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Further proof that Paul Krugman is a bit of an ass The US economist and cheerleader for the Democrats, Paul Krugman, reckons that George W. Bush is a “libertarian”. To which I would respond: “If only”.
US blogger David Bernstein is equally unimpressed:
Bush and McCain are Extreme Libertarians: So says Paul Krugman: “What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all. And that seems to be something undreamed of in either Mr. Bush’s or Mr. McCain’s philosophy.”
After eight years of “no child left behind,” Medicare expansion, aid to Africa for AIDS, drug warring, abstinence education, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth and so on, and more of the same promised by McCain, the better question is, is there any problem that Bush and McCain DON’T think government should solve?
I take those who think that the modern Republican Party is an outpost of radical libertarianism about as seriously as those who think that the Democracts are getting ready to shoot the kulaks.
Well quite.
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At least it balances out the commenter on the previous thread who thinks Obama is more libertarian than McCain.
Still, I guess hennesli isn’t a columnist for the NYT. (Is he?)
Sometimes I think Hitler was on the right track with the whole anti-intelligentsia thing. Some people can have a lot of book larnin’ but be really not all that bright.
And if he were alive today he’s be describing himself as a libertarian too. Probably as a Libertarian Green National Socialist.
No, Krugman would be describing him as libertarian.
Let pause for a moment of silence in menory of the last of Paul Krugman’s marbles.
Once upon a time he had some, but now they are all gone. ashes to ashes, dust to dust, silicates to silicates.
HAHAHAH!!!! Iloved that one Taylor! Hilarious!
Please be careful when gathering evidence about Krugman being an ass.
That evidence is already so massive that any more may change the Earth’s rotation. AGW would be unfairly blamed.
Many intellectuals were National Socialists – for example both many academics, and most university students (and this was before the Nazis came to power). Both Mises and Hayek wrote on the power of such ideas among the intellectuals (and their books were best sellers – in spite of efforts to prevent their publication in Britain and the United States), but their exposure of the truth seems to have gone down the memory hole.
This idea that the Nazis were anti academic elite is a myth put about by members of the “educating classes” themselves. Although, of course, if a collectivist academic happened to be a Jew……
As for Paul Krugman and so on.
It is very unfair to imply that John McCain is as pro government spending as George Bush. McCain is no Tom Tancredo or Ron Paul, but his record is very different to that of Bush.
But calling wild spending Bush a “libertarian”.
This is so in conflict with the facts of how George Walker Bush has acted (facts knowns to Paul Krugman) that to call an “ass” is simply not good enough.
Paul Krugman is writing things he knows (knows because he has access to the data in his daily work as a economist interested in government policy) not to be true. Dr Krugman is therefore a liar.
There is a possible counter argument to what I have typed above.
“But Dr Krugman may have meant that George Bush is a libertarian, IN COMPARISON to a position that holds that the public power should control all aspects of human life in total collectivism”.
However, Dr Krugman would still being dishonest – as he does not admit that total collectivism is his aim.
Officially Dr Krugman holds that he opposes total collectivism and only wants an active interventionist government.
Of course this is actually the position of the person Dr Krugman hates – George Walker Bush.
Paul, seems to me that Krugman has no clue as to what a libertarian is. The lefties tend to regard libertarians as advocates for letting big bad corporations screw the people.
True Jacob.
But Paul Krugman is a person who deals with government spending information in his daily work (both as a New York Times creature and as a “leading economist” at a top university).
And he has shown many times that he knows that libertarians want radically reduced government spending – if a libertarian will tolerate any government spending at all (the argument between minimal statists and anarcho capitalists).
So he knows (at minimum) that libertarians want to radically reduce government spending – making it a small fraction of what it is now.
And he knows that George Walker Bush has vastly increased government spending.
He can not even say “just on the military” (which might sound a bit like McCain I admit), because Bush has increased spending on EVERYTHING – and done so VASTLY.
And Paul Krugman knows this – because he has the stats on his desk everyday.
So, I repeat, not just an ass – a liar.
