It looks like Richard Posner is now hawk­ing his blame-the-guvmint thesis over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog:

The low inter­est rates of the early 2000s pushed up hous­ing prices both directly and indi­rectly. Directly by reduc­ing the cost of hous­ing debt–and hous­ing as I men­tioned in my last entry is bought mainly with debt. Indi­rectly by push­ing up the value of common stocks. The low inter­est rates, as I said, caused asset-​price inflation.

…

[T]he basic fault lies with the Fed­eral Reserve in having pushed inter­est rates too far down, and kept them too far down for too long, during the early 2000s, and with the dis­man­tling of reg­u­la­tory con­trols that had for­merly reduced the incen­tive and abil­ity of banks to lend into a bubble.

I’ve talked about it before, but I want to come back to Posner because I’ve pretty well con­vinced myself that his thesis is going to be the stan­dard con­ser­v­a­tive expla­na­tion for the eco­nomic crisis going forward—if and when, that is, they get their intel­lec­tual act together. I mean, let’s face it: it sort of has to be, since it’s the only halfway cogent expla­na­tion they’ve offered.

The prob­lem, of course, is that Posner’s thesis is only halfway cogent.

Eliot Spitzer wrote recently about how sur­prised he was to read that Richard Posner no longer believes that free mar­kets are capa­ble or com­pe­tent to deter­mine CEO salaries and mutual-​fund fees:

Posner con­cluded that while judges shouldn’t directly review cor­po­rate salaries, evi­dence of unrea­son­able com­pen­sa­tion could be evi­dence of a breach of fidu­ciary duty. Yes, these are legal words, but they reveal a remark­able conclusion—courts should take a hard look at private-​compensation issues—and demon­strate how far, and rapidly, the world has shifted. The two issues Judge Posner examined—setting CEO com­pen­sa­tion at major com­pa­nies and deter­min­ing the fees to be paid to mutual fund-​management com­pa­nies on the base of tril­lions of dol­lars of mutual-​fund investments—are cen­tral to the gov­er­nance of our finan­cial system. It is remark­able that a leader in Chicago School thought would acknowl­edge that the market is so broken that it can’t be prop­erly trusted on those two crit­i­cal issues. Yet that is exactly what Judge Posner has concluded.

What Spitzer doesn’t tell you is how much better it gets.

The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagle­ton and Martin Amis, who now are both teach­ing at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity. In a new intro­duc­tion to his primer Ide­ol­ogy, Eagle­ton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of call­ing Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-​part essay Amis pub­lished last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now pub­lished Eagleton’s response to the latest arti­cle, as well as Amis’s letter respond­ing to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay respond­ing to it. A much-​shortened ver­sion was pub­lished by a U. of Chicago email broad­sheet called Sight­ings. Since the sub­ject has come up again, I thought I’d post the orig­i­nal ver­sion in its entirety below. (Warn­ing: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduc­tion of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic pre­req­ui­site of seri­ous moral thought, and for good reason.