Thomas Wilberding's Profile

at heart, ethical and cultural problems. And improving the attitudes and
virtues of a nation is, at best, a slow, halting process.

Kristol pursued this task by being cheerful, patient and realistic — by being
at once courageously committed and skeptically detached.

Why is it,” he asked, “that we’re going to cap executive compensation for
Wall Street bankers but not Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or N.F.L. football
players?”

That’s an astonishing remark — and not just because the National Football
League does, in fact, have pay caps. Tech firms don’t crash the whole world’s
operating system when they go bankrupt; quarterbacks who make too many risky
passes don’t have to be rescued with hundred-billion-dollar bailouts. Banking is
a special case — and the president is surely smart enough to know that.

“We need all the unmuffled warnings we can get given that humans are not like
slowly boiling frogs, we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs,” he wrote.

The recent spate of years with stable temperatures is particularly noticeable
because it followed a seesawing from unusually cool temperatures to unusually
hot ones in the 1990s, said Vicky Pope of Britain’s
climate agency, called the Met Office.

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines had a cooling
influence, as the volcano threw off veil-like emissions. Then, in 1998, an El
Niño episode in the Pacific Ocean set off a record-setting hot spell.

The global average temperature is now only 0.13 degree Fahrenheit higher than
it was in 1999, according to the British meteorology office.

Where was the Tea Party movement when the tax burden was shifted from the
high end to the middle? Where were the patriots when Wall Street, backed in
Congress by Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, rewrote securities laws so that the
wonder boys of Lehman and A.I.G. could reduce home mortgages to poker chips at a
trillion-dollar table?

Where were the angry “stiffs” when the banking industry rolled the 2005
Congress into rewriting bankruptcy law, making it easier to keep people in
permanent credit card hock?

Where were they when President Bush started the bailouts, with $700 billion
that had to be paid on a few days’ notice — with no debate — to save global
capitalism?

They were nowhere, because they were clueless, just as most journalists were.

But now, at a time when a new president wants to reform health care to fix
the largest single cause of middle-class economic collapse, he’s called a Nazi
by these self-described friends of the working stiff.

In his writings, Minsky looked to his intellectual hero, Keynes, arguably the
greatest economist of the 20th century. But where most economists drew a single,
simplistic lesson from Keynes - that government could step in and micromanage
the economy, smooth out the business cycle, and keep things on an even keel -
Minsky had no interest in what he and a handful of other dissident economists
came to call "bastard Keynesianism."

Instead, Minsky drew his own, far darker, lessons from Keynes's landmark
writings, which dealt not only with the problem of unemployment, but with money
and banking. Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued
that Keynes's collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism
was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward
some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite.
It would lurch over a cliff.

Minsky spent the last years of his life, in the early 1990s, warning of the
dangers of securitization and other forms of financial innovation, but few
economists listened. Nor did they pay attention to consumers' and companies'
growing dependence on debt, and the growing use of leverage within the financial
system.

By the end of the 20th century, the financial system that Minsky had warned
about had materialized, complete with speculative borrowers, Ponzi borrowers,
and precious few of the conservative borrowers who were the bedrock of a truly
stable economy. Over decades, we really had forgotten the meaning of risk. When
storied financial firms started to fall, sending shockwaves through the "real"
economy, his predictions started to look a lot like a road map.

"This wasn't a Minsky moment," explains Randall Wray. "It was a Minsky
half-century."

Minsky's other solution, however, was considerably more radical and less
palatable politically. The preferred mainstream tactic for pulling the economy
out of a crisis was - and is - based on the Keynesian notion of "priming the
pump" by sending money that will employ lots of high-skilled, unionized labor -
by building a new high-speed train line, for example.

Minsky, however, argued for a "bubble-up" approach, sending money to the poor
and unskilled first. The government - or what he liked to call "Big Government"
- should become the "employer of last resort," he said, offering a job to anyone
who wanted one at a set minimum wage. It would be paid to workers who would
supply child care, clean streets, and provide services that would give taxpayers
a visible return on their dollars. In being available to everyone, it would be
even more ambitious than the New Deal, sharply reducing the welfare rolls by
guaranteeing a job for anyone who was able to work. Such a program would not
only help the poor and unskilled, he believed, but would put a floor beneath
everyone else's wages too, preventing salaries of more skilled workers from
falling too precipitously, and sending benefits up the socioeconomic ladder.

In an Ayurvedic hospital in India, a regimen of meditation, rice, lentils and
massage paid for entirely out of pocket, $42.85 per night, led to “obvious
improvement in my frozen joint,” Mr. Reid writes, adding, “To this day, I don’t
know why it happened.”

A person’s last days can be spent in any number of ways. But on the phone
pleading with an insurer, that’s only in America.