Paul Krugman, the Lock-’Em-Down Economist

 Decades ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan observed that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” These words are particularly salient today, as the world order has been upended by governments’ responses to the coronavirus. 

Those who continue to advocate extreme measures, such as lockdowns and forced human separation, are making the extraordinary claim that we must disrupt the functioning of the traditions and institutions that societies have developed over millennia, and are vital to human flourishing, in response to a single problem: a pathogen with an infection fatality rate currently hovering around 0.27 percent, with deaths highly concentrated among those with very low life expectancies.  

Never before have governments throughout the world ordered schools to close, businesses to stop operating, travel to cease, and people to refrain from interacting with each other, for an indefinite time period spanning months and possibly even years. As others have noted, this is an experiment of an unprecedented nature on an unprecedented scale, the consequences of which will undoubtedly ripple into subsequent decades and possibly beyond.  Read on…

As we learn that England has gone into full lockdown. Until December 1. But what’s the bet it goes in until the new year?

ADDED: Paul Krugman (mentioned in the article) really is a piece of work. He’s a regular columnist at the New York Times and a Nobel laureate. Pretty impressive! You’d think that would give him some credibility. Not a bit of it. He’s a bust. In 1990 he said the internet would be a flash in the pan and no more important than the fax machine. He claims the Right is riddled with “zombie ideas” while failing to see the huge mote in his own eye: socialism as the ultimate zombie idea. When Trump was elected he predicted a crash in the stock market and mass unemployment. The reality was stock market at an all time high and unemployment at a record low. There’s hardly a macro trend Krugman hasn’t got wrong. Yet there he is, churning out his dross, smearing the good common sense of the Great Barrington Declaration. 

In his attack on the GBD he tries to link it with the Koch brothers, because, you know, the Kochs are right wing and so…. In fact the Kochs had nothing to do with the GBD, and he’s just attempting a smear by association, something the NYT acolytes will lap up because they love to hate anything that goes against their narrative, here “lockdowns are necessary”. I’ll venture that on this one topic I’m as well read as Krugman and I find for the GBD.

BLM overarching aim: to destroy America. Or at least its capitalist system

I recall a YouTube of Paul Krugman, the grizzled guru at the New York Times, speaking at the Oxford University Union about “Zombie ideas” on the Right. His main bete noir was “trickle down economics” which he claimed was a “zombie theory” — it ought be dead, but continues to shamble along, like a zombie, trailing bloody bandages and shredded ideas. There were no zombie ideas on the Left, said Krugman… uncontested by the students. In the comments I suggested “socialism?”, an idea that simply refuses to die — to die properly — no matter the number of times it has killed and been killed.

In America now, it’s not just nice democratic socialism that is yet again raising its grinning skull, but hard-core Marxist socialism. At least as now ceaselessly pushed by Black Lives Matter —  the movement BLM, all caps, with a website, not the sentiment that “black lives matter”. 

I’ve mentioned this before. It’s on the BLM website, where the three founders of BLM boast of their extensive “training in Marxism”. One of their trainers, an ex-member of the violent Marxist group the Weatherman, Eric Mann, praises Mao, Lenin, Che and Fidel. A more unlovely bunch of  genocidal mass murderers you couldn’t dredge up, but to BLM, these are heroes. 

Lots of ordinary people are falling for this bait and switch. They affirm, innocently (or not), that “black lives matter”, as most assuredly they do, without understanding how this enables Black Lives Matter, the hard-core Marxist group that has been mobilising for years for today’s opportunity. And who dream of a giant step to the destruction of America and its capitalist structure, a structure they allege is “systematically racist” and  must be torn down.

Those that abide, abet.

It’s not conspiracy theory when they are open and proud of their aims. BLM are explicit. And, that’s not even going into their explicit racism…

Mike Gonzales gives a lot more background on BLM, the movement. Isn’t it odd that there is not a word in the MSM about BLM? Not a word.

Krugman claims Republicans “sacrialize” selfishness

Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist has a go at Republicans, claiming they are a “cult of selfishness”, that is “killing America". Is “selfishness" a step up or down from Hillary’s “deplorables”? Who knows.
Imagine this turned about. If we were to make as broad a generalisation about the Democrats. That they were all crazy-left socialists who want to “sacralize” state to control all the means of production and to compel and control your every activity. Fair? Well, no. It’s generally considered bigoted to tar whole groups with one brush. Even if in the converse case it’s truer of where democrats have got to than the alleged selfishness of Republicans. Repeated polls show that Democrats have shifted further left, while Republicans have stayed pretty much Center right.
Back to Krugman. This is a man who has got all the major calls wrong. He said in 1994 that the internet would have no more impact than the fax. On Trump’s election he predicted the worst stock market crash sine the Great Depression, just as it began its longest sustained bull run, that hasn’t quite finished even in this pandemic. He called a crash in 2019, before Nasdaq and Dow reached new records.
He’s also free and easy with figures.

