Smug Krugman's advice, followed, failed.

Perhaps my least favored columnist at the New York Times is the smug Paul Krugman. Krugman, in my opinion, is one of the least honest columnists around. So it is with some amusement that I read what he said on August 2, 2002.

The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Got that? Krugman's solution to a downturn in the economy in 2002 was to "create a housing bubble." To quote the obnoxious Dr. Phil: "How's that working for you?"

Of course, the Left still worships Krugman.

Well, that didn't work out as planned.

Paul Krugman is rather fond of big government -- the bigger the better especially if it is the kind of government where he and his friends are in control. When people he doesn't like, such as Dubya, are in charge is rather unhappy with big government. Sort of like the Republicans, but in reverse. Both love big government just different mixes of big government.

Krugman recently participated in a debate on whether or not the federal government should nationalize health care. He started out basically saying he didn't want to look at the economics of health care. I don't blame him, the economics aren't really good for his case. Instead he wanted to drone on about compassion and morality and caring. I'm in favor of all of those myself but no dose of compassion will turn poison into tonic. And caring can't make the bad incentives of government control work. None of those are actually relevant to the discussion -- which no doubt is precisely why Krugman wanted to discuss them.

Krugman decided to prove the virtues of nationalized health care by taking a poll of his audience. But like most plans put into motion by the Left it didn't quite work out the way he intended. There was a strong debate on the quality of care in Canada and Krugman wanted to settle it by an impromptu poll of Canadians in the audience. Here is how the official transcript reports it:

PAUL KRUGMAN
And private insurance? That’s the thing, I— Actually, can I just
—I wanted to ask a question. And—
JOHN DONVAN
Please—please do—
PAUL KRUGMAN
—and I wanted to ask, actually two questions, to the audience.
First, how many Canadians, would Canadians in the room please
raise your hands. [ONE PERSON APPLAUDS, LAUGHTER]
JOHN DONVAN
We have about seven hands going up—
PAUL KRUGMAN
Okay, not as many as I thought. Okay, of those of you who are
not on the panel who are Canadians,, how many of you think you
have a terrible health care system. [PAUSE] One, two—
JOHN DONVAN
We see—almost all of the same hands going up. [LAUGHTER]
PAUL KRUGMAN
Bad move on my part. [APPLAUSE] I’ve got a selected--all right, I
won’t try it. But I will say, that—

Paul Krugman is seriously demented.

Paul Krugman is demented, and I mean that in the kindest way possible. The only explanation I have for some of his absurd and ridiculous views are that the man is inflicted by some serious brain disease that is rotting out the cells one by one.

Krugman is one of these people who is spreading the bullshit that George Bush is some sort of small government advocate and the failure of the Bush administration is that it didn’t intervene enough. As Krugman writes in the New York Times: “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.”

Apparently Bush didn’t think government “is the solution, after all.”

To believe that you have close your eyes to the inflated budgets that Bush has pushed through. This would remain true even if we removed Bush’s big government war policy -- and war is big government at its biggest, something conservatives can’t comprehend. Bush has extended government into more and more fields throughout his term. He has limited individual rights, ripped up Constitutional protections, and expanded the powers of the state.

What was No Child Left Behind but the nationalization of schools? Who was it pushed through that massive increase in socialized medicine? Bush loves big government across the board. His motto has been: when people hurt government has to move.

Krugman’s bitch is about the Katrina disaster and government not getting involved enough.

I followed that story in great detail at the time and I constantly saw government moving in and taking over. Let’s start with the obvious issue of the levees that failed. These were government built and government maintained. And the issue of the levees was widely known and known for years. Big government lovers like Bill Clinton had an opportunity to shore up the levees. Government reports have existed for a very long time noting that one really big hurricane hitting New Orleans could breach the levees and flood the city.

What we had was government failure not government non-interference. We have government intervention and it failed. It made things worse.

Consider the way the federal government rushed in and stopped all private efforts to help people. It wanted to monopolize the “rescue” even while it wasn’t rescuing anyone. Over and over all the government managed to do was prevent private efforts to help people.

But this is no surprise. Government aid is slow and cumbersome. Private aid is swift and easy. It has been repeatedly shown that when famine hits some region of Africa that food aid takes so long to arrive that the famine has often ended by the time the food arrives. When the free food does arrive it manages to bankrupt the local farmers, putting them out business, making future famines more likely.

People in New Orleans who had food and water and were able to protect themselves were rounded by the feds. Instead of helping people platoons of armed government agents went door to door disarming law abiding citizens. Physicians who sought to fly to the scene to help deliver needed care were stopped by federal agents. Over and over the federal government acted. And its first action was to always monopolize the charity by excluding private aid and preventing people from helping one another.

Bush and Krugman are soul brothers. They share the same love for overreaching, intrusive, regulatory, confiscatory government.

