http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/wild-words-brain-worms-and-civility/
Wild Words, Brain Worms, and Civility
September 14, 2014 2:23 pm...
First, picturesque language, used right, serves an important purpose. “Words ought to be a little wild,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.” You could say, “I’m dubious about the case for expansionary austerity, which rests on questionable empirical evidence and zzzzzzzz…”; or you could accuse austerians of believing in the Confidence Fairy. Which do you think is more effective at challenging a really bad economic doctrine?
Beyond that, civility is a gesture of respect — and sure enough, the loudest demands for civility come from those who have done nothing to earn that respect. Noah felt (and was) justified in ridiculing the Austrians because they don’t argue in good faith; faced with a devastating failure of their prediction about inflation, they didn’t concede that they were wrong and try to explain why. Instead, they denied reality or tried to redefine the meaning of inflation.
And if you look at the uncivil remarks by people like, well, me, you’ll find that they are similarly aimed at people arguing in bad faith. I talk now and then about zombie and cockroach ideas. Zombies are ideas that should have been killed by evidence, but keep shambling along — e.g. the claim that all of Europe’s troubled debtors were fiscally irresponsible before the crisis; cockroaches are ideas that you thought we’d gotten rid of, but keep on coming back, like the claim that Keynes would never have called for fiscal stimulus in the face of current debt levels (Britain in the 1930s had much higher debt to GDP than it does now). Well, what I’m doing is going after bad-faith economics — economics that keeps trotting out claims that have already been discredited.
...
With regard to the first paragraph quoted above, Krugman's claim that the accusation of 'belief in the Confidence Fairy' is a better way to attack those who make the obvious point that government spending doesn't necessarily make people's lives better, is a confession of his inability to convincingly defend his own position.
Phrases like 'believing in the Confidence Fairy' hint at being a straw man, but they don't have enough substance to even qualify as a fallacy, because such phrases have no clear meaning, and certainly don't make an important point. They aren't even an attempt at making an important point — they are just childish mockery — a kind of nonsensical ad hominem, that only tell the reader that the writer is attacking, and that cast doubt on the validity of the attacker's position.
This is just an attempt by Krugman to defend the crude titillation of confused readers who are examples of confirmation bias — the core audience of any writer who writes in this way. No one who wants real evidence to support their view point, and is actively looking for falsifying evidence to check a particular belief, would be satisfied with such silly, content free writing.
Krugman's comments are a fascinating statement of psychological projection. Notice that Krugman massively exhibits the qualities he mentions above as undeserving of civility — 'arguing in bad faith' and 'trotting out claims that have already been discredited.'
No reasonable, honest person, motivated by understanding the truth, would view using phrases like 'Confidence Fairy' and 'cockroach idea' as arguing in good faith.
It's a funny irony when someone reveals a lack of character in trying to argue they have character.
Krugman's dishonesty is fairly well documented, since he really doesn't make an effort to conceal it.
For example, here's a piece Krugman wrote for 'Fortune' magazine in May of 1999, entitled 'The Ascent of E-Man', where Krugman wrote in positive terms about Enron, and that he was on the advisory board --
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1999/05/24/260257/index.htm
The Ascent of E-Man R.I.P.: THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT
By Paul Krugman May 24, 1999
(FORTUNE Magazine) – I grew up in a planned economy. Bureaucrats didn't run everything: Small-business men were more or less free to buy and sell as they saw fit. But those who controlled the economy's "commanding heights," its key industries, were administrators rather than entrepreneurs, conformists who were valued less for their productivity than for their loyalty, whose career advancement depended on their political skill. For ordinary workers, the system had some benefits: It was hard to get ahead, but once you had a good job, your life was secure. Still, the economy was often appallingly inefficient and consistently unresponsive to consumer needs.
No, I am not an immigrant from Eastern Europe. I'm talking about the U.S. economy of the '50s and '60s, when General Motors was the very model of a modern major company.
In those days progressive thinkers like John Kenneth Galbraith used to ridicule economists who still believed what they had learned from Paul Samuelson's textbook, which was that free markets could be counted on to match supply and demand. After all, business itself was clearly moving away from markets and toward planning. More and more of the economy was dominated by large corporations, and those corporations didn't place much faith in the invisible hand. For example, AT&T owned it all--not just the long-distance lines, but the local phone systems, the factories that made telecommunications equipment, even the phones in your home. By contrast, in today's cutting-edge e-businesses (see Cover Stories), the company often owns--or rather, rents--little but brainpower.
