Attack of the Sadistic Zombies – Paul Krugman

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/attack-of-the-sadistic-zombies

by rbanffy • 1 year ago

83 23 1 year ago

paulkrugman.substack.com

adamc• 1 year ago

Also, there are other things hidden in the budget bill. For example, there is a clause that would make administration officials immune from being held in contempt: https://www.rawstory.com/trump-restraining-order/

(I don't know if the courts would rule that constitutional. But the attempt is there.)

jack_h2• 1 year ago

It would be handy if they could actually quote the text of the bill and maybe link to a specific version rather than making assertions. I have multiple versions of the bill up in front of me and "contempt" and a few related searches turns up nothing.

sjsdaiuasgdia2• 1 year ago

Found it in this: https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/one_big_beautiful_bil...

SEC. 70302. RESTRICTION OF FUNDS.
No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.

mikeyouse• 1 year ago

For the text + an analysis of the legal implications:

https://www.justsecurity.org/113529/terrible-idea-contempt-c...

The provision in the proposed budget reconciliation bill states: “No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.”
By its very terms this provision is meant to limit the power of federal courts to use their contempt power. It does so by relying on a relatively rarely used provision of the Rules that govern civil cases in federal court. Rule 65(c) says that judges may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order “only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.”

...

But the provision in the House bill would make the court orders in these cases completely unenforceable. Indeed, the bill is stunning in its scope. It would apply to all temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions, and even permanent injunctions ever issued. By its terms, it applies to court orders “issued prior to, on, or subsequent” to its adoption.

BoiledCabbage• 1 year ago

And where are all the libertarians?

It's why I view contemporary libertarians as a farce. They were all up in arms, screaming at about having to wear a mask to keep others alive, but here we have people building an administrative state placing itself itself to be fully above the law able to impose any rule or action desired without consequence -- and not peep.

Maybe I'm just not understanding the distinction (and am open to being corrected) but the level of hypocrisy is just incredible to me.

marcosdumay• 1 year ago

And where are all the libertarians?

Disenfranchised and marginalized since the 80s.

lokar3• 1 year ago

While I generally agree with krugman, he and other on the left need to be more honest about what funding our (very modest) social safety net will cost.

The idea that a the billionaires could easily pay this is just wrong. You could take the wealth of all US billionaires and it fund government for less then a year.

They should pay more, but for fairness, it won’t fix the budget. For that the middle class needs to pay more. They pay less then they have in modern history, and less then other places.

bryanlarsen• 1 year ago

Standard deflection technique. Please debate the article itself rather than changing the topic and implicitly defending the indefensible.

lokar3• 1 year ago

I said I agreed with him

dahinds• 1 year ago

Can you reference where Krugman made the claim you're criticizing?

photochemsyn• 1 year ago

Politically partisan economists don't seem to grasp the fundamental problem with hyper-financialization of the economy or even understand what made such a program possible.

Take outsourching of industrial manufacturing to overseas labor zones. Historically, industrial economies (eg late 19th century Germany) were reluctant to do this because they knew they'd lose control of their technologies and profit streams (thus German companies resisted British demands that they build their chemical factories in Britain to serve the British market). The American neoliberals, in contrast, thought they could control the overseas sweatshops through a combination of economic free trade deals backed up by covert regime change and overt military interventions, with the result being concentration of wealth domestically combined with an economic shift towards financialization - wealth management in other words. These policies were bipartisan and the result - gross wealth inequality leading to societal tensions - should have been obvious to all - except to the academic economists and their aggregate econometric models.

The wealth inequality problem isn't going to be solved by Democrat-supported handouts to the poor from Congress - the first step will be to accept the fundamental flaws in hyper-financialized investment capitalism, which merely extracts wealth from the middle class and funnels it upwards, versus a mixed system of industrial capitalism and socialism, which encourages middle-class prosperity along with industrial and technological development.

A simple example is illustrative: if we have the Fed print $1M for each US citizen, then at 5% return on investment, everyone gets a universal basic income of $50K/yr and nobody ever has to work again... except for the slaves on the overseas plantations?

tacitusarc• 1 year ago

While this may be generally interesting to some folks, it is off-topic on HackerNews.

fuzzfactor• 1 year ago

I think at one point not too long ago that was more realistic than now.

For one thing the general interest is limited to those that actually pay attention to the cause & effect of economic conditions, and that may not even be the mainstream majority of Facebook readers and TV watchers. I do agree the more mainstream items, controversial or not, were kind of the antithesis of the intended HN readership.

Then rapidly over a period of months the economic landscape has changed in ways never seen for decades, last time it was anything like this was way before the internet or any tech startup scene of any kind.

Very suddenly what could very well be a majority of HN readers[0] may be finding that bullshit in Washington which they have always known was going on, and never thought would have risen to the level of threat that their own ambition and technology could not overcome, has now escalated to the point where for many, things which were completely within reach or coming close are now in doubt through no fault of their own. Whether that's education, career opportunities, or merely continued survival in the tech or financial world, even if they had been "all in" for years or just getting the foot in the door. The "general consensus" is that people can not expect to do as well going forward as they would have if stability could have been maintained, and that surely extends to HN, but it is not a general audience here.

The trick is to keep it from becoming a general audience while still allowing the kind of articles from non-tech sources, especially those having financial implications, that draw worthwhile comments of the kind that can't be found anywhere else.

Because things that didn't used to matter, now relate to technology startup and growth possibilities like never before.

Just because of bozos in Washington which have plainly reached a critical mass of lower intellect that was never endured before, not even decades ago. Regardless if they are all as cruel as Krugman makes them out to be or not. Some very successful and wealthy capitalists are even having that deer-in-the-headlights look themselves.

People on the left & right are all in for a toss-up, due to more unpredictability than ever in solid-state history.

Plenty will land on their feet and come out just fine, plenty will not.

And who else but HN readers would value the commentary of other HN readers over that of the commentary on general interest sites, even over the full articles when a potential entrepreneur is looking for insight into how that might effect their prospects which seemed so much more dependent on personal effort and technology. Like not that long ago, and virtually overnight there are surely some ventures where all the ambition and technology in the world won't help you now, compared to doom that can be handed down from above with the stroke of a pen.

[0] Especially ones who would really like to start new companies, or seek accelerator funding for little companies when they desire to build commitment for growth.

Edit: not my downvote BTW, corrective upvote actually

jaybrendansmith• 1 year ago

I truly appreciate your viewpoint, but we living is some very strange times. We need a place to have a rational discussion about them. There are very few places on the Internet where this can occur that aren't completely polarized already. Since this current political situation impacts so many Hacker News topics, including science, research funding, employment, job postings, economy, startup culture, in my view it is worthy of a few posts. I know there are many libertarians out there, and many small-c conservatives, that are not comfortable with what our current government is doing. I am one of those. I welcome well-reasoned arguments one way or the other, using facts. That objective reality is something worth preserving. And I don't like the deafening silence I am hearing from 'mainstream' news sources about what's going on. I've read quite a lot of dystopian science fiction, and I am getting the feels right now. When I grew up I expected we'd be living in space by now, I wan't expecting to live in Oceania.

Mr_Eri_Atlov• 1 year ago

This is going to cause so much global and domestic pain and suffering for nothing

Absolutely grotesque

polotics• 1 year ago

It will not be for nothing: many old people will die, many young will be stunted. It means harm and will deliver.

Scipio_Afri• 1 year ago

This really shouldn't be flagged.

rbanffy• 1 year ago

There are a lot of things that shouldn't. More than usual, in fact.

Attack of the Sadistic Zombies – Paul Krugman

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