Liz Warren

Elizabeth Warren (whom you may recall I dislike far less than most of you guys) insists she's not running for President, but there's no doubt she's just put out a political biography timed to compete directly with the upcoming Hillary!^TM production.  Warren's views aren't all quite what you'd expect.  The New Yorker reviewer is horrified to find, for instance, that she supports the immediate imposition of unlimited public school vouchers:  “An all-voucher system would be a shock to the educational system, but the shakeout might be just what the system needs.”  "Yes," the reviewer sniffs, "that would be a shock.  It would also be reckless"--and of course doesn't bother to defend this assertion.

Warren previously wrote a book arguing that the two-income family is an economic trap that leads families to take on dangerous levels of debt.  Her own father died suddenly when she was a child; the family survived only because they were accustomed to living on his single salary, so that her homemaking, child-rearing mother was able to go out and get work to replace his paycheck.  This is not an argument that will endear her to many feminists, no matter how querulously the victim angle is spun.  She also has views on the subject of appropriating "other people's money" that are calculated initially to endear her to me, at least (which is to say, not to her target demographic), though unfortunately the only "OPM" context she seems prepared to analyze is that of greedy bankers who collect and re-invest the deposits of virtuous common people.  Evidently if benevolent congressmen do it it's all good.

The reviewer made the surprising admission that it's a bit ticklish for a wealthy U.S. Senator to write an autobiography about how tough the powers-that-be have made her life: "An argument that the system is rigged tends to be somewhat undermined, for instance, by the success of the person pointing that out."

It's a shame that Warren's shabby politics interfere with her considerable analytical skills.  I will never understand how people persuade themselves that other people force them to take on more debt than they can service.  Warren is unusual in her skepticism about debt as an engine of growth for the economy, a stance shared (in my experience) by many people who've made bankruptcy law their specialty, but she seems to think that more regulations on bankers will cure the problem.  Or possibly she believes people would borrow less if they were given more generous handouts, though how that can be squared with the experience of any culture in history is a deep mystery to your humble correspondent.