That's a long way from the era of the man in the gray flannel suit, when the great business empires were not run according to the principles of supply and demand: They were command-and-control systems, and people did what they were told. As technology grew more complex, as big corporations grew ever bigger, as computers made it easier to impose centralized control, it was clear to smart people that the economy would bear ever less resemblance to the competitive system described in obsolete economics textbooks.
But over the past two decades the market has steadily gained ground--not only against socialism but against big-business capitalism. Large companies account for a steadily declining share of employment and value added. Moreover, even within corporations there is a growing tendency to rely on individual initiative, on independent profit centers free to take risks and do it their way. (True, sometimes individual initiative leads to something that looks like mass conformity--seen one Banana Republic, you've seen 'em all. But we're talking about management here, not tastes.)
The retreat of business bureaucracy in the face of the market was brought home to me recently when I joined the advisory board at Enron--a company formed in the '80s by the merger of two pipeline operators. In the old days energy companies tried to be as vertically integrated as possible: to own the hydrocarbons in the ground, the gas pump, and everything in between. And Enron does own gas fields, pipelines, and utilities. But it is not, and does not try to be, vertically integrated: It buys and sells gas both at the wellhead and the destination, leases pipeline (and electrical-transmission) capacity both to and from other companies, buys and sells electricity, and in general acts more like a broker and market maker than a traditional corporation. It's sort of like the difference between your father's bank, which took money from its regular depositors and lent it out to its regular customers, and Goldman Sachs. Sure enough, the company's pride and joy is a room filled with hundreds of casually dressed men and women staring at computer screens and barking into telephones, where cubic feet and megawatts are traded and packaged as if they were financial derivatives. (Instead of CNBC, though, the television screens on the floor show the Weather Channel.) The whole scene looks as if it had been constructed to illustrate the end of the corporation as we knew it.
What happened to the man in the gray flannel suit? No doubt he was partly a victim of sex (er, I mean gender) and drugs and rock & roll--that is, of social change. He was also a victim of information technology, which ended up deconstructing instead of reinforcing the corporation. But probably the biggest force has been a change in ideology, the shift to pro-market policies. It's not that government has vanished from the marketplace. It's still a good guess that in a completely unregulated phone market, long-distance companies would buy up local-access companies and deny their customers the right to connect to rivals, and that the evil empire--or at least monopoly capitalism--would rise again. However, what we have instead in a growing number of markets--phones, gas, electricity today, probably computer operating systems and high-speed Net access tomorrow--is a combination of deregulation that lets new competitors enter and "common carrier" regulation that prevents middlemen from playing favorites, making freewheeling markets possible.
Who would have thunk it? The millennial economy turns out to look more like Adam Smith's vision--or better yet, that of the Victorian economist Alfred Marshall--than the corporatist future predicted by generations of corporate pundits. Get those old textbooks out of the attic: they're more relevant than ever.
PAUL KRUGMAN is professor of economics at MIT and author of The Return of Depression Economics.
No, I am not an immigrant from Eastern Europe. I'm talking about the U.S. economy of the '50s and '60s, when General Motors was the very model of a modern major company.
In those days progressive thinkers like John Kenneth Galbraith used to ridicule economists who still believed what they had learned from Paul Samuelson's textbook, which was that free markets could be counted on to match supply and demand. After all, business itself was clearly moving away from markets and toward planning. More and more of the economy was dominated by large corporations, and those corporations didn't place much faith in the invisible hand. For example, AT&T owned it all--not just the long-distance lines, but the local phone systems, the factories that made telecommunications equipment, even the phones in your home. By contrast, in today's cutting-edge e-businesses (see Cover Stories), the company often owns--or rather, rents--little but brainpower.
That's a long way from the era of the man in the gray flannel suit, when the great business empires were not run according to the principles of supply and demand: They were command-and-control systems, and people did what they were told. As technology grew more complex, as big corporations grew ever bigger, as computers made it easier to impose centralized control, it was clear to smart people that the economy would bear ever less resemblance to the competitive system described in obsolete economics textbooks.
But over the past two decades the market has steadily gained ground--not only against socialism but against big-business capitalism. Large companies account for a steadily declining share of employment and value added. Moreover, even within corporations there is a growing tendency to rely on individual initiative, on independent profit centers free to take risks and do it their way. (True, sometimes individual initiative leads to something that looks like mass conformity--seen one Banana Republic, you've seen 'em all. But we're talking about management here, not tastes.)
