Time to end this.

Enough Whigs. Time for the Keynesians.

I strongly doubt that anything I blog here affects anything. Still, just in case some mistook my earlier call for Congress to attach conditions to the bailout for a monkey-wrench desire to let the financial system crash, let’s be clear.

We got oversight. We got equity. We got CEO compensation provisions. The remaining demands only encourage the politicians and bloggers of all persuasions who persistently refuse to accept anything that anyone else will accept. Such people, whose numbers may even be growing, are far less concerned about the substantive need to pass a bill, and about the human costs of a financial panic, than I would have imagined possible.

The Democrats have already proven themselves the heirs of Pym and Hampden. It’s time to start acting like the heirs of Keynes. Kevin Drum is right. Time to pass the effin bill.

Author: Andrew Sabl

Andrew Sabl, a political theorist, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Ruling Passions: Political Offices and Democratic Ethics and Hume’s Politics: Coordination and Crisis in the History of England, both from Princeton University Press. His research interests include political ethics, liberal and democratic theory, toleration, the work of David Hume, and the realist school of contemporary political thought. He is currently finishing a book for Harvard University Press titled The Uses of Hypocrisy: An Essay on Toleration. He divides his time between Toronto and Brooklyn.