New Silicon Graffiti Video: Where Krugman Has Gone Before
Rather than shoot the new video in the newsroom set we typically use as home base, I decided to borrow a used Apollo capsule and Saturn rocket to make my way to Space Station V. What better place to discuss the alien invasion that’s about to strike planet earth?
Or at least the one that Paul Krugman of the New York Times has publicly called for on two different occasions, first during an interview with CNN host Fareed Zakaria in 2011, and then just last month on Bill Maher’s HBO series. Here’s a partial transcript of Krugman’s CNN appearance, which he shared with Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard University economics professor:
KRUGMAN: Think about World War II, right? That was actually negative social product spending, and yet it brought us out.
I mean, probably because you want to put these things together, if we say, “Look, we could use some inflation.” Ken and I are both saying that, which is, of course, anathema to a lot of people in Washington but is, in fact, what fhe basic logic says.
It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.
If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better –
ROGOFF: And we need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying.
KRUGMAN: No, there was a “Twilight Zone” episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don’t need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
But even if you hire Rod Serling to write your script, and Industrial Light & Magic to provide your special effects, it’s still simply an interstellar spin on William James’ Moral Equivalent of War concept from 1906, a “progressive” obsession that has led to a century of bad ideas — including, as we mention in the video, a few from History’s Greatest Monster himself. While the Malaise Speech of 1979 gets all the credit, Carter’s earlier “M.E.O.W” moment in 1977 arguably demonstrates the futility of his worldview just as well:
And similarly, in April of 2008, Time magazine would illustrate Carter’s notion with this cover, which replaces the American flag the US Marines hoisted atop Iwo Jima with…a tree, and the headline “How to Win the War on Global Warming.”
Back in 2004, Thomas Sowell explored one reason why the Moral Equivalent of War and similar doomsday mongering is a staple of the left:
There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.
But with Solyndra and other elements of Obama’s environmental themed venture socialism now seen as failed ventures, and with the idea of global warming having discredited itself during the infamous “Hide the Decline” scandal in 2009, and numerous doomsday final countdowns having come and gone and the earth no worse for wear, we’re left with Paul Krugman’s Twilight Zone fantasies to sell the idea of massive government spending.
Well, even more massive government spending than we’re doing already.
Click on the above video to watch; a handy embeddable YouTube version is available here. And click here for three years worth of earlier editions of Silicon Graffiti, including our previous trip to the Space Station. We visited there back in the spring of 2009, when John Holdren, President Obama’s Dr. Strangelove-esque “science” “czar” told an apparently nonplussed AP reporter that he debating launching rockets to seed the upper atmosphere with pollutants to fight global warming. Ahh, the heady days of hopenchange…)
Update (7/2/12): PJTV subscribers can tune in here to watch.
“we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat”
This is how Ozymandias took over the world in Watchmen. I had no idea Krugman was a fanboy.
I think this a good part of why the Left was so quick to believe George W. Bush lied to get us to go to war in Iraq.
The Left is so used to themselves having to lie to gin up support for their Moral Equivalents of Wars, they naturally assumed Bush was doing the same for a real war.
Krugman really is a raging idiot.
He keeps repeating the claim that WW2 was just a “Government spending program,” and not, you know, a worldwide holocaust that killed sixty million people and left all of America’s competitors in absolute ruin.
So yeah, Paulie, let’s spend 18 months building laser defense systems against imaginary aliens. That’s pretty much the same thing as the 1940s. Genius.
The only Twilight Zone episode I can think of that even remotely resembles Krugman’s plot line is one called “A Small Talent for War” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbT1fCHOjfI). And this isn’t even a full length episode but more of a short story that runs just 8 minutes. The gist of the story is that aliens visit the Earth with huge spaceships. A spokesman for the aliens drops in on the human political leaders at the United Nations and comments on the humans’ propensity for war and the leaders become terrified, thinking that they are about to be obliterated for their antagonistic ways with one another. Hurriedly, they begin to hammer out peace agreements and within a few hours, have stopped all the world’s wars. The alien spokesman returns and the human leaders proudly tell the alien that they have agreed to universal disarmament. It turns out that they have done exactly the WRONG thing: the aliens were hoping to exploit the human talent for war by turning them against the aliens enemies. The aliens then prepare to obliterate the earth for being too peaceful!
If this is the episode that Krugman means, his memory of it is very faulty indeed, so much so that it is almost delusional. (Not that this would be surprising given his delusional understanding of the real world.)
Does anyone know if we’re talking about the same episode? I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of Twilight Zone by any means so perhaps he means some other episode? Or is he just making this up out of the febrile confines of his brain?
Speaking of Kruggles, one wonders when he’ll become so obviously bonkers that even the Times — even the Times — has to pull the plug on him. What would it take? If Krugman were to come out in favor of another Hitler to stimulate stimulus, that might do it. Well, maybe not. But it probably would be the beginning of the end.
Actually it was more likely an episode of The Outer Limits” Krugman was thinking of: “The Architects of Fear,” which aired Sept. 30, 1963, and starred Robert Culp and Geraldine Brooks.
Krugman is said to have been inspired by Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy” to become an economist, intent on creating a science of social engineering.
Agreed with Steve B on the “Architects” episode, although we might also note there was that TZ episode called “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” wherein (SPOLIERS FOLLOW) aliens fake an alien invasion — to prove to themselves that humans will freak out and turn on each other if they think they’ve been covertly invaded. Nah. Not what Krugman was looking for; it kinda disproves his point.
Carter 1977: “We are running out of gas and oil.” Therefore, government needs more control over your stupid lives.
Well, it’s 25 years later and the USA is awash in gas and oil. The greenies hate that fact, and want to prevent us from using it.
