If The Best Title Wins...

Paul Krugman sweeps the field with his post on Irish austerity titled "A Terrible Ugliness Is Born".  Two Nobel Laureates and the implicit call for an Irish uprising? The other Tom Maguire would be thrilled.

Megan McArdle finds her inner Irish and reminds us that things could always be worse.

Comments

[There just crazee. Stop spending, stop spending, stop spending!]

Is Keynes dead yet?
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[hit and run]

TM:
The other Tom Maguire would be thrilled.

Hmmmm...about that other Tom Maguire:

Maguire's flying column then made for the Party Mountains.

Sounds exactly right.

I retyped it instead of copying. I hope I didn't misspell anything.

[Parking Lot]

didn't krugman recently call savers 'financial terrorists' ??

[Jack is Back!]

Ireland will have a few riders in the Tour de France, which brings me to this OT note. I just found out driving back from Lille, that the Tour de France is in Antwerp. Not just Antwerp but it will start in Holland and during Stage 2 will pass down the Kapellensteenweg in my wife's village of Ekeren-Donk just on the border with Brasschaat. So, now we are in London to try and find some American flags since the peloton and Lance Armstrong will be riding by us on the 4th of July This is Lance's last Tour and my son is so excited he is making a sign out of an old bed sheet that says, "Faster Lance, Lower Taxes" just in case CNN is there to film it.

[LouP]

Bah. A pox on all educated economists, and particularly the Nobel Prize winning kind.

At its most fundamental level, wealth consists of three elements: 1) material - both raw and nature-provided, 2) human labor availability, and 3) restraint (you can't spend more than you can take in by barter and retain wealth). Everything beyond that is just manipulation of those three basic elements.

So where are we? The environmentalists and the demonization of producers have choked off element #1. Labor has been choked off by moving jobs elsewhere, and by paying people to produce nothing. Restraint, and lack thereof, speaks for itself (but Keynes theory is in total opposition to element #3).

There's no great mystery in this, and it doesn't take a Nobel Prize winning economist to figure it out.

[Rob Crawford]

didn't krugman recently call savers 'financial terrorists' ??

Huh?!

[Extraneus]

NEW EVIDENCE REVEALED: GORE SEX SCANDAL VICTIM TELLS ALL!!!

"I want justice served," Hagerty said as she reveals the key witness who could blow the case wide open, the secret hotel video surveillance and the DNA evidence!

Hahaha.

[Parking Lot]

Rob

I can't find the reference so I'm probably misremembering.

[jimmyk]

A pox on all educated economists, and particularly the Nobel Prize winning kind.

Would you include Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, among others, in that pox?

[LouP]

jimmyk, well yes, I would, even if I agree with them. These guys have all succeeded in making the very basics of economics seem so complex (have to justify that advanced degree and Nobel Prize, you know) that the average person is convinced he/she is incapable of understanding even the basics, or that the basics are not even applicable when the ecomony is trusted in the hands of the magic baton-wielding professors. I'll call it the priesthood complex. I know that Milton Friedman is dead, but where are all the high priests of economics to explain that what is going wrong right now can be understood by every man in the street?

It's the "you little people can't begin to understand economics" myth that is letting people like Krugman get away with this BS. And they are all guilty of creating that self-serving mystic.

But, hey, I'm just a little biased and cynical after watching Obama for a year and a half. If the "Bush is to blame" doesn't work, his second line of defense is to trot out the academic PhDs with Nobel Prizes to dazzle us all into silence.

[Rob Crawford]

Actually, LouP, I consider Friedman one of those few people capable of explaining economics clearly and succinctly. I can't recall him ever stooping to the "you're not bright enough to understand" trope.

I could be wrong, of course.

[Rick Ballard]

"dazzle us all into silence"

Befuddle the muddle is more like it. Smith, Hayek and Mises join Friedman among those who have passed on but remain both intelligible and perspicacious in the field and Barro and Becker both continue to proffer proof that even some living economists have a firm grip on the reality which tends to separate the gold from the credentialed moron Keynesian dross even if the Nobel committee is unable to do so.