Krugman, the Junk Economist

Krugman, the Junk Economist

Posted by Michael S. Rozeff

There is Austrian economics. There is good economics. There is sound economics. There is economics that understands markets, the price system, money, finance, booms, and busts. Then, on the other hand, there is Junk Economics. Junk Economics includes Keynesian ideas as a subset, but is much broader in its shredding of truth in economics. Krugman is, in my opinion, the foremost exponent of Junk Economics. He’s the “bottom.” What would Cole Porter say? “You’re a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop.” Krugman babbles and rambles incoherently. Just listen to him explaining The Great Depression in this video! His mind is filled with Junk cliches and stories that he views as truth. He cannot even imagine or rationally consider sound alternatives, because he has constructed for himself Junk Economic interpretations and repeated them so often and shaped his whole politics and being around them that he cannot extricate himself. He mixes his Junk Economics in with his even worse, if that is possible, Junk Politics and Junk History. The result is the kind of slurs he is now levying against the Austrians now appearing. They come natural to him. He doesn’t even have to think about them. They are of course — JUNK.

I feel no ill will toward Krugman, whom I’ve never met. I do think he has a nasty streak in him that comes out when he skewers any and all thinkers and ideas that go against his one-sided Junk views. I do think that what’s more important than him is that he symbolizes and represents so many, indeed, a huge number of economists who have been “trained,” i.e., indoctrinated in many of the same myths that pass for economic science. This is really a shame, and a very harmful shame at that. Even if we granted politician-lawyers the assumption that they are well-meaning, they’d still be sitting there legislating with the half-wit ideas being thrown at them in the press or by Junk Economists or that they pick up at cocktail parties or in a university course. Krugman should be thought of as the quintessential Junk Economist of the time who has transmuted into a Junk Commentator, which is another class of people that Americans should not be listening to.