It is sad and frustrating to see the the current amount of money (Scratch that, our kids’ money) is now costing the US more than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Apollo missions, the S&L Crisis, the Korean War, The New Deal, the Invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, and NASA combined. Yes, you read that right. Barry Ritholtz of the Big Picture, points out that even adjusted for inflation, the Bailout costs more than all of these great projects. I can’t believe the press is at all satisfied with calling this “the Bailout.” How about we all start referring to it as the Black Hole or maybe That Enormous Sucking Sound. It makes me eve more angry to watch this video of Patrick Schiff (my new favorite econnomist) getting scoffed at by the Idiotry of the Media—some people call them the Punditry. I hope it’s not too late to learn a lesson or two from his book, Crash Proof. Still though, the idea that the television is so populated by morons giving advice only more greatly encourages me not to turn the damn thing on anymore. “The Idiot Box” doesn’t just describe who’s watching it.

Wow, a reasonable and relatively brief assessment of what the current crisis in the financial markets is all about and what the government’s (us) options are.  Now go read this so that you have solid, logical reasons to tell the financial sector to go fuck itself.

I have to set this joke up a bit for some of you. Vernor Vinge is a mathematician and science fiction writer from out of San Diego State. Some years ago he proposed that there would be (in the future) a kind of intelligence explosion—that as technology became intelligent, humans would no longer even be able to keep up with the massive changes brought on by new artificial species capable of re-inventing themselves thousands of times faster than evolution could change biological species. So, with that as background, I found this astute and funny comment over at Overcoming Bias.

-Noam Chomsky

[Update 10-18-2008: Further in, I also take into account Krugman's recent Nobel prize as well as Robert Reich's "Supercapitalism."]

I have found that a common error in the critiques that economists proffer (especially those of the Chicago school of thought) is to hone in on small portions of concepts (tiny in fact), analyze that single point, and then dismiss the whole of an argument. Call it particularism or maybe just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I feel that way about Paul Krugman’s review of John Gray’s False Dawn.

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