OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Humbug Express
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: December 23, 2010
Hey,
Get to it, beard-o.
has anyone noticed that “A Christmas Carol” is a dangerous leftist tract?
Tract would be less accurate than, say fable or parable, but I’ll let it slide. It's too early in the article for me to get belligerent.
I mean, consider the scene, early in the book,
Catch your breath, big guy. This is the written equivalent of a child rushing to tell his mother a story about finger painting. “…and then, when we got to school, in third period, the one the Ms. Jenkins teaches, we opened the blue jar so that we could paint our dinosaur, and then Sally got some yellow paint on her dress, and then, Billy dropped the dinosaur book and ruined the picture of the dilapisaurus, and then, I mean, then, [deep breath] the teacher said it looked like a turkey.” Take ‘er easy, slugger. You might pass out.
where Ebenezer Scrooge rightly refuses to contribute to a poverty relief fund.
Please note the relevant features here: this is a private charity funded through voluntary contributions
“I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,”
This is also what we like to call “common sense.”
he declares. Oh, wait. That wasn’t Scrooge. That was Newt Gingrich — last week.
Krugman won’t tell you, but this is in reference to extending unemployment benefits, which are stretching into their second year. Please note the relevant features here: unemployment benefits are a public program funded through mandatory contributions.
What Scrooge actually says is, “Are there no prisons?” But it’s pretty much the same thing.
Public vs. private, voluntary vs. mandatory. With the Obama administration nationalizing industries and using the influence of government agencies (see: Kathleen Sebelius) to stifle opposition and compel constituents to “voluntary” compliance, I can see why Krugman fails to make the distinction. Were this private industry, this type of behavior would fall somewhere between blackmail and racketeering.
Anyway, instead of praising Scrooge for his principled stand against the welfare state,
Again, charities are private. They have nothing to do with the state.
Charles Dickens makes him out to be some kind of bad guy. How leftist is that?
While I certainly understand that Krugman is trying to be ironic, the world is full of leftist parables masquerading as moralistic children’s tales:
--Robin Hood is elevated by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged as the manifesto of her redistributionist villains
--The Giving Tree is an anthem for aspiring eco-terrorists
--The Lorax—this one’s just too easy. “I speak for the trees!” Yeah, well I speak for the chainsaws, backhoes, and helicopter-mounted buzz-saws, Jack.
--Bluebeard (especially in its current incarnations and feminist reimaginings) portrays all wealth as an accessory to deranged rapists.
--Charlotte’s Web is anti-agrarian nonsense
--The Phantom Tollbooth is a tip of the cap to Dadaists and nihilists—or something. My third grade teacher would be displeased to know that I got bored and stopped reading before the end.
--Green Eggs and Ham gives credence to the notion that all strife is born of ignorance as opposed to sustentative issues.
As you can see, the fundamental issues of public policy haven’t changed since Victorian times.
I’m going to bludgeon this, because I’ve got my bludgeoning stick handy: Charity differs from statism insofar as charity is PRIVATE and VOLUNTARY.
Still, some things are different. In particular, the production of humbug —
I get that economists refer to everything as interchangeable widgets and function in the absurd make-believe land where “utils” are a more important metric than money, but this is just fucking silly—and not in a cute way.
which was still a somewhat amateurish craft
:: Requisite joke about writing being an amateurish craft for Paul Krugman ::
when Dickens wrote — has now become a systematic, even industrial, process.
I’m no literary critic, but Dickens was the premier literary icon of the industrial revolution era. While he rarely dealt with the issues of industrialization, he certainly lived in an era that embraced production far more than our post-industrial society.
Let me walk you through a case in point, one that I’ve been following lately.
If you must; I always brace myself for such meanderings when I open up the Times’ Editorial Page.
If you listen to the recent speeches of Republican presidential hopefuls,
I’m expecting no fewer than 3 Republican presidential candidates mentioned by name. This is just protocol.
you’ll find several of them talking at length about the harm done by unionized government workers, who have, they say, multiplied under the Obama administration.
A recent example was an op-ed article by the outgoing Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty,
There’s 1.
who declared that “thanks to President Obama,” government is the only booming sector in our economy:
With you so far.
“Since January 2008” — silly me, I thought Mr. Obama wasn’t inaugurated until 2009
True, but the Democrats in congress enacting his legislative agenda ascended in 2006. By 2008, President Bush had simply lost the will to continue fighting the good fight against a hostile congress and a more hostile media.
— “the private sector has lost nearly eight million jobs, while local, state and federal governments added 590,000.”
Horrors! Except that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, government employment has fallen, not risen, since January 2008.
Seriously. I addressed this last time. My Office of Personnel Management data trumps your Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 17 seconds!
And since January 2009, when Mr. Obama actually did take office, government employment has fallen by more than 300,000 as hard-pressed state and local governments have been forced to lay off teachers, police officers, firefighters and other workers.
In other words, administrators in charge of making sure schools use more “facially-friendly” dodgeballs, meter maids, male strippers in fireman’s outfits, and dim-witted cousins who lucked into appointed do-nothing posts. If so, fantastic.
So how did the notion of a surge in government payrolls under Mr. Obama take hold?
It’s not just federal workers that piss us off. It’s state employees, local employees, government contractors, and non-profit workers who push the American work force away from profitability. It’s a new class of petty tyrants, amassing power in their state-sponsored fiefdoms. It’s the debasement of a market-driven system for compensation. In short, it’s not the numbers. It’s the influence.
