Yanking the Chains of People who Wag the Dog

More of the latest headlines from Red State and the National Review

The Right Wing blogosphere and propaganda media are all in a tizzy about about something Paul Krugman didn’t say. You expect this kind of behavior from the likes of Hot Air or Red State. Now that Bill Buckley’s dead, the National Review appears to have gone the way of Fox News.  Just check out this search on Fact Check.  They’ve gotten it wrong so many times recently it’s not even funny. No wonder right wing Republicans can’t even get their American History straight. So, this is the crux of the story.   Yesterday, a Google+ account from “Paul Krugman” posted this about the earthquake.

People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.

Problem is, the account didn’t belong to Dr. Paul Krugman.  It belongs to some right winger who was trying to make a point. No one in the right wing village actually checked to see if the real Paul Krugman even had a Google+account.  Why would he?  He gets a lot of mileage from his blog at the NYT and other places.

Approximately a month ago, having been laid off and having too much time on my hands, I finally decided to create my own personal account on Google+. I found it to be extremely boring, mostly because no one I knew had an account and my needs for instant news had long been satisfied by twitter. To kill some time and fully delve into what Google+ had to offer, I decided to create a gimmick account of Paul Krugman and see what happened.

Last night, I made this post which caused quite a stir on twitter and blogosphere.

People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.

I do not regret writing it and I hope it will enlighten many on the perverse economic views held by a Nobel winning economist writing for the New York Times who also lectures at Princeton University. While Paul Krugman did not write the above statement, he has made similar statements within the year and I would not be surprised if Paul Krugman did not in fact hold this view.

On March 15, 2011 Paul Krugman wrote this on his blog.

And yes, this does mean that the nuclear catastrophe could end up being expansionary, if not for Japan then at least for the world as a whole. If this sounds crazy, well, liquidity-trap economics is like that — remember, World War II ended the Great Depression.

Three days after the 9/11 tragedy Paul Krugman had this to say.

Nonetheless, we must ask about the economic aftershocks from Tuesday’s horror.These aftershocks need not be major. Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack — like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression — could even do some economic good.

If you showed any disgust at my fake comment written on Google+, I expect you would show equal antipathy for the two quotes above. For too long now, Krugman along with other Keynesian economists such as Nouriel Roubini have supported Keynesian policies which advocate for more taxation of the job creating private sector to contribute to the job destroying public sector. While he public sector has “created” jobs, one must remember and take into account the opportunity cost of taxing the private sector.

Beyond identity theft, this guy has made the cardinal mistake you’re warned against in your first class on your first day in economics 101.  That is assuming a positive statement has any moral judgement or advocacy attached to it.  As an example, I could say legalizing marijuana and taxing it would provide enough revenues to pay off a substantial part of the public debt and still be against legalizing marijuana.  The first statement is a positive statement and could be proved with data and analysis rather easily.   Normative statements are based on personal norms. There is nothing in that first statement that actually advocates for doing that policy like adding, well, that’s the best policy at this point to pay off the debt.  That’s a normative statement and it advocates the policy.  When you’re trained as an economist, you’re taught to separate the two types of thinking because as a number cruncher and researcher, you are supposed to dispassionately crunch through possibilities and come out with results based on logic and data not wishful thinking.  That is something right wingers never seem capable of doing.  They always go with wishful thinking despite facts.

The perfect example of that was making the rounds last week.  That example would be Rick Perry and his continual insistence that “abstinence works” despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. His mind simply won’t wrap itself around something he doesn’t want to see. He just insists he’s right despite the evidence.  Other examples include people that literally believe the world is less than 8000 years old, there’s a god that exactly looks like the god in the Sistine chapel ceiling, and the Garden of Eden was a literal place on earth about 8000 years ago in time.  It’s how these same people claim–despite it not being true now–that there are ‘holes’ in the theory of evolution and that climate change is some kind of numbers hoax.  Their lives are ruled by off the wall moral judgements rather than dispassionate assessment of data and facts via the scientific method where conclusions come from careful, rational thought instead of myth and moral judgement.  It doesn’t occur to them that thought exercises are part of getting out of the box because they want to stay in the box.

Here’s what the real Paul Krugman had to say in a blog post called “Identity Theft” on the NYT.

So here’s two off the wall idiot winger sources that perpetually refuse to fact check, because facts are so damned inconvenient: The American Thinker and  The National Review. I put the link up top to Hot Air that at least updated and corrected the story.   Of course, the right wing story is some take on what I printed from the person committing the identity theft is, well,  it sounded like something he’d say!

It’s one thing to spoof the Bronx Zoo Python or the Satan Shit Sandwich. It’s completely another to steal a real person’s identity.  I frankly hope the police go after him.  The lesson it teaches me is that you can never trust true believers.  They fall for anything.  Villagers, take note!  Yes, any natural disaster or man made disaster will create a situation where you have to rebuild or build-up which creates jobs and customers. Saying that it will happen is not the same as saying you’re all for creating disasters.  Idiots!