Daniel Okrent, a former New York Times ombudsman, writes that Krugman has “the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing, and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.” [Link]

In the article he links to this chart of Covid deaths, failing to mention America numbers are inflated by include previously unrecorded deaths from June whereas European deaths are deflated, by changed measures giving lower than trend figures. That’s why the US comes out so badly, an effect exaggerated by using a daily figure. Overall, the US is in the mid range of Europe as I show in my spreadsheet here. (Worse than France and Germany, better than Italy, Spain ams Britain).
Of course Krugman puts this bad US figure — exaggerated as it is — down to Trump. Whereas the measures to fight Covid are virtually all taken at the state level. And at the state level, as I showed yesterday, the top ten worst states are all run by Democrat governors.
To his main point about the alleged "sacralisation of selfishness” by Republicans, is this perhaps a projection? After all, what can be more selfish than wanting power so much that you attempt to invalidate an election by phoney charges of Russian collusion — as is now manifestly clear from revelations of FBI treatment of the Steele dossier, etc…
And how easy to invert Krugman. Here he is:

You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammelled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual....

And here’s the inverse:

You see, the modern U.S. Left is committed to the proposition that equity is good, that we’re all better off when the government engages in the untrammelled pursuit of control of all means of production. In their vision, unrestricted control by government and restriction of consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual....

I don’t need to refute Krugman’s crude stereotype, nor substantiate the inverse -- after all, we’ve have plenty of evidence of the horrors of socialism in actual practice if not in theory.
In all, Krugman’s piece strikes me as a bit of a rant. I’m guilty of rants myself. But then I’m not a New York Times columnist. A bit more fact-checking by the “paper of record”, would do wonders, especially given the importance of fact checking the Times itself claimed to be motivated by in the fracas over the recent editorial by Tom Cotton -- and editorial, let’s recall, that reflected the beliefs of 58% of the American populace.  

The People’s Republic of America. Brought to you by the Democratic Socialists of America!

The above list of democratic-socialist wins was compiled here

His second article on Denmark in as many weeks (his first is here), New York Times columnist Paul Krugman waxes gooey about this "Butter Republic" in his latest article: Something Not Rotten in Denmark.

And it's true; Denmark is indeed a lovely place, at least in summer when we went, pretty and safe and friendly and happy.  

Krugman segues from Danish social-democracy to the hoped-for American version, by way of the new young NYC Democratic candidate for Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).

Much has been made of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not just because of her upset primary victory, but because she’s a self-proclaimed socialist. Her platform, however, isn’t socialist at all by the traditional definition. It’s just unabashedly social-democratic.

"Much has been made" of AOC not just because of the upset primary victory or because she's a self-proclaimed socialist.  But also because the Democratic party has made her the new "Fresh Face of the Party".  So Fresh. So Face.

I'll grant Krugman his point on her platform. The grab-bag of feel-good "policies" are indeed social-democratic. But note that AOC is a fully paid-up member of the Democratic Socialists of America. And they are very much Socialists, not just the fluffier "Social Democrats".  If AOC reads the DSA website, (one wonders, given her recent media performances), then she and her socialist beliefs and her DSA socialist comrades will be a danger to the Republic.  For it is the duty of paid-up DSA members to infiltrate parties of the Left, principally the Democratic party, and to push them further to the Left, towards pure Socialism.  There are clear indications that they're having impact, witness the recent policies espoused by Elizabeth Warren: pure DSA.

Krugman's comment led me to look at the DSA and its policies.

Below is a critique of the "Where we stand" section on the Democratic Socialists of America website.

Quotes from DSA's "Where we stand" are in italics.  My comments are indented. Highlighting is mine. And I've only done a selection of sections.

Preamble

Para 2: The unbridled power of transnational corporations, underwritten by the major capitalist nations, has created a world economy where the wealth and power of a few is coupled with insecurity and downward mobility for the vast majority of working people -in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

Not true.  Four pinocchios not true. I don’t know where the authors of this paper for the DSA get their figures, because they don’t bother to give any sources.  Me, I’ll use World Bank figures. 

