Free Republic

This winter has brought a useful tutorial on capitalism courtesy of the media, the Democratic party and President Obama. They have illustrated for us how the depredations of profit-seekers crush American aspirations. We will be hearing much more about how Mitt Romney and his private-equity buddies at Bain Capital bought up companies and began searching for ways to return them to profitability. This might mean laying off unneeded workers, outsourcing or automating jobs. As the cliche has it, these smarty-pants consultants in their pinstripe suits are given to “ruthlessly wringing out inefficiencies,” workers be damned. Jobs — entire industries! —...

Paul Krugman had an interesting blog in his New York Times “Conscience of a Liberal” column entitled “A Tale of Two Bubbles.” In the blog, Krugman points out that there was a Clinton bubble and a Bush bubble – Clinton’s was an equity (dotcom) bubble that burst and Bush’s was a debt (housing/credit) bubble that burst. Krugman’s point is that Clinton’s bubble only harmed equity investors while Bush’s bubble harmed virtually everyone. But if we look more closely at the data, Krugman’s criticism of the Bush Administration (as if Congress had nothing to do with it!), a different Tale can...

A pair of articles by Austrian economist professor Antal E. Fekete just might have one wondering who is more in the loony bin, mainstream economists like Krugman or those consistently chanting about the death of the dollar coupled with hyperinflation. Premature Obituaries Please consider Premature Obituaries It is open season for wild monetary prognostications. More premature obituaries on the dollar have been posted on the Internet. For example, see Jim Willie’s The US Dollar Paper Tiger (Gold-Eagle, January 11) with epitaphs like “the U.S. dollar rising to the cemetery”, or “dollar death dance”. Or see another article, Jeff Nielsen’s entitled...

As we watch the Eurozone struggle with its financial challenges Keynesians keep telling us the solution to our economic problems is to spend more money, to pile up bigger debts. A week and a half ago, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the debt of more than half of the Eurozone's countries, and the failure of those policies should be very obvious by now. Solving the Greek debt crisis hit yet another snag on Sunday afternoon. New aid for Greece from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank would have relied on private bondholders “voluntarily” agreeing to a 50...

When Nobel laureate Paul Krugman began a recent New York Times column by showing concern about “disastrously high unemployment,” we could sympathize with his assertion that too much attention is focused on “the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.” After all, there are many other factors that prevent us from employing our resources in the most productive uses. We are overregulated, overtaxed, overinflated, and the government spends wastefully and too much. If we were to prioritize any of those policies, such as cutting tax rates, then we could justify tolerating high deficits a little longer. The brighter prospects...

Accumulated budget deficits of $15.2 trillion and unfunded entitlement liabilities of $117 trillion cannot dissuade Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist and Princeton University professor, from his belief that government must go many trillions more into debt immediately to rescue Barack Obama's presidency. In his latest column extolling the virtues of the late British economist John Maynard Keynes, Mr. Krugman asserts anew that the nearly $800 billion Obama stimulus of 2009 failed to produce 4 million new jobs and keep unemployment under 8 percent simply because it was too small. (He has argued $2.9 trillion of government pump-priming was the...

At Power Line, Steve Hayward spots Paul Krugman phoning in his periodic “Keynes Was Right” column, and asks: I wonder if Krugman also credits Keynes’s views on Jews, which British blogger Damian Thompson of The Telegraph brings to our attention. From Keynes’s diary: [Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs … It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who...

“The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” So declared John Maynard Keynes in 1937, even as F.D.R. was about to prove him right by trying to balance the budget too soon, sending the United States economy — which had been steadily recovering up to that point — into a severe recession. Slashing government spending in a depressed economy depresses the economy further; austerity should wait until a strong recovery is well under way. Unfortunately, in late 2010 and early 2011, politicians and policy makers in much of the Western world believed that they...

In 2008, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. At that time, it wasn't hard to imagine the Swedes were rewarding Krugman for eight years of blasting George W. Bush. In other words, the Nobel Prize truly matched its namesake: Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. Krugman regularly throws rhetorical dynamite at anything that stands in the way of his radical worldview. Krugman outdid himself for outrage in 2011. Every year, the Media Research Center collects a panel of willing conservative journalists and talk show hosts and puts them on a sickening roller coaster ride through...

Robert Reich and Paul Krugman are preeminent mainstream-media mouthpieces of the redistributionist welfare state. They constantly disseminate the myths that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes, and Congress is about to “slash taxes on the very rich”. Yet they never attack the real source of America’s problems, crony capitalism, the economic foundation of the welfare state in which rich and poor alike are partners in crime with the government to rip off their fellow Americans. Reich and Krugman also propagate the myth that America’s deficit and economic problems could be eliminated simply by raising taxes on “the...

