Jim fucking Pinkerton? Why would anybody give a shit what that racist scumbag thinks?

Pinkerton's basic advice to policymakers seems to be: read Hayek, do nothing, and let the wealthy, who will always survive, buy the moiety of the country they don't already own at fire-sale prices.

Pinkerton's suggestion helps explain why people at the National Science Foundation were spending the day looking at porn. What else were they expected to do during a Bush Administration?

Pelecanos' pic makes me extra sad that the restoration of the National Mall area was scrubbed from the Stim. bill.

And it seems it was all for naught, all because Obama wanted to make nice with the pig-headed, age two stubborn House Repubs who only want to lower taxes and nothing else. ARGH!!!

Boy, does that Mall need a make-over--and it would have been such an important jobs creator and pride builder overall.

I believe Maddow referred to the National Mall as "Decrepit" on a recent show.

Pinkerton wrote: "... Ronald Reagan, who won the Cold War."

Pinkerton's regurgitation of that fake, phony, bogus, cartoon / comic book right-wing myth tells me that he is a liar or an idiot, and in either case Obama would do well to ignore anything he has to say.

Yeah, I was surprised that I was agreeing with Pinkerton, and then he had to spout the Reagan won the Cold War crap.

But he's right about economics being a subjective and fluid "science".

The really interesting question here is "Who's the bigger hack: Pinkerton or Hayek?"

Hayek may have more street cred, and he may have been a competent economist (I can't judge), but he's one of the most overrated political thinkers of the 20th century. His big claim to fame, The Road to Serfdom, is a fun read but wrong on almost every point it makes, whether he's misreading Tocqueville or arguing that Nazism was a left-wing (!) movement driven primarily by its insatiable urge to collectivize private property. (Er, militaristic racism? Wasn't there something about the Jews? I guess not.)

All that crap about the limits of our knowledge--which is true in only the most obvious and least consequential sense--derives from Hayek's non-falsifiable ideological premises about the benefits of radical laissez-faire relative to hard-core socialism. The possibility of a reasoned middle ground, one where government policy makers use available social science evidence to check the market's worst excesses, occurs to Hayek only in passing before he assimilates any effort at regulation, no matter how mild, to the big bad Hitler/Stalin nexis of totalitarian bogeymen. By his logic, most of "socialist" Western Europe should have been goose stepping in coordination across acres of death camps for the better part of a century now. Where did today's bedwetter conservatism begin? Hayek. What an idiot.

George Bush's Iraq challenged "defeated him"?

Few would agree with that, now. And they'd all be members of the delusional unreality-based community.

"and Ronald Reagan, who won the Cold War..." writes Pinkerton. I thought it was the Contras that won the Cold War by preventing Daniel Ortega from invading Grenada.

President Obama (golly, I like typing that) should read Trawler, by Redmond O'Hanlon. He probably won't learn anything that'll help him do the job, but it's a ripping yarn. I'm sure he'll get plenty of wonk reading without suggestions from us.

Steve,

Reagan didn't win the cold war. That's a wingnut myth.

So Obama should read the words and wisdom of Hayek, the founder of the school of economics that lead us into a disaster in 1929 and again today? I think not.

Reagan won the who? The USSR was like Bunburry in Importance of Being Ernest - its doctors advised it that it could not live and so it had the decency to die. Capitalism won that war before Ronnie was president. All his palaver was paranoia.

Apart from that: I have a fun game: Looking at Hayek and others lets think of all the wonks that were celebrated in 2001 who are now dish water. Hitchens comes to mind. His latest excertions reek of failure. Limbaugh is a bellowing stuck ox. I'd throw in Friedman. The proponents of the two state solution have crow feathers stuck in thier teeth. Kristol of course was always a clown. There are others. The econmist revealed hacks are very thick on the ground.