Some scattered links I squirreled away during the previous week (or two):

• Steve Benen: Friday's Mini-Report:

  It's a good thing Obama didn't listen to Republicans on the auto industry: "Chrysler will add 1,250 jobs at two Detroit factories next year -- another sign that the once struggling automaker appears to be making a comeback."

  It's a good thing Obama didn't listen to his own advisers -- principally Austin Goolsbee -- when they recommended that he let Chrysler fold. They argued that doing so would help General Motors, and wouldn't be a problem because General Motors would pick up the unemployed Chrysler workers. To my mind, this was the single most craven revelation in Ron Suskind's The Confidence Men. Obama was initially persuaded, but backed down after someone pointed out how insane this was.

• Henry Farrell: Lilla v. Robin: Count me among those who disliked Mark Lilla's review of Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. I picked up a copy of Robin's book shortly after it came out. I haven't gotten around to it, but I understand the central thesis is that conservatives (at least from Burke on) all share one essential trait: their desire to defend the upper class against any challenges from the riff-raff. The upper class may be capitalists or slave owners -- or, if he bothered to look that far, Soviet commissars -- but the instinct is the same. Lilla made a big show of arguing that there are differences between conservatives as if that invalidated Robin's point, then dismissed the book with a flurry of invective. I had never heard of Lilla before, so Henry's post helps frame my annoyance. Also includes this interesting paragraph:

  Al-Ghazali, as quoted by Ernest Gellner, puts Mannheim's point more pithily -- "the genuine traditionalist does not know that he is one; he who proclaims himself to be one, no longer is one." But what I don't know (and can't tell from the book) is how much of this agonism is unique to conservatism's intersection with liberalism, and how much is a generic product of the competitive pressures of political conflict. The left and the right shape each other as they fight. Conservatives read Saul Alinsky. Markos Moulitsas, when he started trying to organize the netroots, was partly inspired by the Goldwater movement (as depicted in Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm). To really get at the questions that I think (perhaps I'm wrong) Robin is interested in, you would need an intellectual history not of the left, or the right, but of how they have shaped each other, and how each has separately been defined by the struggle between them. This would allow you better to figure out which parts of conservatism are uniquely reactionary, and which parts are simply reactive.

  It's certainly hard to think of any significant movement in US history that has been more obscured and distorted than the New Left, in large part because so much of the post-1970 right was defined by its hatred of the civil rights, antiwar, women's, and environmental movements. Still, such reaction wouldn't have gained any traction without aligning with the class interests of the rich, which is again the key point.

• Mike Konczal: An Interview with Josh Kosman on the Embeddedness of Private Equity in the Tax Code: Related to the Romney/Bain stuff elsewhere. Kosman's The Buyout of America: How Private Equity Is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy is one of the first books to check out on how private equity firms work -- and given its scant attention paid to Bain won't be the last.

  Private equity and buyouts started as a way to take advantage of tax gimmicks, not as a way of saying "we're going to turn around companies." And now it's out of control. I look at the 10 largest deals done in the 1990s, during ideal economic times, and in six cases it was clear that the company was worse off than if they never been acquired. Moody's just put out a report in December that looked at the 40 largest buyouts of this era and showed that their revenue was growing at 4 percent since their buyout, while comparable companies were growing at 14 percent.

  In January -- so just in the past 12 days -- Hostess, the largest bakery in the country, just went bankrupt. Coach, the largest bus company, just went bankrupt. And Quizno's is about to go bankrupt. All of these were owned by private equity.

• Paul Krugman: Untruths, Wholly Untrue, and Nothing but Untruths:

  I was deeply radicalized by the 2000 election. At first I couldn't believe that then-candidate George W. Bush was saying so many clearly, provably false things; then I couldn't believe that nobody in the news media was willing to point out the lies. (At the time, the Times actually told me that I couldn't use the l-word either). That was when I formulated my "views differ on shape of planet" motto.

  Now, however, Mitt Romney seems determined to rehabilitate Bush's reputation, by running a campaign so dishonest that it makes Bush look like a model of truth-telling.

  I mean, is there anything at all in Romney's stump speech that's true? It's all based on attacking Obama for apologizing for America, which he didn't, on making deep cuts in defense, which he also didn't, and on being a radical redistributionist who wants equality of outcomes, which he isn't. When the issue turns to jobs, Romney makes false assertions both about Obama's record and about his own. I can't find a single true assertion anywhere.

