ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

According to Lofgren, the Deep State is to blame for many of the aforementioned political maladies and is the explanation for the insubstantial variance between the Bush and Obama administrations: even if they had wanted to, newly elected officeholders were prevented from effecting meaningful change by the "shadow government" of technocrats.

In virtually every policy area he discusses, Lofgren states the status quo to be so foolish that it can only be explained by the maliciousness or greed of Deep State technocrats. But in failing to seriously engage in any of the policy areas he discusses, he shows himself to be out of his depth. He often neglects to show that the policies he condemns were bad in the first place, or if they were bad, he avoids discussion of the role that bad incentives and central planning had to play in the bad outcomes. He never comes close to showing that they were so self-evidently bad that they can be attributed to the the Deep State's self-serving and malevolent ways.

To take one example, Lofgren condemns the 2008 Wall Street bailouts as the inevitable outcome of a giant con played on the American people by high-flying financiers (who play one part of the multi-faceted Deep State). But he utterly avoids engaging with the arguments made in favor of the Troubled Asset Relief Plan, which authorized $700 billion to buy distressed assets and inject capital into banks and other financial institutions (the Dodd-Frank Act later reduced this authorization to $475 billion). There is a good argument that the bailouts were necessary to stabilize an economy on the verge of collapse, but Lofgren airily dismisses this as a mere "debatable counterfactual." Nor does Lofgren mention that the Treasury Department has received about $442 billion in repayments, dividends, and other proceeds under TARP, $7.5 billion more than the $435 billion it has disbursed with the program.

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