The super committee is dead. Long live the substandard committees.Just because the “big deal� didn’t happen as a result of the recent, marginally extra-constitutional shenanigans, that doesn’t mean that Congress doesn’t still have to come up with a plan. And the “go big� theme is far from dead among the chattering class. In fact, New York Times economist Paul Krugman has once again demonstrated the benefits of a classical education and come up with yet another path to prosperity. In this version, he seems to have abandoned the idea of going back to Clinton era tax rates for the wealthy....

DELONG: It Is 1931. We Are Austria. If The Fed Doesn't Save Us Here Comes Another Great Depression... Henry Blodget Nov. 9, 2011, 5:21 PM How does Berkeley professor Brad Delong feel about what's going on in Europe? He's freaking out: Time to Spread Foam on the Runway: The Federal Reserve Needs to Act Now to Firewall Off the Eurocrisis I have been complaining for some time now that Reinhart and Rogoff think that the time is always 1931 and that we are always Austria--that the great fiscal crisis is about to erupt and send us lurching down toward Great...

Late last month, as America was ignoring the 24th anniversary of the Senate's rejection of conservative jurist Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, something extraordinary happened: New York Times columnist Joe Nocera admitted the borking of Judge Bork spawned today's toxic political culture. "(R)arely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork," Mr. Nocera wrote. Judge Bork held conservative opinions, but none could be "fairly characterized as extreme." That didn't deter then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who denounced "'Robert Bork's America' as a place 'in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks...

True to form, Paul Krugman does not understand the difference between problems and solutions in Europe any more than he does in the US. In Deck Chairs, Titanic Krugman states ... OK, yes, European banks do need more capital. But their problems are a symptom of the underlying sovereign debt problem, which can only be resolved, if at all, with ECB lending AND a commitment to reflate. Without that, the losses on sovereign debt will blow right through any amount of newly raised bank capital. The housing bubble came from the Fed's unwillingness to let the recession of 2001 play out...

The OWS Is A Celebration Of The Ongoing Train Wreck Of The Obama Presidency In a cartoonish caricature of himself, columnist Paul Krugman, of the NYT, has written a rambling and unfocused apology for the incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street comedy, in a lame attempt to steal the energy of the mindless mob. Borrowing the first two lines from a popular 1967 song, by Stills of Buffalo Springfield, Krugman begins his clownish attempt of a unifying message for the mob by clumsily injecting his personal prejudices in a vague but obvious method, thereby parroting a nonexistent voice of leadership...

There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people. When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever. It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With...

Doctors used to believe that by draining a patient’s blood they could purge the evil “humors” that were thought to cause disease. In reality, of course, all their bloodletting did was make the patient weaker, and more likely to succumb. Fortunately, physicians no longer believe that bleeding the sick will make them healthy. Unfortunately, many of the makers of economic policy still do. And economic bloodletting isn’t just inflicting vast pain; it’s starting to undermine our long-run growth prospects. Some background: For the past year and a half, policy discourse in both Europe and the United States has been dominated...

I don't want to seem to quibble with Richard Freeman's essay, since I am overwhelmingly in agreement with it. Let me just make a few points. I like Freeman's idea of providing each individual with a trust fund when young rather than retirement benefits when old, but we had better realize that this is a significant change in the character of the social insurance system. Social Security is structured from the point of view of the recipients as if it were an ordinary retirement plan: what you get out depends on what you put in. So it does not look...

I like Freeman's idea of providing each individual with a trust fund when young rather than retirement benefits when old, but we had better realize that this is a significant change in the character of the social insurance system. Social Security is structured from the point of view of the recipients as if it were an ordinary retirement plan: what you get out depends on what you put in. So it does not look like a redistributionist scheme. In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation...

It is one thing (what thing that is we are not sure, but we have heard others say it, so like all good lemmings we will say it too) for Rick Perry to call Social Security a ponzi scheme. After all he is some crazy, foaming in the mouth conservative, as uber-Keynesian liberal Paul Krugman may call him. And that's fine. What confuses us, however, is why Social Security would be called a ponzi by the same liberal noted previously: none other than Paul Krugman himself. Exhibit A, from a distant 1997, which perhaps one would have expected to remain...

At 8:41 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2011, former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, star columnist of the New York Times, had something he wanted to say: "Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?" Krugman began his post on the Times website yesterday morning. "Actually, I don't think it's me, and it's not really that odd." So far, so obvious. Of course the commemorations are subdued. Altogether, just under 3,000 people died in the coordinated attacks of 9/11: at the trade center, whose south tower was hit 17 minutes later; at the Pentagon, and in a field in...