The retreat of business bureaucracy in the face of the market was brought home to me recently when I joined the advisory board at Enron--a company formed in the '80s by the merger of two pipeline operators. In the old days energy companies tried to be as vertically integrated as possible: to own the hydrocarbons in the ground, the gas pump, and everything in between. And Enron does own gas fields, pipelines, and utilities. But it is not, and does not try to be, vertically integrated: It buys and sells gas both at the wellhead and the destination, leases pipeline (and electrical-transmission) capacity both to and from other companies, buys and sells electricity, and in general acts more like a broker and market maker than a traditional corporation. It's sort of like the difference between your father's bank, which took money from its regular depositors and lent it out to its regular customers, and Goldman Sachs. Sure enough, the company's pride and joy is a room filled with hundreds of casually dressed men and women staring at computer screens and barking into telephones, where cubic feet and megawatts are traded and packaged as if they were financial derivatives. (Instead of CNBC, though, the television screens on the floor show the Weather Channel.) The whole scene looks as if it had been constructed to illustrate the end of the corporation as we knew it.
What happened to the man in the gray flannel suit? No doubt he was partly a victim of sex (er, I mean gender) and drugs and rock & roll--that is, of social change. He was also a victim of information technology, which ended up deconstructing instead of reinforcing the corporation. But probably the biggest force has been a change in ideology, the shift to pro-market policies. It's not that government has vanished from the marketplace. It's still a good guess that in a completely unregulated phone market, long-distance companies would buy up local-access companies and deny their customers the right to connect to rivals, and that the evil empire--or at least monopoly capitalism--would rise again. However, what we have instead in a growing number of markets--phones, gas, electricity today, probably computer operating systems and high-speed Net access tomorrow--is a combination of deregulation that lets new competitors enter and "common carrier" regulation that prevents middlemen from playing favorites, making freewheeling markets possible.
Who would have thunk it? The millennial economy turns out to look more like Adam Smith's vision--or better yet, that of the Victorian economist Alfred Marshall--than the corporatist future predicted by generations of corporate pundits. Get those old textbooks out of the attic: they're more relevant than ever.
PAUL KRUGMAN is professor of economics at MIT and author of The Return of Depression Economics.
And here's a piece Krugman wrote in December of 2001, entitled 'Death by Guru', where he claims Enron failed due to being managed by advisory gurus — of course, he doesn't mention here that he had been on Enron's advisory board, making him one of those gurus --
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/18/opinion/18KRUG.html
Death by Guru
By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: December 18, 2001
ies.[sic] Arrogance. Betrayal." So reads Fortune's current cover, under the headline "The Enron Disaster." Sounds good to me. But Fortune may have overlooked one force for evil: trendy management theories. In part, this was a case of death by guru.
Enron sold lots of things, but above all it sold itself: it crafted a self-portrait that business gurus loved. Like a schematic diagram from The McKinsey Quarterly or The Harvard Business Review, Enron's business plan made a perfect PowerPoint presentation. Other companies hired business gurus as consultants; Enron, in effect, put the gurus in charge. (Jeff Skilling, who made Enron what it is today, is a former McKinsey consultant.) What they created was a company so trendy that investors were dazzled. And that let executives get away with financial murder.
Are trendy management theories really that important? A look at the business best-seller lists might suggest not; it might even suggest that the management-guru business is not what it was five or six years ago. In a bull market, readers wanted advice on investment, not on how to re-engineer the search for excellence in the total quality chaos. It has been a while since that giddy moment when both "Jesus CEO" and "Make It So: Management Lessons From Star Trek the Next Generation" were riding high in the charts.
But the real impact of the guru business — and the real money — has always come via consulting rather than book sales. While consultants may not have sold as many books in the late 1990's as they did in earlier years, the influence of trendy business doctrines probably increased as the millennium approached. Why? Because in a bubble economy, investors weren't interested in hard facts; they flocked to the companies that told the best stories. And this created tremendous pressure on managers to conform with the latest trend. Corporations became intellectual fashion victims.
