TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT:

MICKEY KAUS responds to my criticism of Congress for finally passing a stimulus bill now that we don’t need a stimulus bill anymore. Well, actually he takes exception to my suggestion that Congress is thus unqualified to criticize corporate executives for their economic acumen, citing the dot-com bust as an example.

Well, there were plenty of dumb dot-com ideas, though I think that the big injection of liquidity in late 1999 — which was a Fed phenomenon, not a market phenomenon — encouraged some of that. But notice the difference: folks in the market arena generally pay a price for getting things wrong; folks in the political world generally don’t. Just one example: Arthur Andersen is in danger of bankruptcy because it’s hemorrhaging clients. It’s hemorrhaging clients because people don’t trust it. People don’t trust it because it turns out to have been untrustworthy. So far, the market system has punished Andersen more swiftly, and more effectively, than the political system.

Well, some things don’t change.