Paul Krugman: What The World Needs Now Is A Man Like Adrian Veidt

In the Watchmen -- the comic-book version, the real version -- Adrian Veidt's solution to avoiding a coming nuclear war was to fake an alien attack on New York City, an attack so monstrous and arresting that the Soviets and Americans were both frightened enough of a new The Other to put aside their differences and work together to fight the (unreal) menace.

Paul Krugman is now officially out of ideas, because that is in fact his new proposal.

PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: Think about World War II, right? That was actually negative social product spending, and yet it brought us out.

...

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better–

This isn't just silliness. I don't mean that he's serious about implementing Veidt's plan.

I mean he has now simply fled into fantasy. Escaped into dreamlands of space monsters and giant robots.

Look, as I mentioned in my post below, it isn't even impossible to get a major stimulus package through Congress, even now. There are ways to do it.

But these ways involve making major ideological concessions to the Republicans -- which is only fair, since we own half of one branch of government.

But Krugman is another hopeless ideologue who cannot imagine compromising with thugs and brigands such as we, so rather than talk about plausible compromises which could get him the stimulus he won't stop talking about, he simply descends into Make Believe Pretend Land.

As Instapundit always says: We're in the very best of hands.

The political class is an abject failure in all ways. Rather than confront this fact -- which enlightened people (such as they assert they are) are supposed to do; enlightened people are supposed to engage in thoughtful self-evaluation, neutral reexamination of empirical evidence, and, occasionally, realistic consideration of plausible alternatives -- Krugman just starts talking up Chapter 11 of the Watchmen.

posted by Ace at 02:18 PM

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