Yesterday’s alchemist is today’s academician.
He tries to convert leaden ideas into the fool’s gold of medals, awards, medallions, newspaper columns, and various sinecures, including the guarantee of lifetime employment. He maintains the false impression of respectability with the same assiduousness he brings to footnoting nonsense, like one of the anonymous unpaid editors who revise history via Wikipedia.
He is an economist.
His name is Paul Krugman.
By asserting that tax cuts exact the ultimate tax, that they cut apart lives by cutting the social safety net, that the price of expanding personal treasure and enriching the Treasury is blood, that every cut in the marginal tax rate corresponds to an uptick in gun violence among the marginalized, that these cuts constitute a deliberate plan by Republicans to defy destiny by attacking demography, by having white nationalists kill blacks and other minorities, by libeling so many, Krugman reveals his paranoid and vile ideology.
In Krugman’s world, racism is an exclusively Republican phenomenon.
Never mind the real world, where Barack Obama brings a gun to a knife fight.
Put aside, too, the debate about the influence on Obama’s politics by an agitator whose work revels in radicalism, whose works bear the respective titles Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals.
In Krugman’s world, Republicans have a monopoly on violent words and deeds.
In Krugman’s world, free markets eliminate free will, unleashing the creative destruction not of capitalism but of Klansmen.
In Krugman’s world, stubbornness trumps facts.
What a sad world, indeed.
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