this — a note on an obvious crony pick slipped onto the Federal Reserve board — is pretty much the only reason I still read things like The New Republic. Apparently some dude got on whose biggest accomplishment is marrying the daughter of a bigtime GOP donor & is described as having an annoying habit of calling people “bruh” (the article misspells this slang as “bra”, but who expects them to know that type of stuff?).

There’s a right way to do things, even if they’re wrong. By that, I mean that while an act may be in and of itself foolish or pointless, how you carry out that act still matters; your next move within the overall strategy could be the difference between a fairly stinging-albeit-surviveable dissappointment & the mother of all cluster-f*cks. This won’t prove that adage as blatantly as the occupation of Iraq has — unless you do a Deep Politics stretch on this, no one’s going to be bombed or tortured because of bad monetary policy — but it adds to the pile of cases where a Bad (in this case, there being a Federal Reserve at all) is now begging to become a Worse (the head of the Fed being yet another inflation nut & one of the other seats filled by a dullard).

As bad as these exhibits of cronyism are standing alone, the cumulative effect is, IMO, particularly troubling for advocates of sacking the State on 4th Down. See, when relatively qualified people are placed in positions of political power & they screw up anyway, it implies an indictment of that power itself, and every little bit of that helps us make the case that the issue is better off out of the hands of government in the first place. Cronyism is dangerous from a libertarian perspective — strategically speaking — because it changes the likely narrative when the inevitable occurs. Rather than an indictment of the position itself, people end up barking along the lines of “if only we had the RIGHT people as our elite, then everything would be fine!”, which to the naive actually legitimizes what it should’ve discredited.

Keep that in mind next time there’s an opening for an appointment. They’re not going to succeed anyway, but it’s better that they fail due to the system than because of who’s running it.

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