An interesting take on the establishment - insiders know how to get things done.
While it contains a lot of errors, the Washington Consensus is right more often than it is wrong. Even more importantly, critiques of the Washington Consensus are wrong more of then than they are right—meaning that taking Washington Establishment down a peg will tend to do more harm than good.
Take, for example, the Federal Reserve. The Fed has made some big mistakes in the last few years—it was too loose during the middle of the last decade, allowing the housing bubble to inflate, and has been too tight since the housing crash. But the modal critique of the Fed has called for worse policy—even tighter money or, worse yet, a return to the Gold Standard.
Or look at banking. The government has mostly failed to address the root causes of the last financial crisis, by continuing to allow complex financial institutions to profit off risk-taking that is backstopped by an implicit government guarantee. But the ideas with the most populist energy—from calls for indiscriminate debt forgiveness on the left to insistence that we should have just let Citigroup and Bank of America fail on the right—are even worse than what Washington has actually done.
