Did John Maynard Keynes or Paul Krugman ever run businesses? No, of course not. Keynes made his fortunes as an academic and currency trader–he understood inflation quite well, which is the only thing that permits profits in currency trading–and Krugman has been a lifelong academic.
The latter speaks to the psychology of business. He rejects the idea that a socialist-in-chief who has passed a law–Obamacare–for which it is impossible to budget, but which–along with the tax increases that will be necessary at some point, if not this year–will certainly be expensive.
Does he even know what a profit and loss statement is? Or that business owners, not unreasonably, prefer not going bankrupt? Krugman simply doesn’t care. They are an aggregated, undifferentiated mass for him. Treating people as abstractions in this way is no different in principle that claiming that general statements could be made about “the Jews”.
I will grant that he is not motivated by literal bloodlust–although at some point he could perhaps be made to feel the attraction, especially if mass death were also abstract due to his physical distance–but he has no love for the people who take the risks to create the companies that create the jobs that create the wealth in this nation. This is because even though he arrogates to himself the right to speak for “the people”, he has never been one. They are the ones down there on the street: why sully himself?
He is a smug priss. I don’t like him. I don’t like anyone who inserts ideas of hatred, or ideas that lead to poverty into our national dialogue.
I have not run the numbers, but I suspect we could confiscate the wealth of the wealthiest 10,000 Americans and it wouldn’t pay our bills for a month. And it would, of course, lead to the eradication of millions of jobs, and very, very deep depression, from which we would never emerge; at least, until private property rights were again respected, as they had to be, to some extent, in China and elsewhere, for any development to happen at all.
We do need to raise taxes. Far, far more, though, we need to cut off the oxygen to the cancer that is the swollen horde of taxpayer funded parasites in the Federal Government. We live in its shadow–but the sun is still out there. We need to find it.