  And he keeps finding new frontiers of falsehood. The good people at CBPP find him asserting, with regard to programs aiding low-income Americans, that

  What unfortunately happens is with all the multiplicity of federal programs, you have massive overhead, with government bureaucrats in Washington administering all these programs, very little of the money that's actually needed by those that really need help, those that can't care for themselves, actually reaches them.

  which is utterly, totally untrue. Administrative costs are actually quite small, and between 91 and 99 percent of spending, depending on the program, does in fact go to beneficiaries.

  I'll add that it's private charities that have trouble delivering a majority of what they raise to their putative recipients. (Part of their problem is scale, most is the cost of fundraising, and some is due to lack of accountability.)

  For a top-ten list, see Steve Benen: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity.

  Also see Krugman's column, America Isn't a Corporation. The basic points should be clear to anyone, but bear reiterating. As for Romney:

  Now, to be fair, being a career politician isn't necessarily a better preparation for managing economic policy than being a businessman. But Mr. Romney is the one claiming that his career makes him especially suited for the presidency. Did I mention that the last businessman to live in the White House was a guy named Herbert Hoover? (Unless you count former President George W. Bush.)

  And there's also the question of whether Mr. Romney understands the difference between running a business and managing an economy.

  Like many observers, I was somewhat startled by his latest defense of his record at Bain -- namely, that he did the same thing the Obama administration did when it bailed out the auto industry, laying off workers in the process. One might think that Mr. Romney would rather not talk about a highly successful policy that just about everyone in the Republican Party, including him, denounced at the time.

  But what really struck me was how Mr. Romney characterized President Obama's actions: "He did it to try to save the business." No, he didn't; he did it to save the industry, and thereby to save jobs that would otherwise have been lost, deepening America's slump. Does Mr. Romney understand the distinction?

  Romney probably likes the GM/Chrysler example because Obama's team did in fact steal a few pages from the private equity handbook there, so it's something he can understand in his own way: they did force some executives out, close some plants and lay off workers, and cajole the unions into reducing costs; but they didn't saddle the companies with unsustainable debt, and they didn't pile on huge management fees to instantly recoup their investment. Consequently, the industry emerged from the process healthier, whereas had Bain or their ilk been involved they would have been left off in far worse shape.

  Let me add two arguments I have, not with what Krugman said but with what he didn't. One is that Romney is not a typical businessman. Most people who run businesses preside over organizations meant to produce useful goods or services and try to make a comfortable profit doing so. Romney, private equity investors like him, and their financial allies, are fundamentally parasites and predators. They look for the margins between what a company can be bought for and how much cash can be sucked out of it how quick, and when they find one they devour it, reaping quick profits and almost invariably leaving the company depleted and often defunct. To such people, taking over the government looks like a license to steal -- if not just for oneself, then also for one's friends (e.g., with Bush père left office he landed at Carlyle Group, one of the world's largest private equity firms).

  The other question is whether government should be run like a business. That's a big one I can't begin to do justice to here, but the answer is no, and there are lots of reasons. One way to look at this is that capitalism is necessarily unstable, so you need some way of counterbalancing its excesses: to stimulate demand when it slacks, to pop bubbles when they emerge, to keep businesses honest, to protect workers, to provide services that businesses can't (or shouldn't) because they can't (or shouldn't) be gated, or even because we jointly want to do something without thinking of the bottom line.

  One more bit of Krugman on Romney and the Bailout:

  So what the story of Romney and the auto bailout actually shows is something we already knew from health care: he's a smart guy who is also a moral coward. His original proposal for the auto industry, like his health reform, bore considerable resemblance to what Obama actually did. But when the deed took place, Romney -- rather than having the courage to say that the president was actually doing something reasonable -- joined the rest of his party in whining and denouncing the plan.

  And now he wants to claim credit for the very policy he trashed when it hung in the balance.

• Andrew Leonard: The Long Overdue Downfall of Gordon Gekko: Of course, he means Mitt Romney:

  Like Gekko, Romney made his fortune buying and selling companies; and like Gekko, he believes that his "greed is good" version of rough-and-tumble creative destruction is a positive force for America, weeding out the bad performers and nurturing lean-and-mean profit engines. If you are looking for the paradigmatic exemplar of the new style of capitalism mogul launched by the Reagan revolution, Romney is your man. Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko is merely ersatz.

  The shock is to see Newt Gingrich and his financial backers channeling the Oliver Stone critique so passionately and wholeheartedly. If you have not seen the three-minute advertisement "When Romney Came to Town," the soon-to-be debuted documentary lambasting Romney as the enemy of the American worker, prepare to be flabbergasted.