Which brings us back to Enron. From 1997 to 2000, the years when Enron stock rose from $20 to $90, business gurus disdained old-fashioned companies whose valuation had something to do with hard assets. "The usefulness of asset-based strategies is waning," declared one article in The McKinsey Quarterly. The future belonged to companies with no visible means of support. I'm not just talking about dot-coms; gurus also celebrated such new-age business heroes as "petropreneurs," who owned neither oil wells nor refineries, and "fabless" chip companies that owned no factories. Flexibility and vision were what counted, not bricks, mortar and tubular steel.
And Enron was absolutely fabless — it prided itself on being an "asset light" company. O.K., it owned some pipelines, but what it really offered was the vision thing: it would create markets in everything, and make money by trading in those markets. And if you couldn't understand why Enron's trading operation was as profitable as it seemed to be, that was because you just didn't get it.
This sort of circular logic — if you don't believe, that's because there's something wrong with you — is typical of extreme religious and political sects. Well, what's a guru without a cult?
Admittedly, there is a chicken-or- Enron question: Was Enron so admired because it embodied faddish management ideas so perfectly, or did those ideas become so faddish because of Enron's apparent success? Probably both. The point is that the stock market rewarded Enron for following such a fashionable business strategy, and few analysts were willing to fly in the face of fashion by questioning Enron's numbers. Enron executives had every incentive to turn the company into a caricature of itself — a "giant hedge fund sitting on top of a pipeline," as one critic said. And the power that came with fashionability shielded the company from awkward questions about its accounts.
In the end, of course, reality bit. Enron is in bankruptcy; its stock closed yesterday at 57 cents. You can say this for the business world: Because there is a bottom line, ultimately the truth will out. No matter how plausible a business leader sounds, if his numbers don't add up, if he promises more than he can possibly deliver, the facts will eventually catch up with him.
It's just too bad that the false business prophets who ran Enron will probably get off lightly, while the people who trusted them — especially the ordinary employees — will pay a heavy price.
Enron sold lots of things, but above all it sold itself: it crafted a self-portrait that business gurus loved. Like a schematic diagram from The McKinsey Quarterly or The Harvard Business Review, Enron's business plan made a perfect PowerPoint presentation. Other companies hired business gurus as consultants; Enron, in effect, put the gurus in charge. (Jeff Skilling, who made Enron what it is today, is a former McKinsey consultant.) What they created was a company so trendy that investors were dazzled. And that let executives get away with financial murder.
Are trendy management theories really that important? A look at the business best-seller lists might suggest not; it might even suggest that the management-guru business is not what it was five or six years ago. In a bull market, readers wanted advice on investment, not on how to re-engineer the search for excellence in the total quality chaos. It has been a while since that giddy moment when both "Jesus CEO" and "Make It So: Management Lessons From Star Trek the Next Generation" were riding high in the charts.
But the real impact of the guru business — and the real money — has always come via consulting rather than book sales. While consultants may not have sold as many books in the late 1990's as they did in earlier years, the influence of trendy business doctrines probably increased as the millennium approached. Why? Because in a bubble economy, investors weren't interested in hard facts; they flocked to the companies that told the best stories. And this created tremendous pressure on managers to conform with the latest trend. Corporations became intellectual fashion victims.
Which brings us back to Enron. From 1997 to 2000, the years when Enron stock rose from $20 to $90, business gurus disdained old-fashioned companies whose valuation had something to do with hard assets. "The usefulness of asset-based strategies is waning," declared one article in The McKinsey Quarterly. The future belonged to companies with no visible means of support. I'm not just talking about dot-coms; gurus also celebrated such new-age business heroes as "petropreneurs," who owned neither oil wells nor refineries, and "fabless" chip companies that owned no factories. Flexibility and vision were what counted, not bricks, mortar and tubular steel.
And Enron was absolutely fabless — it prided itself on being an "asset light" company. O.K., it owned some pipelines, but what it really offered was the vision thing: it would create markets in everything, and make money by trading in those markets. And if you couldn't understand why Enron's trading operation was as profitable as it seemed to be, that was because you just didn't get it.
This sort of circular logic — if you don't believe, that's because there's something wrong with you — is typical of extreme religious and political sects. Well, what's a guru without a cult?
Admittedly, there is a chicken-or- Enron question: Was Enron so admired because it embodied faddish management ideas so perfectly, or did those ideas become so faddish because of Enron's apparent success? Probably both. The point is that the stock market rewarded Enron for following such a fashionable business strategy, and few analysts were willing to fly in the face of fashion by questioning Enron's numbers. Enron executives had every incentive to turn the company into a caricature of itself — a "giant hedge fund sitting on top of a pipeline," as one critic said. And the power that came with fashionability shielded the company from awkward questions about its accounts.
