Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Krugman Criticizes Ron Paul

Economist Paul Krugman, no lightweight when it comes to fiscal knowledge, recently debated sometime Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul on the issue of his Paul’s prediction of runaway inflation, and criticized the politician’s vague references to ancient history by way of response. Krugman contends that it is no accident that politician’s cite murky historical anecdotes as a way to establish credibility for positions on current affairs, despite having a century’s worth of well-documented knowledge from which to draw – if only it supported the desired conclusion. For more on this continue reading the following article from Economist’s View.



Paul Krugman comments:
Don’t Know Much About (Ancient) History: The things I do for book sales. I debated, sort of, Ron Paul on Bloomberg.Video here. I thought we might have a discussion of why the runaway inflation he and his allies keep predicting keeps not happening. But no, he insisted (if I understood him correctly) that currency debasement and price controls destroyed the Roman Empire. I responded that I am not a defender of the economic policies of the Emperor Diocletian.
Actually, though, appeals to what supposedly happened somewhere in the distant past are quite common on the goldbug side of economics. And it’s kind of telling.
I mean, history is essential to economic analysis. You really do want to know, say, about the failure of Argentina’s convertibility law, of the effects of Chancellor BrĂ¼ning’s dedication to the gold standard, and many other episodes.
Somehow, though, people like Ron Paul don’t like to talk about events of the past century, for which we have reasonably good data; they like to talk about events in the dim mists of history, where we don’t really know what happened. And I think that’s no accident. Partly it’s the attempt of the autodidact to show off his esoteric knowledge; but it’s also the fact that because we don’t really know what happened — what really did go down during the Diocletian era? — you can project what you think should have happened onto the sketchy record, then claim vindication for whatever you want to believe.
It’s funny, in a way — except that this sort of thinking dominates one of our two main political parties.
This blog post was republished with permission from Economist's View.

8 comments:

Questro said...

What a worm Krugman is. Paul took him to the woodshed in that 'debate'. It's no small wonder that Krugman has been dodging Murphy for years.

SharpndPencil said...

Paul doesn't like to talk about the past century? He talks about it all the time! The 98% erosion of our dollar's worth since 1913, the ever growing (real) unemployment numbers, the housing bubbles (and the next bubble, which is Federal Student Loans), our military expansionism, our runaway government spending... should I go on?

Krugman likes this system because he knows how to make money off of it; not because he knows it's what's best for America. Does he really believe that things are better here today than they were in the 90's, 80's, 70's??? Of course not.

Anonymous said...

Krugman is an idiot. You cannot argue for the side of evil & make jokes about missing runaway inflation. No one even knows how much money is being printed or has been printed out of thin air, because we rely on the puppet masters to tell us the "truth". The Government tells us inflation is low. We cannot trust the Government or Krugman.

Anonymous said...

So maybe you should also address Krugman's defense of the Federal Reserve not causing the Great Depression. Then reversing his stance and saying that the Federal Reserve did cause it because they did not do enough.

Paul made the point that no individual, or individual organization, should have so much influence on our economy for exactly that reason. Sometimes they do too much and sometimes they do too little. Let the larger economy truly be a free market.

The bottom line is that Krugman has a central philosophy of government knows best. Paul simply wants to adhere to the US constitution which strongly limits the scope of government.

This article is clearly one-sided. So I urge anyone reading this to actually watch the debate between Paul and Krugman which is readily available on-line and decide for yourself.

Anonymous said...

Krugman's not exactly an Economist's Economist. If he were a literary figure, he'd regularly contribute to Reader's Digest.

Anonymous said...

Krugman is not exactly an Economist's Economist.

Anonymous said...

Light weight - no; light headed - yes. To argue that we did not spend enough into the red is to say that the Titanic would have been better off if it kept sinking until it popped back up in the Indian Ocean. I think Krugman, in this regard, is buuuhlind. Ron Paul had his lunch on this one. So don't think for a minute he is correct. And Paul is correct. The Romans tried this and now look where that went!

Anonymous said...

Ron knows a lot more about everything than Krugman...and hes a politician!