Schizoid Krugman

 

In Paul Krugman’s version of corporate liberalism he stills wants there to be a modicum of deployed fiscal policy, i.e. pseudo-stimulus spending to go along with the Bailout. That’s part of the “neoclassical synthesis” beloved of such pseudo-Keynesians (“bastard Keynesians” as Joan Robinson called them). So he objects to the calls for total assault on the people via “austerity”, at least for right at this moment. So he’s been in a squabble with them. But as we’ll shortly see, it’s purely an arcane squabble among the technicians of kleptocracy over the tempo and mechanisms of destruction, not over the great crime itself.

 

In a Thursday blog post on the matter, Krugman disagrees with fellow Obama hack Brad DeLong about the motivations of austerity-mongers like the OECD, Raju Rahan, and Jeff Sachs. DeLong seeks to find a reasonable explanation for why they’re advocating something so contrary to all the “models” and all the evidence of history. (Needless to say, neither Krugman nor DeLong have any moral or political objections to austerity, just technical ones.)

 

Krugman makes an excellent point:

 

There should be a standard phrase for the construction of anti-straw-men — for attributing to your intellectual opponents sophisticated, reasonable positions they do not in fact hold, ignoring the nonsense they actually espouse.

 

I concur, we do need a handy term for the anti-straw man, as I’ve had occasion to point out several times over the last few days, for example here, here, and here. This species of Big Lie, that criminal cadres aren’t criminals but rather “misguided” in some way, that we should even have to go in for sophisticated psychoanalytical explanations, is one of the most pernicious lies going.

 

But wait a minute – what did K himself say just the day before about these same criminals?

 

What’s going on here? I don’t think you can resort to class-warfare arguments.

What I think is happening is that we’re seeing the deep seductiveness, for many economists (and others), of taking what sounds like a tough-minded position in favor of inflicting pain on the economy — and the people who make up that economy.

Keynes knew all about this. Writing about the peculiar appeal of classical economics even in a world in which it had manifestly failed, he argued

That it reached conclusions quite different from what the ordinary uninstructed person would expect, added, I suppose, to its intellectual prestige. That its teaching, translated into practice, was austere and often unpalatable, lent it virtue.

Something like that, I believe, is going on here. Calling for austerity and tight money feels courageous, tough-minded, and virtuous; it allows the economist making such calls to take the pose of a Serious Person standing firm against the easy-money guys.

 

“I don’t think you can resort to class warfare arguments”?

 

So let’s get this straight. The observed fact is that these professional political cadres are siding with the banks while calling for massive further robberies from the people. So the only reasonable conclusion from the observed fact is that they are aggressively waging class war. But Krugman a priori rules out stating the obvious, and instead confabulates a wild psychoanalytical contraption. Exactly the same thing for which he would shortly criticize DeLong. You can’t “resort” to going with the simple empirical truth, but have to go to lengths of absurdity to obfuscate it? 

 

Is he practicing to write a novel? Why is he lying and refusing to call class war criminals what they are?

 

I hope it won’t be seen as “psychoanalysis” on my part if I answer that in the technical dispute among the class warriors I described above, Krugman wants to argue without compromising the overall class war front. So while he’ll dispute the OECD and Sachs on technical grounds, and argue with DeLong about their “rational” motivations, he will not question their morality or integrity. That’s because they all share the same fundamental immorality and lack of integrity. From Thugman’s point of view, they’re all members of the same death squad. So while they may debate the tactics, they must never admit that they are a death squad at all, or accuse one another of being part of a death squad.

 

This is why Thugman bizarrely says we mustn’t call class war what it is. Because he wants to maintain silence on the fact that he just as much as the OECD and Sachs is waging class war.

 

Also, I suppose he wants to keep his options open in case he eventually has to agree with them, like if Obama directly orders him to. In that case I suppose he’ll say something like “I was wrong, there was a model after all” or “the situation has changed in a way I didn’t expect, and now it turns out their prescription is right and mine was wrong”. (Here’s a recent precedent for Krugman doing exactly that.)

 

But this flip-flop would be much harder if he had called it what it is, class war. So he doesn’t. Instead we get the geocentric version of the Big Lie, as I described it in one of my comments linked above:

It reminds me of all the bizarre stellar behavior Ptolemy had to build into his astronomical model once he started from the premise that the earth is stationary at the center of the universe.

Once you let the evidence induce the hypothesis that the sun is at the center, everything becomes much simpler to depict and easier to explain.