Fun with LJ links

[malsperanza]

Paraphrased from today's NY Times:

According to the Harvard Crimson, in June of this year 39% of work-force-bound Harvard seniors are heading for consulting firms and financial sector companies. That’s down from 47% — almost half the job-bound class — in 2007. (Yes, that's the Ivy League: instilling a sense of citizenship and public service in its privileged and prosperous graduates.)

Barack Obama put the issue this way at Wesleyan University in May: beware of the "poverty of ambition" in a culture of "The big house and the nice suits."

The Times recommends that college seniors read A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure in the current edition of The New York Review of Books, an impassioned plea from the banker and public citizen Felix Rohatyn (who knows something of financial rescues) and Everett Ehrlich for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, or N.I.B.

Its aim, at a time when the Chinese are investing $200 billion in railways and building 97 new airports, would be to use public and private capital to give coherence to a vast program of public works. Like, youknow, bridges and levees and littorals and public transportation and interstate rail.


But nah, we're investing our $200 billion (only it's likely to be 5x that) in replacing money that went pfft this week. As the Reaganauts taught us, regulation = communism = pure evil, and the private sector is always better than the government: more honest, more efficient, less wasteful, less greedy. Laissez-faire capitalism benefits all of us. And nationalizing banks or industries is uncivilized, indecent, monstrous, obscene. Unless, of course, they fuck up and lose money. Because nationalizing failure is patriotic.