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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (102981)	2/3/2009 5:49:01 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542213

Its unusual for me to defend Krugman, but as much as I often disagree with him, I can't really say he's a fruitcake. He did useful economic research, and he's obviously a very intelligent man. I think he's wrong on a lot of things, and I also think he's overly partisan, but neither of those rises to "fruitcake status". Some of the economic ideas he believes in (and to a limited extent even generated), may come to be seen as false, even obviously very false, but the same can be said for many respected economists of the past. I do not agree with all in the article though - for instance, Murphy doesn't make a good case as to how we get bridges built without government spending. If he thinks we can, maybe he's an anarcho-capitalist. The types of systems some of them propose could work in theory, but they have never been demonstrated (sure they've never gotten a chance, but I'm not ready to make the leap). Also many of those ideas have quasi-governmental organizations anyway, just more freedom to leave one and join another, often without even having to move. I like the idea of competition between governments, but I'm skeptical about how well it would work out when taken to the extent that they would take it. A lower level of competition between governments is IMO clearly good, but governments try to stop it (European countries trying to push other European countries to raise tax rates, the US going after future income of people who leave the US and renounce their citizenship to avoid taxes, etc.) One big complaint I have with Krugman is that he seems to think that any man is as efficient as the next I've posted blog posts commenting on that idea, not necessarily focusing on Krugman believing it, but the idea that stimulus may not work out as well as expected because labor is more specialized than in the past. Beyond that point you have the general fact that very large stimulus packages or other increases in government spending, mean that more of the resources of society will be directed by politics, and less by the market. Political direction of resources tends to be less efficient. But Krugman seems to think that the dead weight loss of taxation and the inefficiencies resulting from the real world political process, are minimal at most, and perhaps almost zero.