  "Their greed was only matched by their willingness to do anything to make millions in profits."

  "This film is about one such raider and his firm."

  "His mission: To reap massive rewards for himself and his investors.

  "Romney took foreign seed money from Latin America, and began a pattern exploiting dozens of American businesses."

  And so on. Michael Moore doesn't sting this hard, and MoveOn isn't this angry. If Romney, as expected, ends up winning the Republican nomination, Obama's campaign team can relax.

  Much is being made of whether Gingrich has broken some sort of unspoken code of Republican primary collegiality by declaring class warfare on Romney. As Jonathan Chait argues, you can question whether a fellow GOP candidate is a true conservative, but to call him a "plunderer" is, or should be, beyond the pale. Plundering is what capitalism is all about! The free market is supposed to be built on the principle of unrestrained plunderation. Or it would be, if Democrats didn't keep getting in the way with their socialist-leaning regulations. [ . . . ]

  What the Wall Street Journal euphemistically calls "the rougher side of American capitalism," in its Monday article examining the legacy of Bain Capital, is suddenly no longer in fashion. And there is no better proof of this than the spectacle of one of the great culture warriors of our time, Newt Gingrich, defecting to the other side.

  His treason won't help his sorry campaign, and won't deflect Romney's path to the nomination, but it is still well worth our attention. Because the power of its attack highlights Romney's biggest vulnerability. In the 32 years since Ronald Reagan was elected president, there has never been more widely expressed antagonism and anger toward the practitioners of corporate-raider, leveraged-buyout, excessively compensated CEO, shareholder-value capitalism than there is now.

  And that's Mitt Romney. That is who he is. He can flip-flop about everything else, but there's no way to wriggle out of his essential nature. He's the 1 percent -- even Newt Gingrich says so.

  My emphasis added.

  Leonard has another related piece: A Romney Showdown: Krugman Versus Brooks: mostly on David Brooks, since it's more interesting to talk about wrong than right:

  With this column, Brooks settles, once and for all, the question of whether he himself is an elitist. And not just any run-of-the-mill elitist! No, Brooks is a heroic, truth-telling elitist, with the courage to say what conventional wisdom about American discourse declares verboten!

  In sum, great presidents are often aristocrats and experienced political insiders. They experience great setbacks. They feel the presence of God's hand on their every move.

  Unfortunately, we're not allowed to talk about these things openly these days. We disdain elitism, political experience and explicit God-talk. Great failure is considered "baggage" in today's campaign lingo.

  I wonder, why might Americans disdain elitism? Could it have something to do with our history, our defining identity as a people who rebelled against monarchy? Could it be that one of our core values, at least until recently, is the idea that anyone, no matter what family they were born into, or how wealthy they are, or what prep school they attended, has (at least theoretically) the potential and opportunity to rise to the highest office in the land?

  Brooks doesn't weigh in on whether Romney qualifies as a true blueblooded aristocrat -- although, given the fact that his father was a governor and car company CEO, the implication is obvious. What's equally obvious, however, is the slam at Obama, who was raised by a single mother and enjoyed none of the advantages that were mother's milk to Romney.

• Alex Pareene: Romney's Rivals All Become Socialists, to Horror of Conservatives: Subtitle: "GOP candidates trash capitalism, and good on them."

  Perry added that "there is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failures and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business," which is basically a wholesale rejection of the free market system.

  (Even the reasonable Jon Huntsman got shrill: "Governor Romney enjoys firing people. I enjoy creating jobs.")

  Sarah Palin is among those attempting to stanch the bleeding by blaming the bad old liberal media for attacking Romney for his success, but everyone can plainly see who's actually responsible.

  National Review's Jim Geraghty complains that the candidates now all sound like Occupiers. The Club for Growth is pissed at Newt for his anti-Bain Capital attacks. Phil Klein accuses Romney's rivals of Marxist rhetoric. Avik Roy diagnoses Romney derangement syndrome. (The American Spectator literally calls for Gingrich to be investigated for violating campaign finance law for perhaps coordinating with a Super PAC. What happened to the absolute defense of campaign funding as speech?)

  It looks like Republican opinion leaders are beginning to coalesce around Romney due in part to disgust over anti-capitalist attacks being levied against him. Of course, his rivals wouldn't be pushing this line if they didn't think it was effective. The irony is that the Republican candidates are shameless enough to embrace the exact arguments conservatives and centrists have successfully shamed liberals out of making.

