Ezra Klein, <em>Washington Post</em> Blogger

John Del Signore

Published May 2, 2011

Modified May 2, 2011

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John Del Signore

Published May 2, 2011

Modified May 2, 2011

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Washington Post blogger, Bloomberg View columnist, and MSNBC contributor Ezra Klein has made a name for himself as a trenchant analyst of economic issues and domestic policy. He's kind of a big deal, and he's only 26! You can bask in his warm cewebrity glow tonight (for free!) at the NYU Skirball Center (566 LaGuardia Place), where he'll be participating in a debate called "Capitalism: Is It Moral?" Tonight Klein will be locking horns with John A. Allison, who is affiliated with the Ayn Rand Center and is the former CEO of BB&T Bank. Spoiler: this guy loooves capitalism. Anyway, Klein recently gave us nine minutes of his time last Friday before he dumped us to cover Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke's first formal press conference after an interest rate decision. So that just shows you what Klein's priorities are.

I want to talk about the debate Monday night but obviously the important news today is Obama releasing his birth certificate. Are you satisfied with his statement? I think this is the dumbest day in politics that I've ever seen. There's not a close second as far as I can tell, I've been racking my brain for a close second but I've not been able to come up with one. The most sensible explanation I can come up with is that the Obama administration wants to run against Donald Trump and they're trying to strengthen his hand, but in reality I don't believe that people scheme like that in Washington very much. I think that most people are just rushing around the indecision. I think it's a really dumb day.

So you're not really a conspiracy theorist? Right. My experience in Washington has been that we always hear about these triple quadruple quintuple bankshot plays that people are trying to make. You know, Carl Rove and these political Svengalis are in reality basically just running around, they don't have good information, they're making bad decisions, they're just trying to stay one step ahead of the tide. There's too much going on and too few hours in the day and most of the things that get sold as plans when they work were ad hoc, reactive and reactive when they were actually being done.

About this debate, do you think capitalism is moral? Is capitalism moral? Of course not. Of course it isn't immoral either. Capitalism is not a person, it doesn't decide to do good things or bad things, it doesn't read Kant. think the premise of the debate is slightly flawed. Although, I'm happy to play. Capitalism is very effective, it appears to be, when properly shaped, and constrained, and regulated, the single best system we've come up with to manage most human affairs or at least affairs that involve transactions between parties. This is a category error; societies are moral, people are moral. Economic systems either work or they don't.

I guess the essence of the question is, is Capitalism destructive or positive or not positive? That's like asking me if a wrench is destructive or positive or not positive. Or a baseball bat. Capitalism can be used in one way to dump a bunch of nuclear waste in to streams or it can be used to invent nuclear energy that powers the world cleanly.

This debate feels to me like something out of the '50s a little bit. There really aren't plausible alternatives to what we call capitalism. There are simply different ways to managing capitalism. Nobody's even approaching the idea that we can have an anarchist capitalism in which three months from now, three years from now, we all just live under Google's thumb with Steve Jobs as dictator. We don't think that's capitalism, that's monopoly. And nobody's talking about moving to a communist or socialist system in which the means of production are owned and it's from to each according to his ability and to each according to his need, we are talking about different twists of the dial and how effectively or loosely capitalism should be regulated. I think that just sort of depends on which part of the economy you're talking about. People get very ideological about this question, but functionally it's really a pragmatic inquiry.

You're gonna be going up against someone who has called Atlas Shrugged "the best defense of capitalism ever written," John Allison, who presumably feels strongly that there should be, he's libertarian, so I'm assuming that he thinks there should be as little regulation as possible. I can't speak for him.

Do you know anything about him? I don't.

So you agreed to do the debate because the topic interests you even though you think it's mis-categorized? Are you looking at it like you want to go in and defend one position or another in the traditional sense of the debate? I'm looking to have an enjoyable evening talking economics which is something I tend to like to do. I like to make it up to New York when I have the opportunity, I think Demos does good work and they're allied with my old magazine, "The American Prospect", so I'm happy to help them out.

Did you like Ayn Rand in high school? No. I didn't read Ayn Rand in high school. Not that I didn't like her or did like her, I just didn't read her.

Given the fact that the two major parties seemed to be controlled by the rich, how can the rest of us try to make government serve the needs of people instead of corporations? I think that this question, to sort of deal with it correctly, would require a longer answer than we have time for here. I think there's no doubt that the political system is heavily tilted towards those with money and towards corporations, I wouldn't say it simply serves them. I think things are more complicated than that. I think partisanship is a much stronger force on the system than people realize. There's a lot of things that people attach to interests that are actually partisan incentives at work, mixed with the system's tendency towards paralysis and inertia. I'm about as big as a supporter of campaign finance reform as you'll find, and I don't dismiss the question you're asking, I'm just saying that I think that the problems, the reason people are upset and the problems we're facing are somewhat less monocausal than some people realize. I think that what is breaking the political system apart or at least what is impeding it from functioning effectively is more complicated than simply what representation wealthy interests have.

There seems to be such a disconnect between the complexity of the problems and what happens in the media, in terms of reducing things to sound bytes and even focusing on completely irrelevant things like Obama's birth certificate. This is why I write a boring policy focused blog.

Do you feel like you have somehow influenced the Washington press core to ask tougher questions? Have you seen any influence with the rise of the blogger, actually influencing mainstream reporting? I don't make any claims for my influence. I try to do the best I can with my little corner of it and that's what I can hope for.

What about blogging in general? Do you think that has had any impact? It's like anything else, it's complicated. It has good impacts and bad impacts. It's done good things... there are good blogs and there are bad blogs. There used to be a time when blogging referred to something more specific, a type of an amateur political commentary, people at home trying to get involved. That's what I was when I started out. But now blogging is such a diffuse form that it has a lot more to do with the fact that you're typing in a blogging program than it does of what you're typing. People at the Washington Post blog, people at home blog, it's sort of like writing at paper at this point. Writing on paper has a lot of impact and sometimes what's written is good and sometimes what's written is bad. I wouldn't presume to say what it's been in the aggregate.

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Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.

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