Please spraypaint this on your nearest concrete surface. If you substitute Jimmy S, no one will notice. Put it right next to Johnny M. loves Jenny N., and the other one you can’t read.
As insults go, this is clearly inferior to “big poopy head” and “conserveretard toon”, but I have Soapdish on my Netflix queue, and remember that as being one of the funnier scenes. If you haven’t watched that movie, you should. Along with Birdcage, Anchorman, Team America, and parts of “What about Bob?”, it ranks as one of my favorite comedies. That and “Most Extreme Challenge”, part whatever. Please note I am carefully separating my moral critiques of American culture from what I find funny.
Anyway, the problem obviously is not that Krugman is actually stupid, in the sense of his knowledge base or cognitive capacity. He has a Ph.D. from what is normally considered a prestigious school. He is a professor (or was: I have no idea if his NYT gig is full-time) at a prestigious school. If you sat him down and gave him an IQ test, or entered him on Jeopardy, or asked him to solve some Mensa problem, he would do better than most.
His problem is imaginative. He lacks imagination. Specifically, he is unable to imagine human suffering in the detail I can, and unwilling to see that the policies he advocates so strenuously, and with such seeming sincerity, act to the detriment of the human race. When I think of Vietnam era radicals, I think of nothing so much as sad, frightened Vietnamese, placed in little bamboo cages in the stifling jungle heat, unable to bathe, forced to urinate and defectate on themselves, and fed rice with sand in it, hurting their teeth.
This is the sort of imagination one needs. As an alternative, let us think of a frightened African-American child of say 7, third born to a single mother, who leaves him in the care of his 11 year old sister, who beats him. There is a hole in the roof, and none of the kids in his 1st grade class will sit still long enough for the teacher to teach him anything. Is the hope for this child, surrounded by violence and indifference from his earliest memories really in failed programs like Head Start? Head Start makes a mild difference for perhaps a year–and not one clearly positive in all cases–then the effect disappears: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/hs/impact_study/reports/impact_study/executive_summary_final.pdf
Why would this be? Well, the 11 year old is self supervised, and choosing to bully the 7 year old and his 9 year old sister. What school program is going to counterbalance a daily reality of cruelty and indifference? It won’t. This child should not have been born. This is the reality.
Since I hate discussing problems without offering ANY solutions, I will allow myself one, although I have thought of a number: use taxpayer money to pay $10,000 to any low income person who voluntarily undergoes sterilization. Once 2 or more children have been born to a single mother, make sterilization a condition of future welfare checks. Harsh? Hell is for children, not mothers. The mother has the right to not fuck every man she sees. The child–not born in my example–has the right to a home and family that loves him or her, and having 5 kids you can’t afford is anything but love. I was reading about a real world example in Indianapolis the other day, of a mother who had kids 8,7,6,5, and 3. Five kids in 6 years, none of which she could afford. She left them home alone to go work, and was caught by CPS. They had been taken before because some man she had in the house abused them, and this time they were taken by CPS for good, no doubt mentally scarred for life. None of those kids is likely to reach whatever their natural capacity may have been; if they do, it will be a miracle, and public policy that depends on miracles is incompetent.
But I digress. The general point I wanted to make is that Krugman has clearly followed Keynes in setting as his task the implementation of Socialism in America. Towards that end, he employs creative misdirection, crappy thinking, and caustic ad hominem. Par for the course.
Pointing out his errors is not hard. It is of more interest to me showing his pattern of error, the types of thought errors that he commits over and over and over.
He makes these errors, to repeat, not out of a lack of critical capacity, but out of a deep seated emotional desire for certain things to be true about human life that are not true. It is not the case that if you punish supposed wrong-doers, that good results. You have to create good. You have to work for it. You have to define it, and articulate it as a principle-based behavioral system. It is never enough simply to eradicate what you define arbitrarily as evil. This is laziness. It is childishness. It is throwing a tantrum, kicking the flower pot over, and calling it philosophy.
Life contains pain. It will always contain pain. This in my view is the most practical view, and one which recognizes that pain accepted is pain diminished. It will always contain the pains of resentment and envy, confusion, anxiety, at least potentially. This is my view.
And if we are to have any chance of ridding ourselves of these pests, it can only be done on an individual level, and through spiritual growth. But this is not what the Socialists propose. They propose we solve them through the actions of SOMEONE ELSE. That we can outsource them. That with a properly planned society, they will simply fall away, and flowers burst from the earth, and the sun emerge from behind the gloomy clouds of greed. Killing the bourgeoisie (figuratively, then literally) is not just cathartic for those with pent-up anger spanning decades, but it is a sort of spirtual pesticide, that eliminates all the negative emotions to which human minds and spirits are prone. This is patent nonsense.
But consider the close relationship of Keynes with George Bernard Shaw. They corresponded constantly. Shaw was one of the first people Keynes told when he finished “The General Theory”. And consider who he was. He openly advocated involuntary euthanasia–murder–of social undesireables, and even mused publicly about the development of Zyklon B roughly a decade before Hitler ensured it would not only become a reality, but used in approximately the way Shaw intended. You MUST watch this video, if you are to truly grasp that Fascism is nothing more or less than a type of Socialism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw7DtjO4V6c
To the specific piece: Eat the future. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14krugman.html?ex=1313470800&en=56519977c80612d4&ei=5087&WT.mc_id= NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-0216-L18
The argument: Public research says that the basic mindset of pork barrel politics is still alive. People want other people’s stuff cut. From this, Krugman infers that the Republicans do not have a mandate to cut the budget. This is patent nonsense, of course. In almost all opinion polls the national debt is the top concern, and that people differ in how it should be cut is a far cry from being able to claim it isn’t important.