In the end, of course, reality bit. Enron is in bankruptcy; its stock closed yesterday at 57 cents. You can say this for the business world: Because there is a bottom line, ultimately the truth will out. No matter how plausible a business leader sounds, if his numbers don't add up, if he promises more than he can possibly deliver, the facts will eventually catch up with him.
It's just too bad that the false business prophets who ran Enron will probably get off lightly, while the people who trusted them — especially the ordinary employees — will pay a heavy price.
Here's Krugman's attempt at damage control on January 25, 2002, entitled 'Spreading It Around', in response to being portrayed in the press as a guilty party in the Enron scandal. As usual here, there's no indication that Krugman is in possession of the character traits that he requires of others to deem them worthy of respect.
When Krugman was on Enron's advisory board he wrote glowingly about the company, but he wrote here of criticizing the company when it was too late to matter — after he had resigned from its board in order to write for The New York Times. Again, Krugman demonstrates his own accusation, by writing to avoid his own blame and deflect attention away from how wildly wrong he was --
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/25/opinion/spreading-it-around.html?pagewanted=all
Spreading It Around
By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: January 25, 2002
Correction Appended
A bizarre thing happened to me over the past week: Conservative newspapers and columnists made a concerted effort to portray me as a guilty party in the Enron scandal. Why? Because in 1999, before coming to The New York Times, I was briefly paid to serve on an Enron advisory board.
Never mind that, scrupulously following the Times conflict of interest rules, I resigned from that board as soon as I agreed to write for this newspaper -- making me much more fastidious than, say, William Kristol, who served on that same board while editing The Weekly Standard. Never mind that I disclosed that past connection a year ago, the first time I wrote about Enron in this column -- and also disclosed it the one time I mentioned Enron before, in a Fortune column. Never mind that the compensation I received per day was actually somewhat less than other companies were paying me at the time for speeches on world economic issues.
And never mind that when I started writing in this column about issues of concern to Enron -- in particular, criticizing the role that market manipulation by energy companies played in the California power crisis -- my position was not at all what the company wanted to hear. (Compare this with the board member Lawrence Kudlow, a commentator for National Review and CNBC. He wrote vehemently in favor of the Cheney energy plan -- and has called this the ''Clinton-Levitt recession,'' blaming Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, who tried to fight the accounting laxity that made Enron possible.)
Yet reading those attacks, you would think that I was a major-league white-collar criminal.
It's tempting to take this vendetta as a personal compliment: Some people are so worried about the effect of my writing that they will try anything to get me off this page. But actually it was part of a broader effort by conservatives to sling Enron muck toward their left, hoping that some of it would stick.
A few days ago Tim Noah published a very funny piece in Slate about this effort, titled ''Blaming liberalism for Enron.'' (Full disclosure: I used to write a column for Slate -- and Slate is owned by Microsoft. So I guess that makes me a Bill Gates crony. I even shook his hand once.) It describes the strategies conservative pundits have used to shift the blame for the Enron scandal onto the other side of the political spectrum.
Among the ploys: Enron was in favor of the Kyoto treaty, because it thought it could make money trading emission permits; see, environmentalism is the villain. Or how about this: Enron made money by exploiting the quirks of electricity markets that had been only partly deregulated; see, regulation is the villain.
And, of course -- you knew this was coming -- it's all a reflection of Clinton-era moral decline. Traditionally, as we all know, Texas businessmen and politicians were models of probity; they never cooked their books or engaged in mutual back-scratching.
One doubts that the people putting out this stuff really expect to convince anyone. But they do hope to muddy the waters. If they can get a little bit of Enron dirt on everyone -- the Clinton administration, environmentalists, liberal columnists -- the stain on people and ideas they support will be less noticeable.
Why is Enron a problem for conservatives? Even if the Bush administration turns out to be squeaky clean, which we'll never know unless it starts to be more forthcoming, the scandal threatens perceptions that the right has spent decades creating. After all that effort to discredit concerns about the gap between haves and have-nots as obsolete ''class warfare,'' along comes a real-life story that reads like a leftist morality play: wealthy executives make off with millions while ordinary workers lose their jobs and their life savings. After all that effort to convince people that the private sector can police itself, the most admired company in America turns out to have been a giant Ponzi scheme -- and the most respected accounting firm turns out to have been an accomplice.
