By Nick Sorrentino 7-13-2009
Last night I tuned into the Daily Show/Colbert Report hour on Comedy Central for the first time in a couple of months and I must say that I chose a good night.
The guest on the Daily Show was everyone’s favorite congressional sea lion Barney Frank.
I don’t completely dislike Mr. Frank. He openly talked about his boyfriend in the audience which I thought was funny and he does not shy away from slightly off color humor generally, which is one of my favorite colors of humor.
But as Chair of the House Financial Services Committee his counterpart on the GOP side is Ron Paul and I couldn’t help but think about the two men in comparison to one another.
Frank kind of looks like the blob. He is soft and sort of rolls around in his chair. Ron Paul is in shape and at 73 still looks like he could beat most House Members in a quarter mile around the Rayburn House Office Building.
Oddly as I watched Frank list back and forth in his seat it struck me- Frank is big government, fatty and nearly always expanding. Paul is small government, lean and sharp.
There is no real coloration here I know. There are more than a few fat libertarians and lots of skinny liberal vegetarians. The contrast just struck me.
But while Barney Frank was mildly amusing and seemed to me to be a guy who would be fun to have a steak with, Colbert’s guest, Paul Krugman was just smug and completely unamusing.
Paul Krugman is the New York Times columnist and “economist” who won the Nobel Prize for economics last year just as the financial crisis began to take hold. His aloofness and clear contempt for business irks me every time I read him, or watch him, or listen to him. I don’t much care for him.
Most of the time I just disagree with him. OK, that’s not really true. Most of the time I end up yelling at the newspaper, TV, computer, or radio, until my wife whaps me in the back of the head. Thanks honey, by the way.
I usually end up yelling because I disagree with his conclusions. We just see the world differently. I see the world in a clear and simple way of course, and he sees the world through the lens of heavy handed and unduly complicated market intervention. But last night he said something that was just flat out false.
Forgive the paraphrase but when questioned about the effectiveness of the “stimulus” Krugman explained that the stimulus was making things less God awful. Ok, we can agree to disagree on that. But what he said next, that the stimulus had helped mitigate job losses from “700k a month to 300k a month,” was stretching the government supplied stats a bit.
In January the economy lost 741,000 jobs. In February and March about 650,000 or so each month. In April a bit over 500,000. And in May there was a blip, we “only” lost 325,000, (which would have been a catastrophic number just 9 months ago.) So maybe this is where Krugman was basing his argument.
However, job losses for June came in at 467,000 which holds more in line with current economic trends.
I am not even going to go into how the statistics we look at are sugarcoated, and how the real job loss and unemployment numbers are much higher if one looks at those who are underemployed, or who have just given up looking for work. Or that the only growth sector in the economy is government which is a net drain on the national economy (though this is hotly debated by the Keynesians.) I won’t go into those things. Not today anyway.
What should I expect from Krugman though? The man won’t be quoting Mises or Hayek in this lifetime. Why should I get so perturbed?
I get agitated because Krugman is held up by the establishment as the leading economic light in this dark night of America’s soul despite the fact that he would have us march right off of a cliff. Get the consumer to spend more! Print more money! Artificially create credit! Bailout banks! And carmakers! Saving in un-American!
Whap!
Oh, thanks honey.
As I was saying, Krugman’s analysis is deeply flawed and I abhor his distain for free enterprise. And this is what really gets me. He doesn’t see the stimulus as a bad thing at all. He sees it as an opportunity to expand the state and to push the free market, such as it exists, farther to the margins. The “financial crisis” is a statists dream. It worked well for Mussolini and FDR right? Why not Krugman, Obama, and company?
Krugman, I believe, is probably like a professor I had years ago, a professor that I liked quite a lot personally by the way, who felt that the Constitution needed to be done away with because it restrained the hand of the state in it’s effort to “help” society run more smoothly. How could a document written 230 years ago have any value for us today? In his eyes the Constitution was a cage, not a liberating document as I and many others believe it to be.
I believe that Krugman, star of the neo-Keynesians, economic savior extraordinaire, facial hair proponent, dislikes the fact that this country was built on the premise that a significant dose of “chaos” is good for humanity and indeed vital for men to be free.
What is saddest though, and perhaps scariest of all, is that Krugman doesn’t even realize he’s a fascist.
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