Who's the Smartest Dumb Democrat?
Paul Krugman hated 9/11 because it interfered with his obsessive communist economics lesson
 

September 9 2005
Counterbias.com
by Ted Baiamonte
R E P U B L I C A N   V I E W
 

Paul Krugman, Ph.D. is a distinguished professor of economics at Princeton University and a regular op-ed writer for The New York Times. By any standard he occupies one of the most visible intellectual territories within the Democratic Party. So how does a geeky, nerdy, socially immature, very honest guy with a severe emotional attachment to the Democratic Party do in the public arena? Answer: he comes off as dumber than a normal Democrat in direct proportion to his exceptionally high IQ.

While his factual and technical mistakes are legend, and seem to take up 100's of websites devoted to nothing else, his more general conceptual mistakes seem more telling to me. Here are two of his best ones: 1) he said recently that in the end, the Internet would be no more important than the fax machine, and, 2) after 9/11, he said, in the end Enron would be more important than 9/11.

If you're tempted to think his confusion is random, think again. This is an organized confusion dictated by the Democratic half of his brain. Democrats hate the relatively capitalistic business community, much as Marx did, and much for the same reasons. They have always wanted to control business, regulate it, tax it, and have never said how far short of socialism they would stop. Throughout 200 years of American History they have always been for more government control of business, and everything else for that matter, while the Republicans, since Jefferson, have been for freedom.

In keeping with his Marxist spirit, Krugman did not like the Internet because it seemed to represent yet another capitalistic revolution that was causing yet another revolution in human progress. To him the government was supposed to be in control because, in theory, it didn't have profit as a motive, but rather genuine altruism. In point of fact, government altruism throughout history has usually amounted to genocide, while capitalism, almost by definition, has resulted in the broad masses buying what they alone decided improved their standard of living. So, if the government wasn't in control, then the Internet could not be important, at least not much more important than the fax machine. Dumb yes, but a necessary manifestation of honest Democratic thinking.

Of course, Krugman loved Enron more than any human being on earth. It represented nothing short of deliverance for him. He wrote dozens of columns on it, all of which generally proclaimed: "this is exactly what Marx said would happen, you don't have my IQ so you don't see it yet, this is essentially what is happening in all greedy American corporations, a Democratic government needs to take control to save you." In his blind allegiance, Krugman forgot to notice that Americans were managing to live far better than, for example, socialist Cubans, and, incidentally, the remainder of the world, despite the imagined inherent evils of their mostly capitalist economic system.

When 9/11 came along, he hated it because it interrupted the protracted lesson on Enronomics he was giving us. How would he ever teach us the inherent evil of Republican capitalism if we went off to fight a silly little war on terrorism? Hence, he was forced by his insane ideology to predict for us that 9/11 would be relatively unimportant compared to Enron. The possibility of a few more 9/11s could not be allowed to interfere with his obsessive communist economics lesson.

Krugman collected all his columns from the period in a book called The Great Unraveling. What was unraveling was the American economy and culture (he's part left wing sociologist too), he claimed. Initially it was easy to attack Bush. He had inherited a recession that officially started during the Clinton Administration, a burst Internet/tech bubble, 9/11, and two wars (at least one of which was unavoidable). The economy sank and Krugman was there to viciously and relentlessly pretend it was all Bush's fault. In the end the economy recovered, under Bush, on time and about as well as it had from previous recessions despite the extraordinary and historic shocks that caused it. Krugman's "great unraveling" was never taking place; what was taking place was the unraveling of his zealous mind.

Even so, Krugman has no idea when to shut up. He remains Alan Greenspan's harshest critic despite Greenspan being, by far, the most universally revered figure in the entire history of monetary policy. His concomitant illusion is that the doomed economic recovery is based on borrowed foreign money that Americans are using to support a housing bubble that will shortly burst; thus finally exposing the underlying evil in our capitalist economy. Now that Krugman has predicted it, will can all hold our breaths until this new unraveling takes place—right?

Krugman does not seem to catch on to the fact that predicting the future under the best of circumstances is difficult, but that with a Ph.D. from MIT, a genius IQ, a column in the Times, and a huge Democratic bias, he is much like a drunk predicting where his chair is before trying to sit down on it. Or, perhaps what he doesn't realize is that his common Democratic passion against American freedom and capitalism should not be in proportion to his uncommonly high technical IQ. After all, Democrats in general seem to hate freedom with a similar passion, even with their average IQ's.

 

Ted Baiamonte is author of "Understanding the Difference Between Democrats and Republicans". His blog is The Dumb Democrat, and he can be reached at bje1000@aol.com.