Thursday, April 16, 2009

Spit Polish

Here's a piece in Slate where it's reported Judge Posner believes the market won't properly set CEO salaries or mutual fund fees. I don't agree (and one nice thing about the Judge is he is one of the rare people who honestly doesn't mind when you disagree), but that's not what interested me. Anyone who's been following the Judge lately is aware of his views--they're not that surprising, as the piece would have it.

No, what surprised me is it was written by Eliot Spitzer. He's out in public again? And while he's at it, he takes some time out to polish his rep:

Indeed, when I was attorney general of New York, we successfully reclaimed billions of dollars of mutual-fund fees for the shareholders of many mutual-fund companies on just this theory—yet were criticized by the intellectual allies of Judge Posner for doing so.

Last week on SNL, they had a sketch where a bar served drinks to kids. It ended with Eliot Spitzer coming out, telling us how he's trying to get back in our hearts one issue at a time. I guess they were right.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

The good thing about Posner has always been that he argues through a position and generally hasn't acted as a true believer on the issues he writes about.

No matter how the lefties and righties try to spin this, this is just Posner logically applying facts as he sees them.

(The argument is not that markets are efficient, just that they are less inefficient, over time, than government intervention).

4:54 AM, April 16, 2009  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Posner sees structural problems in the market in these areas. He's always seen himself as a pragmatist who'll change with new information. That doesn't mean his arguments are convincing.

12:16 PM, April 16, 2009  

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