Princeton Professor Paul Krugman's ugly New York Times blog on the post 9/11 environment stopped short of accusing Pres. Bush of masterminding the attacks, but it did accuse Bush and his associates of cashing in on the tragedy, of being "fake heroes." If nothing else, the timing was hateful – the very week when the former President was called on to emerge from relative obscurity to lend gravity to the memorial ceremonies. Krugman's hate cannot hold a candle to retired MIT professor, and radical anti-American, Noam Chomsky's article in Al Jazeera. Chomsky goes a step further to condemn the US...

September 11, 2011, 8:41 am The Years of Shame ... The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it. I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

After reading Krugman’s repugnant piece on 9/11, I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times this AM. Twitter via Drudge

After reading Krugman’s repugnant piece on 9/11, I cancelled my subscription to the New York Times this AM.--Donald Rumsfeld 52 minutes ago

We always knew that Krugman couldn’t add or subtract. As an economist, the guy is a terrific writer. And fantasy is his genre. But the fact that he thinks that we’ve all been secretly ashamed of our reactions to 9/11 for the last ten years should be enough to place him in observation for indulging in too much fantasy. “What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not,” writes Krugman as his sick 9/11 tribute, “was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead...

FR has helped me learn some important stuff.

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued? Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd. What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all...

Friday brought two numbers that should have everyone in Washington saying, “My God, what have we done?” One of these numbers was zero — the number of jobs created in August. The other was two — the interest rate on 10-year U.S. bonds, almost as low as this rate has ever gone. Taken together, these numbers almost scream that the inside-the-Beltway crowd has been worrying about the wrong things, and inflicting grievous harm as a result. Ever since the acute phase of the financial crisis ended, policy discussion in Washington has been dominated not by unemployment, but by the alleged...

The commenter in question, mivogo, seems to think if only people would allow vandals to break all of their windows and they are forced to spend money to fix them, it's a stimulus to the economy. And anybody that's against that wants to destroy you: When someone vandalizes your home you must spend money to restore its value, and anyone who admonishes "You're going to waste MORE money? Shame on you!" is either stupid or wants to destroy you. The Republicans aren't stupid. These are the people who agree that Krugman, former Enron consultant, is an economic genius. Liberalism is...

Late this week, President Obama stunned the EPA and environmentalists by dropping plans to tighten Bush-era ozone standards. His logic? Tighter rules would increase the "regulatory burden" that Republicans blame for the crappy economy. Paul Krugman says this is yet another example of Obama wimping out in the hopes that Republicans will stop attacking him. He also argues that the move will actually hurt the economy. Why will not tightening ozone rules hurt the economy? Because tighter rules, Krugman argues, would have forced companies to spend money to improve their pollution control equipment. This spending would have boosted the revenue...

I’ve actually been avoiding thinking about the latest Obama cave-in, on ozone regulation; these repeated retreats are getting painful to watch. For what it’s worth, I think it’s bad politics. The Obama political people seem to think that their route to victory is to avoid doing anything that the GOP might attack — but the GOP will call Obama a socialist job-killer no matter what they do. Meanwhile, they just keep reinforcing the perception of mush from the wimp, of a president who doesn’t stand for anything. Whatever. Let’s talk about the economics. Because the ozone decision is definitely a...

Yes, you. You know who you are. You’re liberal; an academic, perhaps, or a writer/journalist/opinion-shaper of some sort. You spout the liberal line (I’m not really sure whether you really believe it, or just realize that it’s a good gig that pays well) to your adoring audience, who gobble it up and regurgitate it to others ad nauseum. This I can deal with. What I cannot deal with, what I cannot comprehend, is the dangerous mentality that sometimes accompanies basic liberal elite thinking. The mentality that actively wishes harm on our country and its citizens–all in the name of progress,...

I do not know if I have ever read anything so stupid, but what would you expect from Paul Krugman? From Google+: If you aren't an idiot, this is a very clear case of the "Parable of the broken window." Here is the original text outlining the idea. Unfortunately, Mr. Krugman is apparently illiterate or simply a moron: Suppose it cost six francs to repair the damage, and you say that the accident brings six francs to the glazier's trade—that it encourages that trade to the amount of six francs—I grant it; I have not a word to say against...

Via Timothy Carney, this appears to be real. Is it real or just a goof? Kevin Williamson isn’t sure and neither am I, but given that this is the same guy who fantasized recently about the Keynesian awesomeness of an alien invasion, it’s at least a toss-up. All day long I’ve felt relieved that the quake caused only very minor damage, but now suddenly I’m bummed that the Brooklyn Bridge didn’t fall into the river. Maybe we can get DHS or the NYPD to blow it up? That’s a few thousand jobs right there.

