Idolatry, the Left and Paul Krugman

Our friends on the left have a high priest of the economics sort - Paul Krugman. They are passionate about this guy, bordering on lust in the case of the ladies of the Marin left (and a Macy’s window designer or two). My, my. Fact is we hear endlessly from these types - Krugman says this and Krugman says that. For many, it’s the only economist they ever heard of, and, naturally by the way of the NYT’s. These folk read the NYT’s as a daily ritual, thinking that all wisdom is distilled on those pages. It’s cool carrying a copy to work, even cooler if you hold it just right - pages folded just so. Those pages are about to disappear of course because more and more Americans want the news, not the left’s opinion, but until they do our friends will parrot Krugman in support of Obama’s rush to socialize America.

Krugman is a devotee of Keynes. That means right now this guy wants the government to spend every $ you’ve got (and some you’re yet to get). Our training was at UCLA and that is where we first encountered the wisdom of Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist who did see through all of this nonsense. Von Mises was the first to prove that it was impossible for socialism to undertake "economic calculation," that is, the government will always come in second best in comparison with the creative destruction of free enterprise and the private sector. And pertinent to our current situation, von Mises wrote that, "... a government can spend or invest only what it takes away from its citizens … its additional spending and investment curtails the citizens' spending and investment to the full extent of its quantity." Our point all along.

Krugman supports massive US government spending to spark a recovery. Krugman ignores US economic history at his followers' peril. Past evidence suggest that the impact of government spending programs that are intended to encourage economic growth did nothing of the sort; at best they were a wash. We have touched on this repeatedly in past sketches. Recall that the Japanese government tried this foolishness in the 1990's. Didn’t go too well, did it? Unless of course you call nearly two decades of economic stagnation a success.

We would suggest liberals begin to think out of the box, try a little original insight, or at the very least, maybe open a book or two on US economic history. Painful as if may be, try to decouple from the NYT’s and your (false) messiah Paul Krugman.

Robert Craven