Has anything changed in 25 years?!?!
For what it may be worth, Krugman can’t even get his cultural references straight — it wasn’t a Twilight Zone episode, it was The Outer Limits episode entitled “The Architects of Fear”.
key point…
“Look, we could use some inflation.” Ken and I are both saying that, which is, of course, anathema to a lot of people in Washington but is, in fact, what fhe basic logic says.
It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy.”
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It’s true. I won’t necessarily take krugman’s word of Rogoff’s opinion in the matter, but this is our plan B.
The mathematics are simple…
you can blow the ominous debt/gdp ratio, 100%, back to 50%, simply by cutting the dollar’s value in half. The follow up admission by Krugman is telling…
“It’s very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy.”
Paul Krugman is advancing the idea of printing up our budgetary shortfalls, but, strangely, cannot accept that those shortfalls should occur due to lower taxes.
he’s desperate for growth, damn the costs, while simultaneously holding tax cuts off the table. this is the economic equivalent of a religious adherent refusing teatment in spite of imminent death.
it essential that if a country is going to pursue devaluation, that it feature a robust economy.
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please note that the thought of devaluation is rather abhorent, as it basically tells the world that we are no longer worthy of their credit. we are not without advantages…
current food production, and potential energy production are an intrinsic hedge against the impact of the inflation created.
while not the best path to pursue, we will be forced to ween ourselves off of the ‘crack’ of foreing credit.
The conditions for US prosperity after World War II are not unique to that time. The desire of the population to limit the US government was unusual, and could be applied again.
Krugman repeats the conventional and wrong explanation of why the US economy grew fast after World War II. He says that the government spent a huge amount of money, and the economy improved after the war ended. Unfortunately for Krugman, the economy improved just after the government drastically cut spending, to the horror of Keynesians at that time.
Today’s problems arise from the heavy hand of politicians who are emulating FDR, with the same depressing results. By trying to spend our way to success, they are scaring the stuffing out of the managers and investors who would like to build for the future, but won’t build if inflation, taxes, and regulatory policy are going to confiscate their profits and investments.The post World War II economic record is commonly misinterpreted to hide the truth, that lower government spending and greater economic freedom supported the US postwar boom.
The U.S. Postwar Miracle
11/04/10 – Economist David R. Henderson
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[edited] We often hear that big cuts in government spending over a short time are a bad idea. Keynesians argue first that large cuts in government spending, with no offsetting tax cuts, would lead to a large drop in aggregate demand for goods and services, thus causing a recession or even a depression.
Second, with a major shift in demand (fewer government goods and services and more private ones), Keynesians say that the economy will experience a wrenching readjustment, during which people will be unemployed and the economy will slow.
Yet, this scenario has already occurred in the United States, and the result was an astonishing boom. In the four years from 1944 to 1948, the U.S. government cut spending by 75% ($72 billion). It brought federal spending down from a peak of 44% of gross national product (GNP) in 1944 to only 8.9% in 1948, a drop of 35.1 percentage points.
The US economy did badly in the years preceding World War II. Why did it do so well in the years following the war? Dramatically reduced government spending and deregulation can take an economy from sickness to health. In short, one of the main things a government can do to help a weak economy recover is to step aside.
The biggest trigger to post-war growth was a sharp rise in private capital investment, which the war had all but halted. The New Deal had slowed investment, one reason the Great Depression lingered as long as it did. That investment jumped from $10.6 billion in 1945 to $46 billion in 1948, as plants expanded and retooled for the production of civilian goods.
Although the overall personal savings rate fell, the private investment rate soared from 5% to almost 18%, with the biggest leap coming in 1946, and reflected in GNP numbers only two years later. Business savings almost doubled in the same period, from $15.1 billion to $28 billion, financing expansion and hiring.
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To have a US export boom, other countries must be producing resources and goods to pay for our exports. Bombed out foreign economies could not provide those payments to us, and so our postwar recovery could not be based on them. We had less competition, but we also had weak foreign buyers.
Net US exports in 1946 were 0.3% of GDP, not enough to support our observed economic growth. Net US exports have declined since then.
A country doesn’t need exports to be growing and prosperous. It only needs to be freed from the dead hand of government taxes and spending. Free trade improves prosperity on top of that.
FDR’s spending did not end the Great Depression
Reduced spending and lowered tax rates did it.
04/16/10 – Planet Yelnik, The Wall Street Journal
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[edited] What happened in 1945 at the end of WWII? FDR was convinced the only way to employ the 12 million returning soldiers was another New Deal program, but he died before he could impose his plan. The new President Truman proposed it, along with national health care.
Both the Congress and Senate had Democratic majorities. They said “No” to the whole New Deal revival: no federal program for health care, no full-employment act, only limited federal housing, and no increase in minimum wage or Social Security benefits.
Instead, Congress reduced taxes across the board. Top marginal corporate tax rates effectively went from 90% to 38% after 1945.
By the late 1940s, a revived economy was generating more annual federal revenue than the US had received during the higher tax rates of the war years. Price controls ended by the end of 1946. The US began running budget surpluses.
Unemployment had remained double-digit throughout the whole New Deal. One year after the end of New Deal policies and the return of economic freedom, it was under 4% despite the return of a huge number of soldiers.
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Whatever you do, no one point out to Krugman that we could get twice the stimulus if we would take on both sides of the conflict and go to war with ourselves. He’d be calling for the bombing of Denver and Dallas within five minutes.
Yep, “The Architects of Fear” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4XbwWAXimI on the original Outer Limits. A month ago somebody posted “PAUL KRUGMAN” as a comment there about it.