Oh those whacky liberals. On Sunday's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," New York Times columnist - and, ahem, Nobel laureate - Paul Krugman actually advocated space aliens attack earth thereby requiring a massive defense buildup by the United States that would stimulate the economy (video follows with transcript and commentary): KENNETH ROGOFF, PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Infrastructure spending, if it were well-spent, that's great. I'm all for that. I'd borrow for that, assuming we're not paying Boston Big Dig kind of prices for the infrastructure. FAREED ZAKARIA, HOST: But even if you were, wouldn't John Maynard Keynes say that if you...

Paul Krugman's latest NYT column, "The President Surrenders", already has an FR thread, but I want to call attention to the last paragraph: "What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t." Paul Krugman and the NYT believe our political system, with its checks and balances, should be gutted when it produces results they disfavor. Who are the "extremists"?

A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong. For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status. Start with the economics. We currently...

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system. And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are. No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Tuesday said it was a "moral issue" for the press to censor conservative views about the debt ceiling.

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system. And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are. No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure...

July 24, 2011, 10:11 AM President Pushover Updated: Drew article now available. The redoubtable Elizabeth Drew has a forthcoming article in the New York Review of Books — not yet online — that confirms all our worst fears. She tells us that past concessions have established in both Democrats’ and Republicans’ minds the thought that Obama was a weak negotiator—a “pushover.” He was more widely seen among Democrats and other close observers as having a strategy of starting near where he thinks the Republicans are—at the fifty-yard line—and then moving closer to their position. Even more alarming, however, is her...

Conceder In ChiefPaul Krugman July 22, 2011, 9:01 am Amanda Marcotte is right: of course the big problem is the craziness of the GOP. That said, I am among those in a state of suppressed rage and panic over the president’s negotiating strategy. I’d like to believe that it’s all 11-dimensional political chess; but at this point — after the midterm debacle, after the big concession on taxes without even getting a raise in the debt limit — what evidence do we have that Obama knows what he’s doing? It’s very hard to avoid the impression that three things are...

Getting to CrazyBy PAUL KRUGMAN Published: July 14, 2011 There aren’t many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy. A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask. Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been...

It’s quite the spectacle watching a pundit who is so often wrong regularly accuse his political opponents of insanity and extremism. But Paul Krugman is the man for the job — economist, bon vivant and amateur psychiatrist. And this debt ceiling situation is so insane that he’s now brought the exclamation point to the pages of the august New York Times. President Obama has made it clear that he’s willing to sign on to a deficit-reduction deal that consists overwhelmingly of spending cuts, and includes draconian cuts in key social programs, up to and including a rise in the age...

Of all the misfits and demented rejects that have the temerity to call themselves columnists at the New York Slimes , the most detestable of them all is Paul Krugman. Sure, there is Maureen the Moron and Comrade Friedman, but there's a special place in hell for the fraud known as Paul Krugman. Remember this from 1999 ? (Hat tip: Ann Coulter and her fabulous tome, Demonic .) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "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 [Yes, that Enron. The same Enron...

The demagoguery of Paul Ryan by the media continues. On Friday, the New York Times' resident Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called the Wisconsin Congressman a liar and a sore loser: ~snip~ If anyone is lying here, it’s Mr. Ryan himself, who has claimed that his plan would give seniors the same kind of coverage that members of Congress receive — an assertion that is completely false. And, by the way, the claim that the plan would keep Medicare as we know it intact for Americans currently 55 or older is highly dubious. True, that’s what the plan promises, but if...

Origins of the Crisis, Fake and Real I don’t spend too much time these days talking about the origins of the financial crisis — right now the burning question is what comes next. Still, history is a battlefield, and the usual suspects are trying hard to rewrite that history in their interests.

In a recent screed masquerading as the thoughts of a Nobel prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman excoriates those who speak of fear: fear of a debt crisis, of runaway inflation, of a disastrous plunge in the dollar. Scare stories are very much on politicians' minds. As Krugman explains, such worries are irrational and certainly untrue: None of these scare stories reflect anything that is actually happening, or is likely to happen. And while the threats are imaginary, fear of these imaginary threats has real consequences: an absence of any action to deal with the real crisis, the suffering now...

Liberal columnist for The New York Times and persistent critic of President Obama, Paul Krugman, liked the passion he saw in Obama last week on the deficit battle and wants the rhetoric flame turned up even higher. In a column titled “Let’s Not Be Civil,” Krugman unapologetically lays out the case why Obama should not seek consensus with Republicans and should instead vigorously defend his vision for America while attacking the Republican proposal without restraint. Krugman argues: The point is that the two parties don’t just live in different moral universes, they also live in different intellectual universes, with Republicans...