I have always wondered why the left hates No Child Left Behind so much. Recently my daughter started school. It turned out that the school she was assigned to had been put on the “list” of schools that are failing according to the No Child Left Behind act. What this did was allow me to have her transferred to another school that is perfoming better.
Now the mystery has been solved. They hate it because it requires them to perform and it allows a way out when they do not. Is there any creedo that could be more inimical to the values of the average government worker than free choice and accountability?
I suspect otherwise. I suspect it is because the politics in that phrase are theirs, stolen, and it is hard with it established to sell a counter-policy. The left is furious because it has no answer – it is not possible to argue against the content of the policy because it has been given a name that embeds it in popular desire and protects it against criticism. I sympathise.
The British government has promoted the nationalisation of children under the slogan: Every Child Matters. It is politically impossible to deny the proposition encapsulated in the title, so fighting the profoundly evil policy is rendered almost impossible.
This is the fully-modernised version of the technique pioneered by Mussolini and revived by Nixon of declaring abstract objects of policy to be a “war”, in order to imply national unison of intent, and that dissentients are traitors. (The prime example till this decade being the War on Drugs. And both the claim of various violent Islamists to be engaged in jihad and the rhetoric of the War on Terror have precisely the same proleptic intent.)
In the modern version it is not necessary to imply that the policy is central to national survival. It suffices to make criticising tantamount to denial of a populist truism. All sorts of extraordinary positions and programmes are sustained by the circular logic of identifying the policy with prevention of some Terrible Evil so that critics are implicitly promoters of Terrible Evil. The degree to which it works or not depends on the emotional intensity with which the public apprehends the Terrible Evil and the cleverness with which it is encapsulated and evoked by the title of the policy programme.
The “war on poverty” was President Johnson’s term, not President Nixon’s term.
Hi Jonathan,
Quite by accident I somehow stumbled upon your ad hominem comments regarding Princeton economist Paul Krugman, who you call an “ass”.
This “ass” you mention just won the internationally famed NOBEL PRIZE for Economics.
I also might mention it was “libertarian” laissez faire de-regualtion that is to blame for the current global financial meltdown, its quite obvious. That’s why everything is being NATIONALIZED: the opposite of your dreamy, little idealistic fantasyland.
I think Mr. Krugman, the “ass” as you call him is a far more respectable and intelligent person than you, little libertarian blogger man!
Don’t be so precious. Krugman called Bush a libertarian. Only a total moron would suppose that a man who has advocated massive extension of state power, big increases in spending, the Patriot Act, etc, is a defender of liberty.
So Krugman won the Nobel Prize. So what? Nobel prizewinners are as capable of saying stupid things on politics as anyone else. Mr Krugman has also been a fairly constant cheerleader for the Democrats, which has detracted from his original high standing as a serious economist.
Utter bullshit. The reason for the current bust is the credit bubble, aided and abetted by the Fed – a state institution – US federal home loan agencies – state bodies – perverse regulations – drawn up by state officials, etc. The hubris of some private sector bankers has added to the pain, but not the main cause. If you honestly think we should go back to the economics of North Korea, then you are an ass. In fact that is too polite a term for the likes of you.
And remember, during the New Deal of your hero, Roosevelt, unemployment during the 1930s did not drop. Fact. Go and read it up.
Paul Krugman is an idiot statist. What in the world was the nobel prize comittee thinking? Just saw him on cnbc talking about how government needs to print money until they run out of ink to get us out of the depression we are in.
I guess we should try to dig our way out of the grand canyon too, if only we can find a big enough shovel!
How can these “economists” really believe such nonsense? I like economics and human action as a hobby and it seems obvious that the Austrians have it right and the Keynesians are chasing shadows.
We have been borrowing and spending as a nation, money like no people on earth has ever dreamed for the last 40 years. We have saved nothing, manufactured almost nothing, and everyone you see on the “news” believe that printing unsound, non-gold backed fiat paper money and having the government nationalize our financial system so it can force everyone to spend it, is the solution.
If you just say it out loud it sounds idiotic on its face.