am not one of them. In fact, I was told to "then please shut up." I suppose I should be happy that there was a 'please' added to the directive that I should shut up. ha ha ha. So much for the view from the outside that being tenured gives us real First Amendment rights :-)

The Market as God

All this constant chatter about the stock market reminded me about a wonderful article I had read a few years ago in the Atlantic. So, a quick search and it is amazing how fast we can now pull up something from the past.

In that 1999 article by Harvey Cox, who was (is?) a Professor of Divinity at Harvard, easily juggles with philosophical constructs, theological ideas, and compares them with how the Market has taken over as the new religion. I remembered feeling lost about some of the philosophical ideas he was talking about .... A neat piece that Cox concludes with:

No religion, new or old, is subject to empirical proof, so what we have is a contest between faiths. Much is at stake. The Market, for example, strongly prefers individualism and mobility. Since it needs to shift people to wherever production requires them, it becomes wrathful when people cling to local traditions. These belong to the older dispensations and -- like the high places of the Baalim -- should be plowed under. But maybe not. Like previous religions, the new one has ingenious ways of incorporating pre-existing ones. Hindu temples, Buddhist festivals, and Catholic saints' shrines can look forward to new incarnations. Along with native costumes and spicy food, they will be allowed to provide local color and authenticity in what could otherwise turn out to be an extremely bland Beulah Land.

There is, however, one contradiction between the religion of The Market and the traditional religions that seems to be insurmountable. All of the traditional religions teach that human beings are finite creatures and that there are limits to any earthly enterprise. A Japanese Zen master once said to his disciples as he was dying, "I have learned only one thing in life: how much is enough." He would find no niche in the chapel of The Market, for whom the First Commandment is "There is never enough." Like the proverbial shark that stops moving, The Market that stops expanding dies. That could happen. If it does, then Nietzsche will have been right after all. He will just have had the wrong God in mind.

Bonus if you read until here: it was in 1999 that the Atlantic also featured an article that argued that stocks were undervalued and that we would soon race towards a Dow Jones value of 36,000. Ha ha ha. I guess the Market God failed us, or got very very angry :-)
Their thesis was this:

Stocks are now, we believe, in the midst of a one-time-only rise to much higher ground -- to the neighborhood of 36,000 for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. After they complete this historic ascent, owning them will still be profitable but the returns will decline. You won't be able to make as much money from them each year. We believe that in the meantime, however, astounding profits will be made.

More Starbucks = more financial crisis. Really?

I am no fan of Starbucks. The last time I went on my own to buy a cup of coffee--whatever they call them sizes--was .... I don't remember when! I blogged earlier about the many, many takes on Starbucks. Frankly, I don't care a damn about Starbucks--it is like the adult stores by the freeways. Hey, I don't care for them, and if there are those who want to get stuff there, well, more power to them as long as nobody hassles me.

But, I do like intelligent and innovative takes on Starbucks. Which is why I liked this piece where the idea is simple: "The higher the concentration of expensive, nautically themed, faux-Italian-branded Frappuccino joints in a country's financial capital, the more likely the country is to have suffered catastrophic financial losses."
Pretty simple the idea, eh! I wish I had taken the trouble to correlate the location of Starbucks outlets with the real estate data and banks .... Some of these commentators are smart--unlike the motor mouths on talk radio and TV who spin the same ideological crap over and over and over .... Anyway, the theory is:

Having a significant Starbucks presence is a pretty significant indicator of the degree of connectedness to the form of highly caffeinated, free-spending capitalism that got us into this mess. It's also a sign of a culture's willingness to abandon traditional norms and ways of doing business (virtually all the countries in which Starbucks has established beachheads have their own venerable coffee-house traditions) in favor of fast-moving American ones. The fact that the company or its local licensee felt there was room for dozens of outlets where consumers would pony up lots of euros, liras, and rials for expensive drinks is also a pretty good indicator that excessive financial
optimism had entered the bloodstream.

Oil and other commodities becoming cheaper .... is bad?

More on whether falling oil prices are good or bad .... And grains and metals and a whole bunch of commodities are also experiencing significant price decreases ..... I suppose critical thinking means that we never take anything for what it seems like on the outside .... Ray Fisman explains:

How are commodities prices connected to civil strife? Poor farmers impoverished by lower crop prices may be eager recruits for rebel groups who can promise a better livelihood from stolen loot than what the soil can provide (not to mention protection from pillaging, since unaligned farmers may be easy prey for either rebels or government troops). A cheaper cup of joe may thus translate into conflict in the coffee-growing world. ....
Then again, lower prices may also mean less conflict. One of the great ironies of modern economic history is that natural resources can be less an economic blessing than a curse (the so-called natural resource curse). One reason for this apparent paradox is that resource-abundant countries suffer through frequent civil conflicts as competing factions struggle for control over oil wells, diamond mines, and other sources of natural wealth (and use the resulting revenues to fuel further conflict). If
resource prices fall, then there's less wealth to bicker over, less reason to fight, and less cash on hand to purchase further armaments.
Given these two opposing forces, when should we expect price drops to trigger more violence, and when should we expect less? [ Oeindrila Dube and Juan Vargas] argue that the critical difference is the "labor intensity" of extracting a resource—that is, the value of workers relative to the cost of buildings and machines. For example, a farmer tending his land may need little more than a strong back and a shovel, but an oil rig may cost billions and a pipeline billions more. Subsistence farming is labor-intensive; oil drilling is capital-intensive.

Brother, can you spare me a dime?

