dodd

I’m not sure why Matthew Yglesias chose to adopt the unpleasant leftist tactic of beginning an argument with insult (“conservatives don’t know anything about anything”) in response to a recent Corner post of mine. Yglesias also engages in shifting the goalposts, because my “enthusiastic recommendation” of a Wall Street Journal leader column was not enthusiastic for the argument he chooses to highlight, but for its expose of the tactics Sen. Dodd and co are employing in the current debate.

Let’s leave all that irrelevance aside, however, and concentrate on Yglesias’ supposed killer point, which is his characterization of the “conservative position” on Fannie and Freddie:

[T]he implied government guarantee to Fannie and Freddie might cause them to take unduly large risks, and … the very scale of those risks would mean that in the event of a crash we actually would need to bail them out despite the lack of explicit guarantee. Thus, the idea of limiting the size of the Fannie/Freddie portfolios. The point was that if the Fannie/Freddie portfolios could be kept small, then perhaps the GSEs wouldn’t be “too big to fail” and we could afford to avoid bailing them out. And if we did wind up needing to bail them out, we wouldn’t be on the hook for such an enormous amount of money.

Yglesias concedes that this concern was valid, but further argues that: [click to continue…]