• John Quiggin: Blogging the Zombies: Expansionary Austerity -- After the Zombies: A draft chapter to append to the forthcoming paperback edition of Quiggin's fine book, Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. Key paragraph here (my emphasis added to key line):

  Expansionary austerity is not simply a zombie economic idea. It forms the basis of a political strategy of class war, undertaken by the financial and political elite (the "1 per cent") to hold on to the wealth and power they accumulated during the decades of market liberalism, and to shift the costs of their own failure on to the rest of the population. An effective response must similarly combine an economic analysis with a policy program and a political movement to mobilise resistance to the push for austerity.

  In other words, it is a political ploy disguised as economics. The problems with writing a chapter which tries to treat it as a matter of economics is that without its politics there is no idea there. Simply put, recessions occur when large numbers of people stop spending, either because they don't have and cannot borrow the money, or because they have a liquidity preference not to do so. Recessions end when people start spending again. Governments can help mitigate or even end a recession by deliberately making up the missing spending. Austerity is the argument that government should not do so, and in fact should contract like the private sector. By further reducing spending, the only thing austerity can do in the short term is to deepen and prolong the recession. So how can anyone think austerity can ever be expansionary? As best I can reckon, the answer depends on three highly implausible assumptions, each having more to do with political interests than with economics. First, austerity can only be expansionary in the long run: since by any analysis you're digging a short term hole, you're expecting something so good to happen later that it will more than make up for short-term sacrifice. (Keynes, you should recall, was notoriously dismissive of such arguments, reminding us that in the long run we're all dead.) Second, you assume that all economic growth results from investor confidence: that the economy can't grow until the rich are ready to invest again, and that as soon as they are it will grow spectacularly without any of the distortions government intervention would inject. And third, you assume that no permanent harm will come from prolonging the recession: for instance, you assume that idling workers won't cause their skills to atrophy, that education cuts won't reduce the skill levels of the workforce, that reduced health care won't undermine public health, that neglecting infrastructure won't reduce its value, that prolonged hardships won't kick back in the form of crime or revolt, and so forth.

  I can't see any way for austerity to prove its benefits, but I'm handicapped by viewing people as having both substantial needs and a democratic claim on the nation's wealth, and because I view workers as having at least as much to do with the generation of that wealth as anyone else (and probably a good deal more). The proponents of austerity, on the other hand, are remarkably keen on marginalizing everyone else. In fact, their economic theory tells them that recessions would automatically self-correct if only labor costs would drop to whatever level allowed immediate profitability rather than be obstructed by unemployment-producing strictures like minimum wage law. (Again, this is a major point where Keynes proved not that it shouldn't or couldn't work but that it doesn't.)

  While conservatives like to argue that whatever is convenient for them now is in line with timeless principles, the main effect of austerity programs is to delay, and the action conservatives most want to delay is anything that redistributes wealth, even at a trivial level. For example, unemployment benefits, food stamps, any sort of income support helps prevent the labor market from collapsing, allowing the unemployed to hold out for decent wages, and reducing downward wage pressure on the employed. Businessmen look at their own labor costs as lost profit, but don't seem to be able to grasp that lower wages for everyone reduces demand and locks them into a death spiral. That view is pure politics.

  There are reasons why austerity arguments have some appeal, and those do involve zombie economic ideas -- e.g., the idea that government should be run like a corporation. But the main idea is based on pure faith: if we just let nature run its course, we will rebound from this recession like we've rebounded from every past one. This is one idea that could be not just wrong but disastrously so. One big reason recessions in the past didn't persist was because external factors promised opportunities for growth: people, land, resources, energy, technology, access to markets, all those things used to be expanding even when the economy panicked. All those factors are approaching limits now, and that in turn limits the opportunities for investors. We've seen how recovery from the last three or four recessions has been increasingly protracted, with long delays in recovering employment levels, and no net wage growth over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, in searching for ever higher profits, the rich has turned increasingly to financial tricks -- indeed, one of the big problems with monetary stimulus is that when we pump more money into the financial system very little of it ever gets into the real economy, which makes the approach vastly inefficient. Such stimulus only adds to the inequality problem, which like austerity aims at impoverishing workers but winds up hollowing out the entire economy. I suspect that it has already become the case that the only way to actually grow the economy out of its recession is through a massive redistribution of wealth. We're a long ways from having the political insight to do that, but part of the process is extirpating the economic zombies Quiggins writes about: the whole hoary theory of "expansionary austerity" chief among them.