Proudly delegitimizing the state since 2005
"Aye, free! Free as a tethered ass!" —W.S. Gilbert
"All the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and . . . the State should be abolished." —Benjamin Tucker
"You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." —James Madison
"Fat chance." —Sheldon Richman
The most offensive claim made during the debt-ceiling controversy is that there’s a moral equivalence between cutting government spending and raising taxes.
—Henry David Thoreau
"Free association . . . the only true form of society."
—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
2 comments:
FWIW, Wikipedia seems to disagree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_(finance)
This comment was apparently intended for the post on Roger Garrison's point about the word default. I noted on Facebook that the Wikipedia entry seems to contradict Garrison, but we should take care not to drop the context. No one in Washington is warning that the government will refuse to make a payment to the bondholders that it is able to make if the debt-ceiling deadline is missed. That would make no sense. Why would it refuse? Treasury Secretary Geithner has not hinted at that -- quite the contrary. Thus willful default isn't on the list of realistic possibilities. The clear implication of the warnings is that the government will be unable to pay. But we know that's not true because we know it will have enough tax revenue income to pay the bondholders. (Not that it should.)
The upshot is that Garrison is right in this context. He writes, "[I]f default means that you’re unable to pay [which is what people mean in this context], then 'choosing to default' must mean that you 'choose to be unable to pay.'
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