New regulation forces companies to hire new employees for compliance. That will not translate to the statistics, but these new employees add no value, and costs are passed on to the consumer. New graduates view a government job as solid gold. Wall Street is a distant second. Productive industry is a distant third. The fear is not that we’ll be inundated by legions of federal employees; it is that we will all—public sector or private—be working for the government.
It turns out that last spring there was, in fact, a bulge in government employment. And both politicians and researchers at humbug factories — I mean, conservative think tanks — quickly seized on this bulge as evidence of an exploding public sector.
No, you buffoon. It was widely acknowledged as a dampener to the over-hyped good news about the surge in employment figures. That, of course, didn’t stop fellow buffoon Joe Biden from dubbing Summer 2010 as “the Summer of Recovery.” Fail.
Over the summer, articles and speeches began to appear highlighting the rise in government employment and issuing dire warnings about what it portended for America’s future.
[Citation needed]
But anyone paying attention knew why public employment had risen — and it had nothing to do with Big Government. It was, instead, the fact that the federal government had to hire a lot of temporary workers to carry out the 2010 Census — workers who have almost all left the payroll now that the Census is done.
Yes. We said absolutely all of this while the Obama/Biden tag-team thumped its chest about improving unemployment figures in early 2010. We knew then that it was bullshit.
Is it really possible that the authors of those articles and speeches about soaring public employment didn’t know what was going on?
No. Everyone I talked about the economy with during that period knew that the Census was inflating the numbers. No one I talked to thinks that the government is hiring up a storm. We know why. It’s broke and the Republicans are going to yank on the reins of the federal government. That doesn’t assuage our concerns on the scope and influence (often misstated as the size) of government.
Well, I guess we should never assume malice when ignorance remains a possibility.
Anyone familiar with the myth of Narcissus and Echo? Does he really believe that he’s the only one who understands this basic algebraic truism?
There has not, however, been any visible effort to retract those erroneous claims.
Largely because they STILL ARE NOT ERRONEOUS. If they were counted in the unemployment figures, they should be counted in our analysis as well.
And this isn’t the only case of a claimed huge expansion in government that turns out to be nothing of the kind. Have you heard the one about how there’s been an explosion in the number of federal regulators?
Not even a little. I’ve heard that there is going to be a huge explosion in the number of federal regulators. IRS agents to administer the Obamacare mandate; SEC drones to enforce FinReg; the food safety bill will force more municipal drones into the schools to make sure the salad par is stocked with organic, locally grown cucumbers.
Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute looked into the numbers behind that claim, and it turns out that almost all of those additional “regulators” work for the Department of Homeland Security, protecting us against terrorists.
Well that, and taking over/censoring various websites for alleged copyright infringement without a court order and groping air travelers…sounds like a regulatory agency to me.
Still, why does it matter what some politicians and think tanks say? The answer is that there’s a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure in place to catapult the propaganda,
Lies. Damnable lies. The right has talk radio and sometimes Fox News. The left has the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNN, virtually all daytime talk, and the entirety of the Hollywood apparatus and a slew of other former heavyweights that I’m forgetting.
as former President George W. Bush put it, to rapidly disseminate bogus analysis to a wide audience where it becomes part of what “everyone knows.” (There’s nothing comparable on the left,
I like to think of Paul Krugman as Mr. Magoo. The idiot can’t even see that he and his ilk are the mechanism on the left to disseminate falsehoods with an ideological slant. This is like Colonel Sanders insisting that no one in Kentucky cooks chicken or Robert Byrd claiming that the Democratic party was never a haven for contemptible racists.
which has fallen far behind in the humbug race.)
Mostly because the newspapers are failing as a result of being antiquated, outdated, and publishing the type of blather spewed by Paul Krugman.
And it’s a very effective process.
He would know.
When discussing the alleged huge expansion of government under Mr. Obama, I’ve repeatedly found that people just won’t believe me when I try to point out that it never happened.
Because your statistics are dubious—or--at best, completely irrelevant.
They assume that I’m lying, or somehow cherry-picking the data.
Nailed it.
After all, they’ve heard over and over again about that surge in government spending and employment, and they don’t realize that everything they’ve heard was a special delivery from the Humbug Express.
We get it. Everyone but you is a sheep.
So in this holiday season, let’s remember the wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge. Not the bit about denying food and medical care to those who need them:
This is not even close to an appropriate use for a colon.
America’s failure to take care of its own less-fortunate citizens is a national disgrace.
We have welfare, food stamps, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, SCHIP, and a network of charities more wide-ranging than any in the world. We have food banks and blood drives. We have free emergency room care and free education. We have 15000 pages of tax code that are designed to give breaks and loopholes to favored constituencies of “less-fortunates.” Our impoverished have color TVs and cell phones. The United States has colossal safety net that is precisely designed to “take care of its own less fortunate citizens.” No one with a brain in their head believes that the safety net is deficient.
But Scrooge was right about the prevalence of humbug. And we’d be much better off as a nation if more people had the courage to say “Bah!”
Nope, but in the spirit of “A Christmas Carol,” I’ll make sure the ‘Ghost of a Swift Kick in the Ass’ pays you a visit sometime soon.
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