[The] idea of $25 billion for Africa suddenly doesn’t sound like so much after a $700 billion bailout in the United States or $2 trillion in bank guarantees in Europe. We’ve just been making choices to ignore the poor rather than calculations based on real resources available. We made a choice to let millions of people die and not honor our commitments. The crisis doesn’t change our quantitative ability to follow through. And now, I think everyone is more of a macroeconomist than they were before. They can evaluate for themselves that it’s just not a lot of money compared to the amounts mobilized in recent weeks.

In that argument, Jeffrey Sachs makes a fantastic point--we always offered excuses that we didn't have $25 billion to help out the poor in Africa. Anti-malarial medication, mosquito nets, TB medication, .... any of these was met with the same argument that we can't keep throwing money in Africa.

Well, hello, and we now have consensus that Uncle Sam is ready to spend 800 billion dollars to bail out banks and their bankers? The hypocrisy is too damn evident. But, as Ralph Nader likes to point out, as long we play a game of going back and forth between tweedledum and tweedledee, there will be only one message for the poor, whether they are in Africa or anywhere else: so long, suckers :-(

Kinsley finds small business at The Beast

Tina Brown, who went from the new Yorker to found Talk, which crashed and burned, is now the person behind The Beast. Which is where Christopher Buckley wrote about why he quit the National Review, which was founded by his father. And now, I find one of my favorite commentators there; Michael Kinsley has a hilarious column on small businesses--the ones that every politician loves to talk about. The opener is just outrightly funny:

“Fifty percent of small business income taxes are paid by small business.”
— Senator John McCain, during the third presidential debate, October 15
I have been diligently researching this matter, in the hope of winning a Nobel Prize in Economics, and my preliminary conclusion is that the situation is even more extreme than John McCain suggests. Although I really should run this past Paul Krugman before going public, the evidence seems to suggest that as much as 100 percent of small business income taxes are paid by small business.

The latest insult word: Professorial!

Professorial must be the insult of the season. ... When and why did professorial become an insult or a political liability?

That is Siva Vaidhyanathan trying to make sense of the idiocy with which the media uses the word "professorial" to imply that we are not "normal" and can't connect with "normal" people. He then writes,

The presumed communicative disorder of professorial speech seems to be the root of the problem. Of course, there is no such thing as a uniform professorial style. My field of media studies is filled with dull, timid, dense lecturers. But it also has its share of stirring orators and provocative interlocutors. Some of us are math geeks. Some of us are policy geeks. Some of us are poetry geeks. Many of us are not geeks at all.

I should poll my students on whether I am a geek :-)
But, I think we have a wonderful context to think about what it means to be a professor these days. After all, as Vaidhyanathan notes, we are a diverse lot. But, there has to be something in common, right?
Well, that is the question that Stanley Katz tackled a couple of years ago. He asserted that:

we have lost something along the way. We have lost a sense of commonality as professors, the sense that we are all in this together — "this" being a dedication to undergraduate teaching and not just specialized research. We have lost a belief in the relevance of teaching undergraduates for the health of our democracy. We have lost confidence that what we do in teaching and research is inherently good, and not primarily a utilitarian occupation. We have lost the conviction that we have a calling, that as professors our duty is to profess.
We have also, manifestly, lost our sense of belonging to an ascertainable and manageable community of teacher-professors. Along the way, we have lost our commitment to the particular universities in which we work.

I think I don't have much to argue with his points. Well, except for one thing: if we think it is that highly valuable for democracy, then we--taxpayers--ought to pay for it. The current system stinks. Further, the context has changed--society and students see college education in strictly utilitarian terms, which means employment, and the health of democracy has no place in it.
Anyway, Katz further notes that

Too frequently even the most thoughtful academics are fixated on academic freedom as the crucial challenge. Academic freedom — the freedom to teach and to learn — is central. But it must follow from an acceptance of the duties of professionalism. We have such academic "rights" only if we embrace the duties of a public profession — to instruct the untrained and to create knowledge. That includes the obligation to identify the standards by which practice can be assessed and to enforce adherence to them. Seen from that perspective, professionalism is the core of democratic behavior, since it entails the acceptance of the principled provision of public services, without
which a modern democracy cannot be expected to succeed. ....

I would like us to consider whether there are not recoverable values and practices in the world that we have lost — and also new ones more appropriate to the 21st-century professoriate. Shouldn't we at least be asking Dewey's question: "But have we not come to a time when more can be achieved by taking thought together?"

Yes, now is the time to discuss these issues. Unfortunately, I can't see this happening at the university where I teach--what can be discussed is strictly defined by one group that shall not be named.

Palin or Fey? Very funny

Ideologues neither die nor fade away

General Douglas McArthur famously uttered that "old soldiers never die, they just fade away." That may be true of old soldiers. But, old ideas do not seem to die nor do they fade away. They just hang around and cause additional misery for all of us. When the USSR was going strong, the defenders in the free world argued that the USSR was not representing the true ideals of socialism and communism. And now, we hear from the far right about how all this is not the fault of a free market--because, after all, what we have now is not a free market to begin with!

Of course, we do not have a free market--not when government accounts for almost a fifth of the economy. And not when we have significant government involvement in economic decision making.

But, come on, can't we at least accept that the market is imperfect? Oh yeah, even if some of them will say that in the softest of whispers, they immediately come back with a much louder, the most imperfect market will be more perfect than the most perfect government. Which, again, is ideological speak.

Jacob Weisberg writes that this financial crisis is the end of libertarianism. I say he is way too optimistic. But, he has some good points:

the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along. .....

Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster.