Silver State of the living dead

Gleaner readers tend to be among the most well-read and sophisticated information consumers in the Las Vegas MSA (see, Gleaner readers know what MSA means!). So a recent spate of stories in area media, some of them more trenchant than others, explaining Nevada's failure, as a state, will shock or surprise exactly no one who has paid even casual attention to this humble little corner of the Facebook machine.

On what is clearly a related note, erudite readers also may be familiar (Krugman riffed on it last month) with Australian economist John Quiqqin's popularization of the term "Zombie economics" and his 2010 book of that title.

Blind faith in free markets, the privatization fetish, trickle-down economics and other deeply ideological notions "have failed the test of the global financial crisis," Quiggin writes. Yet...

...the ideas that brought the global financial system to the brink of meltdown, and have already caused thousands of firms to fail and cost millions of workers their jobs, still underlie the thinking of those who are trying to respond to the crisis and, to a large extent, of the commentators and analysts who assess those responses. These ideas are neither alive nor dead; rather, they are undead, or zombie ideas.

Or as Gov. Brian Sandoval (pictured with Chuck Muth and Somer Hollingsworth) chants in an unearthly tone while fellow soulless Nevadans wander aimlessly from one shiny/moving/warm object to another amid civilization's crumbling rotting remains, "no new taxes."

Comments

[ColinFromLasVegas]

Damn, Gleanster.

I always believed the extras that played the zombies in George Romero's 1968 classic "Night Of The Living Dead" were in fact Republicans.

YOU HAVE PROVED IT!

[Goldy]

What the Michigan Snowmobilers Association has to do with Nevada I have no idea, nor why you reference them in your article. Regardless of what area of which you speak, Nevada does not have a taxing problem, we have a spending problem. We spend money to lock up prisoners, educate kids, and take care of sick people. We have to spend less money doing that. And we already spend less than almost any state in the country. See the problem?

[Susan]

Zombie economics ... 30 years on the road to nowhere.

When do we admit we're lost & turn the car around??

[Observer]

Gleaner:

I have NOT read Quiggins' book, Zombie Economics, but I just finished reading John Cassidy's 2009 book, How Markets Fail, which seems to cover much of the same ground. Cassidy constrasts what he calls "Utopian economics": free markets, Milton Friedman, etc. etc. with "Reality-Based Economics". (Cassidy is a writer for The New Yorker).

Cassidy explains that Friedman's ideas, in a minority in the 1950's and 1960's, came to be widely accepted in the 1970's and 1980's. But now, in the 2008 collapse, the banking system was only saved from total collapse by government intervention, something that Friedman abhorred. Cassidy claims that the vision of markets (and banks) being self-regulating has been totally discredited.

I hope Cassidy is right.

Thanks for the tip, gleaner, I'll look for the Quiggins book.

[dave404]

@ Observer;

Friedman was the 'genius' that got Nixon to "default on American obligations" of the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement and "Just let the free market set currency exchange rates and trade deficits will self-correct" when he pushed Nixon to abandon the golod standard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html

Take a read of Reagan's OMB Director, David Stockman's, editorial, NYT 7.31.10, concerning the GOP led "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse" and the destruction of the U.S. economy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html

Odd how Muth's PAC has been silent since 2006 when his PAC's campaign spending in Nevada was reported on this website, and obviously he is the pudgy one in the picture above.