You might think that the shock of the Enron scandal -- and it is shocking, even to us hardened cynics -- would make some conservatives reconsider their beliefs. But the die-hards prefer to sling muck at liberals, hoping it will stick.
Sorry, guys; I'm clean. The muck stops here.
A bizarre thing happened to me over the past week: Conservative newspapers and columnists made a concerted effort to portray me as a guilty party in the Enron scandal. Why? Because in 1999, before coming to The New York Times, I was briefly paid to serve on an Enron advisory board.
Never mind that, scrupulously following the Times conflict of interest rules, I resigned from that board as soon as I agreed to write for this newspaper -- making me much more fastidious than, say, William Kristol, who served on that same board while editing The Weekly Standard. Never mind that I disclosed that past connection a year ago, the first time I wrote about Enron in this column -- and also disclosed it the one time I mentioned Enron before, in a Fortune column. Never mind that the compensation I received per day was actually somewhat less than other companies were paying me at the time for speeches on world economic issues.
And never mind that when I started writing in this column about issues of concern to Enron -- in particular, criticizing the role that market manipulation by energy companies played in the California power crisis -- my position was not at all what the company wanted to hear. (Compare this with the board member Lawrence Kudlow, a commentator for National Review and CNBC. He wrote vehemently in favor of the Cheney energy plan -- and has called this the ''Clinton-Levitt recession,'' blaming Arthur Levitt, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, who tried to fight the accounting laxity that made Enron possible.)
Yet reading those attacks, you would think that I was a major-league white-collar criminal.
It's tempting to take this vendetta as a personal compliment: Some people are so worried about the effect of my writing that they will try anything to get me off this page. But actually it was part of a broader effort by conservatives to sling Enron muck toward their left, hoping that some of it would stick.
A few days ago Tim Noah published a very funny piece in Slate about this effort, titled ''Blaming liberalism for Enron.'' (Full disclosure: I used to write a column for Slate -- and Slate is owned by Microsoft. So I guess that makes me a Bill Gates crony. I even shook his hand once.) It describes the strategies conservative pundits have used to shift the blame for the Enron scandal onto the other side of the political spectrum.
Among the ploys: Enron was in favor of the Kyoto treaty, because it thought it could make money trading emission permits; see, environmentalism is the villain. Or how about this: Enron made money by exploiting the quirks of electricity markets that had been only partly deregulated; see, regulation is the villain.
And, of course -- you knew this was coming -- it's all a reflection of Clinton-era moral decline. Traditionally, as we all know, Texas businessmen and politicians were models of probity; they never cooked their books or engaged in mutual back-scratching.
One doubts that the people putting out this stuff really expect to convince anyone. But they do hope to muddy the waters. If they can get a little bit of Enron dirt on everyone -- the Clinton administration, environmentalists, liberal columnists -- the stain on people and ideas they support will be less noticeable.
Why is Enron a problem for conservatives? Even if the Bush administration turns out to be squeaky clean, which we'll never know unless it starts to be more forthcoming, the scandal threatens perceptions that the right has spent decades creating. After all that effort to discredit concerns about the gap between haves and have-nots as obsolete ''class warfare,'' along comes a real-life story that reads like a leftist morality play: wealthy executives make off with millions while ordinary workers lose their jobs and their life savings. After all that effort to convince people that the private sector can police itself, the most admired company in America turns out to have been a giant Ponzi scheme -- and the most respected accounting firm turns out to have been an accomplice.
You might think that the shock of the Enron scandal -- and it is shocking, even to us hardened cynics -- would make some conservatives reconsider their beliefs. But the die-hards prefer to sling muck at liberals, hoping it will stick.
Sorry, guys; I'm clean. The muck stops here.
Here's a piece by James Taranto, commenting on some of these questionable statements by Krugman --
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204573704577187081831886976
Here's Robert Higgs pointing out the insult of the Nobel Prize in economics being given to someone as undeserving as Krugman --
http://blog.independent.org/2008/10/13/krugmans-bizarre-comparison/
Here's an interview with Donald Luskin, where he compares Krugman to one of Ayn Rand's fictional characters from 'The Fountainhead', Ellsworth Toohey. The similarities are striking --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcuGBdY998E
When will Krugman exhibit the character he claims to be lacking in others, and concede how often that he has been wrong?
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