·       In 1981 there were 1.9 billion poor, 42% of the world population.

·       In 2013 there were 0.78 billion poor, 10% of the world. 

Over a billion people taken out of poverty, a drop of 32 percentage points. That's a compound drop of 3 percent each and every year since 1981.

That is a staggering, historical, unprecedented drop in world poverty, the opposite of “downward mobility” or “unrelenting poverty” (para 3 below).  It is due to countries ditching socialism or communism in favour of market forces. [ADDED: China is a big chunk of the decline in poverty.  And China does say it's Socialist.  But it's "Socialist with Chinese characteristics", which is to say not socialist at all, or with a glancing acquaintance with socialism. Its economy is largely market-driven, and though it still has its State Owned Enterprises, it is trying to reform or sell them off, a clear indication of where Beijing thinks it should be moving: more towards the market economy, which has done so well for it]

Consider this counterfactual: if the world had kept on doing what it was doing, hewing to systems that had led to 42% of the world living in poverty, we’d have 3 billion poor people now, not the 0.78 billion we do have.  In short, we have over 2 billion fewer poor people because of global market economies instead of failing socialist ones

Another thing: the World Bank 2015 figures are due out in October 2018.  Early indications are that the number of poor has fallen still further since 2013.  On past history it's probably dropped by a further 23-odd million, and is now below 10% of the world population.

In sum: Socialism: F.  Capitalism: A+

Para 3: …democratically control their community and society--remains central to the movement for radical democracy.

“Control” is throughout the document.  This is a give-away as “control” is the core of socialism: State control of the means of production.

Para 3: The struggle for mass democracy has always been led by the excluded -- workers, minorities, and women.

Not true: Assuming “mass democracy” = “radical democracy” = some form of socialism/communism, then it’s always been elites that led the major movements: Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Che, Castro, the Kims, Chavez, Maduro….

Para 3: The equation of capitalism with democracy cannot survive scrutiny in a world where untrammeled capitalism means unrelenting poverty, disease, and unemployment.

Not true: see above, under Para 2.

Para 4: … inequality of wealth and income has grown worse in the last 15 years…

Partly true: from 1980-95 the Gini index did rise, meaning greater income inequality.  But since then the figures have remained very stable. [Ref].  There are also studies that show the US’s Gini index is not as high as officially recorded if non-wage income is included: food stamps, welfare payments and the like.
A reader comment: 

Whilst you are right on the statistics, I argue that there is something missing and something very important missing. Something that the traditional statistics do not capture. Let’s say  that the average middle class income has remained static in inflation adjusted terms since 1995. So you made $100 then and now make $100 in 1995 dollars. If you put a list together of 1) what you could buy for $100 in 1995 and what you could buy in 2018 it would be very different ie. Better, 2) The average price of all these things have gone down and gone down a lot. Communication choices, entertainment, travel etc. are all much better, more available and cheaper. So my point is that you actually get more value for your $100 today than you did then, so you are actually much better off even though the actual amount of money you receive is the same.

Para 5: In the global capitalist economy…millions elsewhere are forever hungry.

Four pinocchios false.  See above under para 2. 

Section 2: Democratic Control of Productive and Social Life

There it is again: the “control” word, right there in the heading.  “Control” of the means of production, by the state (euphemized here as “democratic”.  Of course it is!), is precisely what defines socialism. Not “democratic socialism” as many are banging on about, like Krugman in his latest Denmarkian musings, in an effort to make it harmless and fluffy; no, not democratic socialism, but Socialism, pure and simple.  The Marxist theory that brought penury and misery to countless hundreds of millions in the 20^th Century and continues to do so in North Korea and Venezuela. 

Para 1 doesn’t get any better….

Para 1: As democratic socialists we are committed to ensuring that any market is the servant of the public good and not its master. Liberty, equality, and solidarity will require not only democratic control over economic life, but also a progressively financed, decentralized, and quality public sector. Free markets or private charity cannot provide adequate public goods and services.

Look, it doesn’t matter how “democratic” you say it is.  It never is.  Socialist bureaucrats with control (shudder) over “economic life” won’t be able to help themselves to help themselves… .and to help their cronies, their relatives, and to muck things up in doing so. That’s always been the case; why should it be any different next time. We’re not told.  Nor should we believe for one minute that it will be so.  Closing your eyes and wishing hard is not a strategy.

