People who hate Paul Krugman

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

I think it erodes a person’s credibility when they admit this much emotion regarding someone they disagree with.

But as I wrote my rebuttal to Krugman’s recent posts, I was surprised to feel a blazing anger towards the man—not towards his policies, or even towards his less-than-honest attempts to fudge facts in order to score points— —I found that I despised Krugman: With a passion.

A policy disagreement is not enough to get me to despise anyone. I’ve had plenty of big disagreements with plenty of people, including close friends—I never allow intellectual disagreements to come between me and my friends, or even to color my feelings towards my opponents. I’m just not built that way: Ideas, for me, are toys to play with, not flags of opposing enemies.

However, though I have fewer disagreements with Krugman than with some of my close friends, I still despise Krugman—still with a passion.

…I really do despise Krugman—not because I disagree with him: I despise him because I get the vibe that he wants the US to get involved in a war, just like WWII, just so that the economy improves.

Getting involved in a war for economic gain is immoral—it’s no different than killing someone for money. THAT is why I despise Krugman.

I read Paul Krugman as saying what my dad told me repeatedly when I was 8 and 9 and 10 years old: the Great Depression ended because of the military buildup leading to WW II. It would have been great to end the Great Depression sooner, but FDR was unable to put together a political coalition that would vote for the kind of big deficit spending that would have ended the Great Depression in peace time. Thus, government spending remained too timid, till the war broke out. The immoral part of the story is that so many Americans were willing to let other Americans suffer poverty and unemployment – it should not take a war to mobilize the resources to reach full employment. And of course, what was true in the 1930s is also true in 2010.