A former student sends me this short piece from the great Krugman:
I realize how lucky I am to have reached a place where I’m no longer in the rat race
…
But there are no promotions I’m seeking, no honors I desperately desire that I don’t already have
…
no more steps to climb, no more boxes to check
This was included in his short reaction to Larry Summers withdrawing his name from contention for Fed Chair. Well, if this isn’t pretty clear admission that the push for behavior modification by the nanny-state leftists is because they are projecting themselves onto others, then I don’t know what is. The first time I ever heard of the “hedonic treadmill” or “tournament pay models” was from this crowd, not the crowd it was being pointed at. That was in my time at Cornell. Fortunately for me, even if I desire some award or honor, I’ve decided to stop trying. Not hard. And all without a gun forcing me to do so. By the way, go read the first paragraph of that piece – pretty scientific statement there.
I am sickened. How can a man write this and expect the respect of anyone? This is the Conscience of a Liberal?
In all fairness, profligate government spending forces the Federal Reserve into the dilemma of making prices stable, or putting off the problem to tomorrow. The latest statement by Chairman Ben is that tomorrow we will rob savers in the interest of borrowers, by artificially supporting the price of ten-year Treasurys and troubled mortgages to the tune of over (let me make sure I get the zeroes right) 1,000,000,000,000,000 per year.
Before anybody gets sore and accuses me of adding a few zeroes, let us stipulate that in the thinking of macroeconomist Keynesans, extra zeroes do not matter because we owe it to ourselves, a tautological statement by a bank that prints the money in which the country’s debt is denominated. Electronic money, created with a wave of the hand and the stroke of the beard at a press conference.
This is not the same as taking a few loaves and a few fishes and feeding the multitudes.
So what is Krugman’s legacy? Has he on his day of rest been happy with persistent low growth, high unemployment, and bleak prospects for tens of millions of young Americans? For our country to become impoverished? For the Land of Opportunity to vanish?
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