Note how many socialist hellholes have “democratic” in their name: “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” (the worst), “The People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria” (merely bad) and the rest.  Note how many are “Authoritarian regimes” and Socialist.

Para 5: Democratic, representative control over fiscal, monetary, and trade policy would enable citizens to have a voice in setting the basic framework of economic policy--what social investment is needed, who should own or control basic industries, and how they might be governed.

So we are no longer to have an independent monetary authority, the Fed, to set monetary policy?  That way lies ruin, via hyperinflation, as per happening now in Venezuela. 

As for the rest, the mind boggles.  It’s pure Marxist socialist, destined for massive failure.  Please, FSM, no!

Section 4: Strategy for the Next Left

Socialists have historically supported public ownership and control of the major economic institutions of society -- the large corporations -- in order to eliminate the injustice and inequality of a class-based society, and have depended on the organization of a working class party to gain state power to achieve such ends

There it is yet again.  The state control of the means of production. 

Social Redistribution --the shift of wealth and resources from the rich to the rest of society--will require:

1.  massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector, in order to provide the main source of new funds for social programs,income maintenance and infrastructure rehabilitation, and

2.  a massive shift of public resources from the military (the main user of existing discretionary funds) to civilian uses.

Groan. As Margaret Thatcher noted, "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money".

********

I’m stopping there, as I’m tired of pulling apart a document that has glaring errors and shameful misrepresentations on every page, in every paragraph, in virtually every sentence.

The overall feeling of the document reminds me of the essays I used to have to read in China in the seventies.  Turgid pieces by Marxist theoreticians, or slightly brighter but still obscure speeches by Mao Tse-tung.  Talks of “programmatic” coalitions, capitalism which is always “brutal” and “uncaring”, and most of all, repetition of “democratic control”.  Repeat after me: democratic control; democratic control.  Doesn't that sound nice, now?

Me, I run a mile from this stuff.  I lived under it for a couple of years in China.  I had enough of it.  A billion Chinese also had enough of it.  You won’t find anyone in China who cares a jot for socialism. It’s a great danger that so many in the US do – they’ve had no experience of living in socialism, yet they want it passionately, poor dears.  Poor us, too. If they have even a skerrick of success.  

LATER: I realise I'm a bit too gung-ho on capitalism (good) vs socialism (bad) here.  There are some real concerns I have -- we have, we should have -- about the fact that real wages in America haven't increased since about 1980.  I'm going to have a look at that, the why's and wherefores of that, later.
LATERER (20 Aug 2018): Overall the DSA document on "Where we stand" is a long bleat about how horrible things are in America and the World.  And how that's because we're not socialist enough. 

That story of the terribleness of things is belied by the data: most convincingly brought together by Steven Pinker in "Better Angels of our Nature" and his recent "Enlightenment Now".  Must reads, especially by petulant progressives, surly socialists and dyspeptic democrats....

"The centrist cop-out", Paul Krugman

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.”

["The Centrist Cop-Out" by Paul Krugman, NYT, 28 July] 

Krugman is speaking about the debate over the deficit, and I think he's right on that one: the fault is more with the Reps than the Dems.
This "cult of centrism" exists everywhere, particularly amongst the left-wing fishies amongst whom Krugman swims.  It is also known as "cultural equivalence".
In the case of religion, it takes the form of "all religions are basically the same", ie, equally bad, or equally violent, or equally good, or worshipping equally the one god.  Each is a manifestation like each other.
But that's no more true of religions than it is of political parties.  There are Nationalists; and there are Socialists.  Then there are the National Socialists.  Who would claim all these are the same?

Islam is unique in many ways: 

• It is the only religion in which the core document -- the Koran -- is the "uncreated" (in the sense that Man did not create it), inviolate and uncorrectable, Word of God.  
• It is the only on in which its prophet is a warlord. 
• It is the only one without the golden rule -- do unto others as you would have others do unto you. 
• It is the only one with a documented political system central to its tenets (Sharia).

What is the religious equivalent to Krugman's "Views Differ on Shape of Planet"?  It is leaders in Islam quoting their inviolate texts to call for Islam to "Rule the world", for their votaries in the west to call for "Behead those who insult the prophet", and the headline reads: "Islam: the Religion of Peace and Tolerance".

Global warming: causes and symptoms

Letter to International Herald Tribune (the global edition of the New York Times) sent 15th April: