Paul Krugman

It takes a lot of effort to make me dislike people on a sustained basis, but it is not hard with Krugman.  I want to be clear: his problem is not that he is stupid, arrogant, or wrong.  The problem is that he is a de facto apologist for ALL the abuses of power with which we are increasingly surrounded, and he cannot NOT know this.  That makes him a collaborator in a terror he knows is coming, when an unholy cabal of left wingers and banking elites will reduce our freedoms to the merest shred possible, a level wholly incompatible with human dignity.  These people are more or less open about their aims, so this is scarcely conspiracy.

Recently, I saw him in a debate in Spain, and he had three talking points, all of them willfully disingenous.

1) Economic “stimulus” was supposed to increase interest rates.  It didn’t, ergo sane economists are wrong.  This is stupid: all the Central Banks are keeping the key rates far below what they would be if market forces dictated them; and in any event, people are completely terrified about the future, so they are not borrowing or spending, meaning that the amount of money which could be in circulation that would cause interest rate spikes simply isn’t there.

2) Related: Sane economists claimed that “stimulus” approaches–including of course the $700 billion or more granted superlarge banks by St. Bernanke–would lead to inflation. It hasn’t, therefore he is right.  This, again, is willfully disingenuous.  If you study the basic process of money creation, the OVERWHELMING amount of money in circulation is neither created by central banks nor spent by the government.  It is money created as a result of the fractional reserve system.  This system is only inflationary when people are borrowing a lot of money.  People are not borrowing money, so the simple fact is that we won’t see price inflation UNTIL we get confidence again.  At the rate we are going, that may be five years or more out.

3) “Austerity” measures aren’t working.  Bullshit.  First off, most governments consider anything other than constant INCREASES in spending to be “austerity”.  In America, we cut some .02% of planned INCREASES, and the Left was claiming old people would be subsisting on cut rate Chinese dog food.  Nearly all of Europe was like this.  They cut some amount so small as to be functionally invisible–certainly relative to the massive SPENDING increases Krugman and his ilk have managed to get us to undertake–then six months later clowns like Krugman–who are quite willing to wait a decade for so-called stimulus packages to “work”–are calling them failures.

It takes time to get into difficulties, and time to get out.  He knows this.  He is just a de facto Eichman, greasing the rails to our shared enslavement.  He deserves contempt, nothing else.