Milton Friedman's rises from grave spreads death and disaster in wake.

I have long thought that one of the worst writers around is Paul Krugman. He is just a very nasty man with issues. His hatred overflows his columns regularly.

One of his more absurd opinion pieces was recently published in the New York Times. At least with opinion pieces he doesn’t need facts or evidence. He just needs an opinion, his hate and a cup full of irrationality to boot. Economist Russell Roberts has brought to my attention that Krugman is now claiming the Milton Friedman is responisble for people dying.

Yes, the much honored but deceased economist is supposedly responsible for people dying at this very time. And he uses food scares to prove his point. Terror is an effect weapon and Krugman doesn’t mind using it. I don’t mean terrorism just the stirring up of terror, the fear-mongering that Statists like Krugman (and I should add his counterparts on the Right) use with amazing regularity.

Who’s responsible for the new fear of eating? Some blame globalization; some blame food-producing corporations; some blame the Bush administration. But I blame Milton Friedman.

He mentions the various cases of E. coli where people get sick from the food we eat. So was Uncle Miltie running around the fields before his death lacing the fields with poison to knock off people long after he’s gone. It concerns me. I had dinner with the man. I sat next to him at the table. I even left my food unattended at a couple of points during the meal. Perhaps I should rush off to the clinic for an exam. No doubt the moment I mention Milton Friedman I’ll be rushed into intensive care. But then that was some years ago but maybe it’s just slow acting! I do fear a bit warm. (Which couldn’t be anything to do with hot summer weather we are having here.)

How does Krugman prove his point. First, he mentions that Friedman was a critic of government consumer protection. Friedman argued it didn’t work well. He argued it didn’t really make consumers safer and it had unintended consequences that often made them worse off and it cost a lot of money in the meantime.

Krugman’s view is the opposite. If there is a state control that someone proposes Krugman gets orgasmic over it. He has wet dreams over socialism just call it something else.. He thinks a book of photos of Stalin, Marx, Mao, Castro and such is just raw erotica.

According to Krugman the laughable Bush administration is not pushing through new strong controls (see I told you he gets aroused at the very thought of economic bondage) because they are in the grips of a free market ideology. Okay, so it is laughable. The reality is that none of Friedman’s suggestions on this matter were tried. What is in place is the system that Krugman and his allies advocated.

Some would say that the food problems still arise with regulations show that the regulatory system itself doesn’t work. Krugman’s view is relatively consistent. He always says the controls were stringent enough, big enough, broad enough. He always advocates more state power. No one he hates Milton Friedman.

Now is it Bush? That is a different question and one that can’t be so easily dismissed. Bush is supremely inept when it comes to the occupants of the oval office. His handling of Katrina was a clear indication of that. Ditto for the war, the budget, constitutional liberties, ad nauseum. But beyond lip service paid by Bush to woe his own Republican base there hasn’t been an administration so NOT influenced by Friedman. It takes a certain kind of insanity to accuse Bush of believing in too much freedom.

But are E.coli outbreaks really that unprecedented that Krugman thinks he can use them to slander a dead man? Actually not but then facts are not on speaking terms with Krugman. Let’s look at past recent E.coli outbreaks.

During Bush, who I also loathe as anyone reading this blog knows, we had an E.coli outbreak where 70 people got sick from some infected meat. And then there was the fresh spinach outbreak of last year were 200 got ill and three died. Still pretty awful stuff but hardly earth shattering.

So how about under Mr. Clinton? In 1999 there was an E.coli outbreak in New York state that sickened 781 people. That’s way more than under Bush though Bush did have three fatalities. But that isn’t the end of the outbreaks under Clinton. In 1997 there was another outbreak with 108 becoming sick and three having kidney failure. Still no deaths. In 1996 there were 70 cases of E.coli infections and one died. In 1994 another 23 were infected and in 1993 over 700 people were infected and four of them died.

It is rather gruesome but we do need to do a body count here. Bush: 270 sick, 3 deaths. Clinton: About 1,700 sick and 5 deaths. Was Milton Fridman sneaking into the White House at night and whispering in Bill Clinton’s ear?

Before becoming an journalistic hit-man Krugman was also a paid adviser to the Enron company. Not exactly prime credentials in my books. Even the omsbudsman for the New York Times had to say that “Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.”

Gracious in victory.

Over the years I have read Paul Krugman on the far left and Andrew Sullivan on the right. I have frequently disagreed with Sullivan who I thought had liberal tendencies but was still a conservative at heart.

Krugman, however, I found it hard to enjoy anything he wrote. Even when I agreed with his basic conclusion I found him atrocious. I always got the impression that there was something rather unpleasant about him. His writing always had a nasty tone to it.

On a few occasions, very few, he is right. But even when he manages that he usually gets the reasoning wrong and almost always had an unpleasant demeanour about the whole issue. He struck me as someone who enjoyed being unpleasant.

Two areas where Krugman got it right, but for all the wrong reasons, was the US invasion of Iraq and his appraisal of the Bush debacle. Sullivan mainly got it wrong on the same two issues.

But Sullivan learned his lesson and he learned it some years ago. He endorsed John Kerry in the last election, not because of Kerry’s brilliance, but because of the disastrous consequences of a second term for Bush.

And recently Sullivan was one of two speakers at a forum held at the Cato Institute which dissected the Bush disaster. Now you would think that Paul Krugman would find Sullivan’s critique of Bush as something to welcome.


But he doesn’t. Instead he gets nasty about it. Sullivan admits he rallied behind Bush after 9/11. Sullivan is, of course unhappy with the attack. He says Krugman accused him of being “a ‘born-again’ Bush-basher.” But Sullivan notes that his criticism of Bush goes back several years. His presentation at Cato was not a recent dip in the pool of criticism for Bush.

And Sullivan is correct. A read of his daily blog reveals many such criticisms. And sure there are lots of things one can debate from a classical liberal perspective. Sullivan is not a classical liberal. He is a conservative. And one gets the impression that he’d be far more conservative than he is if it weren’t for the matter of him being gay.

So what is the lesson from all of this for classical liberals? We really can’t learn anything from Krugman. Even in his own field of economics the man is amazingly bad. We can admire that Sullivan has recognized some of his errors regarding Bush and wonder why he took as long as he did.

Bush didn’t have anything to offer classical liberals going into the first election except that he wasn’t Al Gore. And soon after his election it became obvious to all but the most blind that he was not an advocate of individual rights or limited government. His policies have been a mixture of Lincoln’s belief in executive power, Johnson’s Great Society and Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Add in a touch of Wilsonian illusions about remaking the world and you have a man who is the opposite of almost everything for which liberalism stands.

If Reagan wanted to end the era of big government then Bush has plunged the nation back into that statist abyss. Not only plunged back in but taken the country to new depths.

The Krugman/Sullivan feud does have lessons for us liberals however. And the main one is that when an intellectual opponent concedes a position one should not gloat about it.

It is clear that Sullivan feels insulted by Krugman. And Krugman’s writing is often nasty as I said so this doesn’t surprise me. But what kind of lesson is Krugman trying to teach Sullivan?

He basically punishes Sullivan when Sullivan is wrong and punishes him when he’s right. If someone moves closer to a good position, and if we want to see continued progress, we ought not bash them over the head for their movement.

It is said that one should be gracious in defeat. Untrue. It is far more important to be gracious in victory. When an intellectual opponent shifts his views it is not inappropriate to mention it. But only in a supportive way. Unless, of course, what you want to do is stifle all movement on their part. If you want people to stagnate and cling to bad positions then bash them when they move and accept good positions.

I remember a debate I had in print with an elected official. This politician was all over the place on a specific issue and I wanted to see a principled liberal position being taken. The politician finally replied to my essay by conceding the position. Some supporters of mine were anxious for my final response where I could gloat and do a little victory dance. I did not reply at all and let the debate end.

I did so because I did not want this official to be humiliated by the concession. I didn’t want intellectual movement to stop. I did not want to punish someone by humiliating them because they did something right. All I would have done was reinforce the idea that, even when you know you are wrong, you should still cling to bad view because shifting views is too costly.

It comes back to some economics. There are always costs and benefits. When we shift our views in public there are costs to this. One cost is the embarrassment of having been wrong. None of us like being wrong. And that is one reason a lot of people cling to wrong positions even when they know they are wrong. To them emotional costs of changing their position is too great.

Now when costs go up the demand for something goes down. (Though I suspect Paul Krugman would deny this.) When you raise the cost of an opponent changing their mind you reduce the likelihood that they will change their mind. To gloat or chastise them after such a concession is like a tax that is being added. They already paid the cost of publicly changing positions and now you add this tax on top of the price they paid making it even more expensive. By driving up the costs you guarantee that next time they are faced with this option they will be less likely to change their stance.

Far better to be gracious. If you must say anything at all you can restate their new view, endorse it and applaud their courage in changing their minds. Paul Krugman should have repeated Sullivan’s critique and said how brave it is for one so public to change their position. He should have recognized the good character traits needed for someone to do this. That he didn’t makes Krugman, the victor in a sense, look small, petty and unpleasant.

To see Sullivan’s presentation at the Cato forum go here:
http://cato.org/event.php?eventid=2710

To read Sullivan’s blog go to:
http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/

I can not direct you to Krugman as the New York Times has made him “premium” content that one must pay for to read on-line. Somehow calling Krugman’s columns “premium content” seems grossly inappropriate.