Forbes: Paul Krugman let out to pee on NY Times

Help! The crazy economist is after me! OK, Krugman takes a wild pitch at supply-siders, that's all. But it is a wild throw! Read the piece in the NY Times, you'll notice the rest of it is not even cohesive with the first paragraph. I assume this means he is now forging ahead full steam with a "hate Republicans" career (even though he was an economist affiliated with a pretty big one, once). I guess the getting's easy now, huh?

Forbes' writer Karlgaard blogs his defense of supply-siders and business, and damns -- rightfully, I say -- the immoral capitalists. We could use more of that!

Failure Of Morality, Not Of Capitalism - Forbes.com: Digital Rules By Rich Karlgaard

“Old-fashioned voodoo economics--the belief in tax-cut magic--has been banished from civilized discourse. The supply-side cult has shrunk to the point that it contains only cranks, charlatans, and Republicans.”

Take a guess. Who wrote this?

If you said "one of those anonymous twerps posting on Daily Kos," you are forgiven. Had I not cut and pasted this crazed quote myself, I might have guessed it came from a reedy tenor in the Huffington Greek Chorus.

It was actually Paul Krugman, writing in today’s New York Times.

...supply-side capitalism is just a simple and benign idea. It posits: Only suppliers can supply us with goods and services. The demand side can’t will a product or service
into existence. Society therefore advances economically when it reduces tax and regulatory barriers to the creation of goods and services.

Hardly a cultish idea. One can unpack this simple idea into entire books, and many of Krugman’s betters have. The reputations of Smith, Say, Schumpeter and Hayek surpass that of the dyspeptic economist writing for The New York Times.

In fairness, Krugman is not alone. Many people do blame capitalism for bringing us to this low moment in the economy. Do they have a point?

They do if capitalism, as they define it, is devoid of any underlying morality. True enough, it is hard to see any underlying morality when one surveys the present carnage caused by liar loans, shady banks, duplicitous politicians, Ponzi schemers and regulators angling for Wall Street jobs.

The author continues by reflecting on the title of his piece, and I think perfectly, rightly, so in his suggestions on how to get back on track. Lest we ultimately FAIL (!!!), I should note.

This weekend, I caught a BBC radio program on the meltdown in “The City”--London’s financial district. The program quoted many young Brit bankers who said morality was a barrier to personal success in The City. Better to have the sociopath gene if one wants to become a billionaire.

What we are hearing and seeing, in other words, is a failure of morality, not of capitalism.

How do we get back to the old Adam Smith/Benjamin Franklin idea of free enterprise based on a moral foundation? It won’t be easy, but I think we need to start with these:

Please read the piece to review his kernels of good old American business... goodness, and keep going.

Krugman, a Nobel-winning economist (that was the old days, while today some suggest he's merely a political pundit who hates the GOP and favors state-heavy economics) will have NOTHING to do with that remotely unpartisan, working together thing. He wants to blame it all on the same people that 18-year-old video game addicts who don't read want to blame it on: the bloody Republicans.

Oh, please, will someone please out him as a slimy little socialist -- and uncover some sickly thing he likes doing in his free time or something -- so we can move past this kook?!! Geez -- where's Noam Chomsky when you need him!!! (Gaaag!)


- jR

Powered by ScribeFire.