United Liberty
Paul Krugman: Patron Saint of Idiocy, Death, and Misery
Wed, 05/23/2012 - 11:15am | posted by Jeremy Kolassa
No, seriously, that is what this man has become. He recently blogged a chart on his blog (inappropriately—or maybe entirely appropriately—named “Conscience of a Liberal,”) showing first quarter growth for five countries:
He then goes, “Wait, what? Japan as star performer? What’s that about? Actually, no mystery.”
He links to a Bloomberg article, and excerpts:
Japan’s economy expanded faster than estimated in the first quarter, boosted by reconstruction spending that’s poised to fade just as a worsening in Europe’s crisis threatens to curtail export demand.
So he then argues that the tsunami reconstruction has led to great economic growth, while so-called “austerity” (which isn’t actually austerity at all, if Krugman had bothered to pay attention) has doomed Italy.
It makes perfect sense! Absolutely! Let’s hit Japan with another tsunami that will kill over 15,000 people, injure 27,000 citizens, and make 3,155 go missing! If only the 2011 tsunami had destroyed even more than that paltry 130,000 buildings—if only it had actually caused Fukushima to go critical and explode—it would have created so much potential for rebuilding! It would have shot the Japanese GDP right over the moon!
Hey, you know what, America can do this! We can totally destroy a bunch of stuff, and it would help out everybody! We have over 5,000 nuclear warheads just sitting in silos not doing anything, not creating any GDP growth. Why don’t we just nuke some parts of the Midwest, California, and downtown Manhattan? That would be a lot of rebuilding and a lot of business for disaster relief! Man, we wouldn’t have to worry about unemployment for a generation! And hey, while we’re at it, we could help Europe out too! Let’s sprinkle a few nukes all over Europe. We could make Rush Limbaugh happy and turn Paris into molten glass! Better yet, we could nuke Rome, and not only would Barack Obama get rid of that pesky Catholic Church and its opposition to contraceptives, he’d be doing the Italians a big favor by making their GDP skyrocket! (Not sure if we want to waste any on Greece, though. Not like they’ve done anything for us.)
This is what Paul Krugman is peddling, here. He is quite literally saying that “destruction = economic growth.” As one of my friends said on Facebook: “How many lives must be destroyed to realize Krugman’s stellar economic growth?” He has, once again, given into the broken window fallacy, but this time on a horrendously massive scale.
Why anyone takes this guy seriously is utterly beyond me. A man who thinks that to boost the economy, we must suffer a horrific natural disaster? If that’s the “Conscience of a Liberal,” then thank goodness I’m not a liberal. I actually want people to live and enjoy their lives, not suffer and die just for a higher GDP.
I wonder who cares about people and individuals more: me, the humble libertarian, or this patron saint of idiocy, death, and misery?
No, you are taking this the wrong way. Krugman isn’t saying that “destruction = economic growth.” He is saying that “infrastructure/construction = economic growth.” He isn’t advocating that other countries be subject to natural/man-made disasters in order to boost their economy. He is just saying that government spending CAN help the economy, while austerity during a recession can hurt it.
Your critique should have been: Any country that suffers from such a terrible disaster which kills thousands and wrecks its economy would very well see some form of growth in the subsequent years as industries come back in full swing, anyway. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with government spending. Or, you could have commented on how small of a window one fiscal quarter is in the grand scheme of things. Both would be valid criticisms of his argument.
But saying that he is advocating for the death of thousands for the sake of economic growth is plain wrong.
While those are good and valid arguments, Aaron, they’re not the point I want to make. The point is that Krugman is looking at disasters and saying “Wow! This has done wonders for this nation’s economy!” without paying attention to the damage that the disaster caused.
I’m being deliberately shocking here, because I want to shock people to what this guy is essentially saying. I want them to wake up and evaluate what’s going on behind the numbers, in the real world, and have them think, “Oh gosh, this is horrific!” If they can realize that, then we’re good.
Otherwise people just think “Government spending is good!” and completely forget that what’s going on is, you know, the deaths of thousands of people and the survivors putting their lives back together. That’s not economic prosperity or progress. That’s a very painful recovery.
You miss his point entirely.
As others commentators already mentioned, Krugman is advocating for government spending, regardless of the source. He has said himself that wars and disasters aren’t the ideal purpose of government spending, and emphasized that it was the BUILDUP to the war that got the US out of its depression.
Wouldn’t it be nice, instead of the government spending money on repairing what was destroyed, investing and creating new and improved infrastructure? Wouldn’t it be nice, if the the government rehired the teachers that were laid off and invested in our schools?
Why do Republicans have VERY little reservation is giving ridiculously generous tax cuts to the wealthy and spending huge amounts on a war, and when we’re finally in a depression, households are burdened with debt and unemployment, is deficit spending to relieve these people a step towards socialism?
It’s just completely ridiculous.
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