This Guy Could Do Standup!
By Robert Higgs on Jan 5, 2009 in Budget and Tax Policy, Economics, Natural Law, Property Rights, Taxation, The State
I rarely read Paul Krugman’s column, but today I did, because an old friend sent the latest one to me. I gotta tell ya, Krugman could do standup! Really, he’s a riot. Most economists can pass for undertakers, but not this fellow. He’s truly funny.
I know I should be kind to him, on grounds of collegiality toward a fellow economist, so I’m not going to go on and on about his stunningly sophomoric ideas on economics, income distribution, the Great Depression, how best to deal with business recessions, and so forth. Besides, I’d never earn a marksman’s medal for shooting a fish in a barrel.
But good golly, Miss Molly, here’s what he says in the column, in discussing the proposed “stimulus” plan the next administration hopes to get enacted into law soon after it takes office. “The biggest problem facing the Obama plan . . . is likely to be the demand of many politicians for proof that the benefits of the proposed public spending justify its costs—a burden of proof never imposed on proposals for tax cuts.”
Think about that statement; roll it around in your mind. Krugman worries that certain politicians may obstruct enactment of the stimulus plan by insisting on a demonstration that its benefits exceed its costs. Could anything be more unreasonable than such hidebound insistence that the government’s expenditures be shown to be worthwhile? That’s not the funny part, though.
The hilarious part is the appended phrase “a burden of proof never imposed on proposals for tax cuts.” Think about that one, if you can stop yourself from rolling around on the floor in laughter. Look, here’s the deal, Krugman is saying: these conservative fuddy-duddies insist that the government not spend the taxpayers’ money unless the spending passes a benefit/cost test. Pretty dumb, huh? But even dumber is that these hypocritical prigs never insist on such a test when they decide to suck a little less than they’ve been sucking out of the taxpayers’ bank accounts. Damned cheeky of these old fossils, eh?
Krugman obviously subscribes to the belief, immensely popular inside the beltway, that all the money rightfully belongs to the government, whether it is being considered for involuntary transfer from its private holders to the government or being considered for retention by the people who earned it in the first place. He wants anyone who proposes to allow such retention to bear a burden of benefit/cost proof. What a guy. I tell ya he slays me!
If only to regain my composure, I will mention a somewhat related idea I take seriously about who should bear the burden of proof. Consider the following proposition: a gang of armed people calling itself a government has a right to take money from and impose rules on people who are innocent of violating anyone’s just rights, employing violence and threats of violence against these unoffending people to get its way. My idea is that anyone who supports this proposition bears a heavy burden of proof—so heavy, indeed, that no one can bear it on the basis of logic, evidence, and a moral standard higher than a wolf’s.
I don’t expect Krugman, a plumed knight of the economics profession and a designated hatchet man for the goofy left, to bother trying to meet this challenge. Yet I wish he would do so. Watching his antics would be a barrel of laughs.
Krugman was the final straw for me on respecting the Nobel Prize for Economics. I can’t believe this blowhard has taken the mantle of economics guru for the New York Times that was once held by Hazlitt. My how the world has changed.
Craigr | Jan 5, 2009 | Reply
Hilarious indeed, but not unprecedented.
This is what Hugh Dalton, M.A., D.Sc.(Econ.), M.P., had to say in his widely used textbook Public Finance (George Routlegde & Sons, 1922, 15th edition 1946, 13-14):
“Amid the grave financial difficulties of the period through which we are passing we need to scrutinise more closely than usual the expenditures of private individuals, no less than of public authorities. … It is not wisdom to cut down public expenditures simply in order that private individuals may have more to spend as they please.”
Those among you who think all that scrutinizing is a bit much, “should console themselves with the saying of the ancient Greeks that ‘it is not the easy things, but the difficult things, that are beautiful.’” (ibid., p.16)
Frank V | Jan 5, 2009 | Reply
Sometimes it seems like Krugman is trying to channel Ellesworth Toohey.
Is there even a small chance that Krugman is pulling an extremely detailed and well thought out hoax just to prove you can get a Nobel Prize for doing nothing more than spouting tired leftist bromides day after day?
Harry Rose | Jan 5, 2009 | Reply
I’ve seen a lot of Austrian economists (e.g. on mises.org) regularly writing articles shooting down his newspaper columns. But surely there is some academic work of Krugman’s that can be shot down too? He must have repeated his bad economics in published journals? Maybe someone should get busy on digging up old Krugman journal articles; it could be a profitable research project.
Sukrit | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
Here’s a quote of Krugman—his own words from the WSJ
aul Krugman, as reported in the WSJ:
“It was in a way, strange for me to be a part of the Reagan Adm., Mr. Krugman later wrote. “I WAS THEN AND STILL AM AN UNABASHED DEFENDER OF THE WELFARE STATE, WHICH I REGARD AS THE MOST DECENT SOCIAL ARRANGEMENT YET DEVISED.” About November 15th or so, 2008.
His award of a Nobel Prize in Economics tells more about the Nobel Prize Committee than it does about Krugman. Look at the clown who got the Nobel Peace Prize! Is there anything Left of Nobel?? (That’s a joke, son.)
Richard Timberlake | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
Nobel, and Nobel. Do you know Ivar Gaiver? No? Look him up on the web, if you can. Yes he is Swedish and also got a Nobel
richard smith | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
That’s the thing about Krugman (and about many nobel laureates): he did win a Nobel, but that has nothing to do with his supposed expertise everyone thinks he possess. He won a Nobel for for works on «geographical economy/trade whatever», which has nothing to do with the New Deal nor with fiscal policy. And, as is sadly too common in the economics profession, he won this Nobel because he was able to build up a cute mathematical model of a theory of his own. Nobody cares if this theory has any meaningful insights to offer about the real world. As long as it’s the most complicated mathematical model around, you win the prize.
Don | Jan 6, 2009 | Reply
It is indeed an interesting observation for the story goes that mathematicians aren’t considered by Nobel Prize committee (so they have their own prize, called Fields medal). It’s being said that Nobel’s wife was cheating on him with a mathematician and that’s the reason to exclude mathematicians from the “competition”
Konstantin | Jan 8, 2009 | Reply
You hit the nail on the head. I have often thought of the Toohey-Krugman connection.
I love this guy. A Nobel prize winner.
In this paragraph, he criticizes Arnold for spending too much, then 2 paragraphs later, praises Strickland for doing the same thing.
I guess if you can do that and get away with it for years, you either get elected to office or win the Nobel prize.
Here it is-
“Are governors responsible for their own predicament? To some extent. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in particular, deserves some jeers. He became governor in the first place because voters were outraged over his predecessor’s budget problems, but he did nothing to secure the state’s fiscal future — and he now faces a projected budget deficit bigger than the one that did in Gray Davis.
But even the best-run states are in deep trouble. Anyway, we shouldn’t punish our fellow citizens and our economy to spite a few local politicians.
What can be done? Ted Strickland, the governor of Ohio, is pushing for federal aid to the states on three fronts: help for the neediest, in the form of funding for food stamps and Medicaid; federal funding of state- and local-level infrastructure projects; and federal aid to education. That sounds right — and if the numbers Strickland proposes are huge, so is the crisis.
Bob | Jan 9, 2009 | Reply