Further, the problem is ENORMOUS. We will be paying more in interest expenses within the decade than we spend currently on the ENTIRE Defense Dept. budget. This is because we are running $1.5 trillion ANNUAL deficits. This is simply unsustainable. NO AMOUNT OF ECONOMIC GROWTH CAN PAY OFF THIS DEBT AT THE RATE WE ARE ACCUMULATING IT, IF WE DO NOT RADICALLY REDUCE EXPENDITURES.
Clearly, taxes may need to be raised, but the historic pattern is taxes are raised to meet shortfalls, then EXPENDITURES ARE INCREASED AGAIN. It’s a revolving pattern. This year, this Congress, we HAVE to make a stand. We are plainly going bankrupt, and arguing that we CAN pay our bills is no different than the arguments of people I’ve known that their ability to afford their $200,000 annual lifestyles means spending every cent they make is OK. Just because you have money, does not mean you should spend it. And since we DON’T have the money, that makes it apply doubly.
To the requisite attack on Republicans as dumb meany-heads. Republicans have cut food stamps. http://washingtonindependent.com/98886/the-real-impact-of-food-stamp-cuts
You need to understand that Krugman exaggerates to the point where he may as well be lying. The so-called “Stimulus” was actually a massive, but in theory temporary, expansion of the welfare state. Roughly one third of it–$250 billion–did nothing but fund pet Democratic social spending programs that Congress was otherwise unwilling to fund. It shored up bankrupt State Medicaid accounts. It shored up bankrupt food stamp programs. What the Republicans have done is roll back spending on this program to 2008 levels. The spending all along was supposed to be temporary.
What Krugman and his fellow socialists want, of course, is for temporary money, appropriated through underhanded, deceptive means, to become permanent. That will bankrupt us that much more quickly, and enable the “rationality” of–can I call it this?–Uebergovernment, a central State of Chineseian power and control, and ruthlessness.
Republicans cut money for nuclear non-proliferation. Horrible, right? You know how this program works? We give money to Russians and others to find lost nukes. They keep it. This is really a pretty simple process. This has been going on for a long time. This does not make lost Russian nukes less dangerous, but there is categorically no direct relationship between money appropriated and actual outcomes. Most of it, in fact, is wasted. As things stand, we still have $2 billion allocated for it.
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/business/hancock/blog/2011/02/congress_moves_to_help_terrori.html
Here is what this money has accomplished recently:
At the close of 2010, NNSA announced that 111 pounds of bomb-making highly enriched uranium were removed from three sites in Ukraine. Since April 2009, six countries have given up all their highly enriched uranium and a total of 120 bombs’ worth of nuclear material was secured.
Useful? Of course. $2.6 billion worth of useful when we have many more billions allocated to overseas intelligence and Homeland Security? Probably not so much. Most of even this $2 billion will likely be wasted on fancy lunches, good cigars, and exorbitant salaries for people who accomplish one thing every decade they “serve”. I could be wrong, but Krugman’s case is far from airtight.
As far as the IRS agents go, I would be curious if he can back up that claim. The IRS asked for an INCREASE of $338 million. This article is from Feb. 15th: http://www.accountingweb.com/topic/tax/irs-releases-2012-budget-proposal-summary
The point is inescapable, too, that greater collections means more tax revenue, which means more cash out of the system and into government coffers. For all intents and purposes, all increases in the IRS Collections activity amount to tax increases. As I said, we will at some point likely have to raise taxes. What we MUST do, first, is demonstrate the capacity to stop using our goddamned charge card for every little thing that catches our eye.
As far as his “death panels” quote, obviously we cannot pay end-of-life care indefinitely. But who should decide? The patients, with their family and chosen insurer, or an omnipotent government panel trying to keep costs down? The latter alternative ALREADY EXISTS IN EUROPE, and is inevitable here. To claim otherwise is, frankly, to be an asshole.
I’m tired and irritable. I will leave it there for now.
No: one more thing. If Krugman had a shred of human decency, he would take the time to grasp that the policies he advocates, on balance, cause human suffering. Rich people hire poor people, making them not poor. Poor people suffer. They don’t hire anyone. Socialism creates the latter, in the process of destroying the former. Cubans, 40 years after the full implementation of Communism, live on $20/month, and are uniformly surrounded by secret police, and under the constant threat of political arrest if they have the temerity to call bullshit on the whole nasty, sordid, roach-infested hell that leftists have been looking to as an example all these years.
Shame on you, Paul Krugman. You are a nasty piece of shit. Hell has a place for you. I don’t wish it on you, but in my view things have a way of working their course. Your task, all your life, has been to understand what is good, and work for it. You have failed, and you continue to fail. You don’t get points for what you say you are trying to do. You don’t get points for willful self delusion. You know what the reality is, and if you choose not to acknowledge it, if you continue a parade of lies calculated to expand human evil on Earth, you bear the full brunt of the responsibility for your actions.
I avoid ad hominem in general as intellectually vacuous. Occasionally, I do seem to feel the need to vent, though. It may not be useful rhetorically, but it feels good to be completely frank sometimes.