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"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
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(Rate Your Students)
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except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, February 25, 2006

HARVARD ECON


Even Milton Friedman says it:

‘We have learned about the importance of private property and the rule of law as a basis for economic freedom. Just after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, I used to be asked a lot: "What do these ex-communist states have to do in order to become market economies?" And I used to say: "You can describe that in three words: privatize, privatize, privatize." But, I was wrong. That wasn't enough. The example of Russia shows that. Russia privatized but in a way that created private monopolies - private centralized economic controls that replaced government's centralized controls. It turns out that the rule of law is probably more basic than privatization. Privatization is meaningless if you don't have the rule of law.’


But a high-ranking Harvard economist in Russia ignored the rule of law, eagerly joining the lawless culture there to enrich himself, in direct violation of his enormous US AID contract. Andrei Shleifer and Harvard were found guilty of such serious misbehavior and negligence that Shleifer, who remains a member, in excellent standing, of Harvard’s economics department, had to pay two million, and Harvard 44 million, to the government and to attorneys.



None of this is in dispute; yet members of Harvard’s economics department describe reporters and scholars who’ve drawn from the legal record and written about it as purveyors of hate comparable to the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They’ve said none of it matters because Shleifer’s on his way to a Nobel Prize, and the Nobel committee doesn’t care about what he did in Russia.

Only losers care about the rule of law. Winners know that markets are about what you can get out of them for yourself and your friends.

John Tierney and others can rail against Harvard’s liberal arts “faculty club,” full of “delicate psyches,” “complacent” “paleoliberals” “insulated from reality” and “interested in their own welfare” -- but even if some of this characterization is true (and there’s more stereotype in it than truth), UD would rather affiliate herself with this lot than with the creepy amoral economics faculty club, still out there defending their massively defrauding colleague, and using incendiary language against the voices of moral reason and the rule of law.
Posted at: 2/25/2006 02:42:00 AM