http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/krugman-obama-embraced-conservative-worldview/
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says President Barack Obama has adopted a right-wing mindset on American politics and is allowing conservative "mythology" to instruct his view of US history.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist and superstar commentator of the left excoriated Obama's allegation that President Franklin Roosevelt initially dragged his feet on the Great Depression for political purposes.
"We didn’t actually, I think, do what Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, which was basically wait for six months until the thing had gotten so bad that it became an easier sell politically because we thought that was irresponsible. We had to act quickly," Obama told liberal bloggers recently in a private meeting.
On his Times blog, Krugman dismissed this as a "right-wing smear." "What actually happened" between FDR's election and inauguration, he wrote, is that "Herbert Hoover tried to rope FDR into maintaining his policies, including rigid adherence to the gold standard and fiscal austerity. FDR declined to be part of this."
Did Hoover actually maintain a rigid adherence to the gold standard and how can Krugman say that Hoover believed in fiscal austerity given the growth in government during his administration and the fact that John Nance Gardner accused Hoover of ' leading America down the path to socialism'?
Can anybody explain how Krugman reaches such conclusions?
It depends on what you mean by 'gold standard'. After the creation of the Fed in 1913, the Fed notes were backed 40% by gold, not the 100% which, I think, most people refer to as the 'gold standard.' Further, Rothbard claims that the gold standard ended around WWI.
Joseph Stalin would accuse Murray Rothbard of socialism to win an election.
The same way Krugman reaches every conclusion. He makes up something the ruling class wants to hear, and shouts it to everyone and completely ignores all evidence to the contrary. When the sentiments of the ruling class changes, so does his arguments.
In short, he's a snake.
That's possible, although did FDR enter into the race for president with the New Deal already in his head or did he wing it and expand upon Hoover's policies? You also have to remember that the Dems did have some street cred when it comes to classical liberalism.
Herbert Hoover was opposed to two things while President 1)Going off the gold standard and 2)Direct help to the poor (unemployment benefits/welfare).
During the end of his administration (late 1932 to 1933) when literally everything was in the shitter and Hoover was powerless (Roosevelt won and Democrats had control of the house) Hoover apparently tried to have talks with Roosevelt to see if he would work with him in implementing some of his policies to try and alleviate the depression. Roosevelt didn't want to because then some of the improvement would be given to Hoover, he prefferred to have shit hit the fan while he wasn't in office instead of trying to work with the previous adminstration.
CrazyCoot: Can anybody explain how Krugman reaches such conclusions?
He's a moron. Or two other possible solutions: he's lying; he's nuts.
After a long time in dealing with such people, those who subscribe to such simplistic, 10th grade history text book myths for their world view without even admitting perhaps a debatable grey area are either: ignorant morons who never read beyond their predetermined circle of echo chamber yes-authors; liars who are trying to push an agenda and deliberately ignoring facts not convenient to their narrative; nut jobs who belong in a rubber room. From what I've seen of Krugman in the NYT and in interviews, he's not nuts and at least he doesn't seem to think he has an agenda. He's just an extreme version of your typical smug echo chamber liberal with a pretense to knowledge that his recent award probably exacerbated to Napoeonic levels. It's not a phenomena unique to the left but it is more pronounced with them because they tend to congregate in cities and major metro areas unlike conservatives and libertarians who tend to be more spread out and by nature have to interact with more varied people on a day to day basis.
I like how Krugman considers 'right wing' a view that was held by many liberals, Progressives and Communist fellow-travelers.
But let's just forget the localist, populist anti-Federal Progressives, liberals and socialists. They're inconvenient history.
"I like how Krugman considers 'right wing' a view that was held by many liberals, Progressives and Communist fellow-travelers.
But let's just forget the localist, populist anti-Federal Progressives, liberals and socialists. They're inconvenient history."
I often think the best and most needed first step in political discourse is to get the Nolan chart and teach it to people so at least there can be some kind of objective judgement about where on the political spectrum an idea truly belongs. I'm so sick of 'conservatives' who advocate massive state intervention and 'liberals' who think anyone to the right of Marx is a right wing nutjob. Bill Maher is one of my favorite examples, he thinks the right is massive and extreme and the left moderate and reasonable, and if you plot Maher and assume an equal distribution of people across the Nolan chart and then look at it edge-on, you'd see relatively speaking he's right, but it's just because the US itself is so far into lefty totalitarian territory that there are relatively far more people objecting to the current state of affairs as those who accept it or want more, and the objectors tend to be on 'the right', even though they're a mix of everything from fascists to libertarians. It's also this phenomena which alllows lefties like Maher to define the whole right as Hannity and Palin because what they're doing is essentially removing an entire dimension of political though.
The Nolan Chart is incoherent. Personal vs. economic freedom? Lulz!
The Pournelle Chart is much better.
The word conservative has absolutely no meaning.
Look, I hang out around a few interesting (non-political) internet column sites where the writers occasionally call themselves conservative. Of course, if you ever prod them on what conservative means or what that indicates about their beliefs, they will respond that they don't have any particular worldview or ideology or any common perspective. They are just called conservatives, because that's what the media calls them.
They don't like libertarianism, not necessarilly because of disagreement but because they found libertarians they knew to be a little impolite and arrogant. They don't like statism, because they think it is extremely out of proportion that authorities do things in the name of safety as if we are all going to live forever. They don't like unpatriotic people, because they think it's expected out of some sense of humanity to love at least your fellow regional peoples unconditionally. They don't like nationalists, because they find it ridiculous that certain dubious ideas are justified in the name of national interest. They don't like leftists and Marxists or whatever because they find their experiments in social engineering and alternative lifestyles to be scary. They don't like National Review/Fox News style people for the exact same reasons. They don't like aggressively anti-religious atheism, because they think it is childish. They don't like modern day pop evangelical Christianity and Bible-thumping, because it is a heretical version of what Christianity used to be. They don't like environmental laws, because they find them out of proportion, but they don't like industrialisation and urbanisation burning the forests of their youth. They don't like Civil Rights Act and they are turned off by certain minorities because of their behaviour. They also don't like Nazis and the modern day racialists of the Stormfront kind because they think it is wacky to assume race and culture are the same thing.
So to clarify, they would simply say that they are conservatives, because modern day polarization and media name calling means that they are conservatives for opposing progressive values like equality, taxation, and state control and liking the past a little more than allowed. Otherwise, they never had any particular views. So they say, fine, call us whatever you want. Because such people often don't like many political conservatives, "some misguided young men decided that we instead were "paleoconservatives", annoyingly enough". In the end, what I have gathered from reading entertainment/humour columns of such people loosely called conservatives is that the word conservative is simply a portmanteau word for everybody who does not follow any elitist academic ideology. Thus, a conservative could refer to all kinds of people under the sun. And it does. The clever trick was in inventing the word "conservative", so that ideologues could turn the tables and make their opponents look like they are the insane ideological ones. Even in more serious political columns, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams simply say they are ordinary middle class people saying what all ordinary middle class people say to each other on a daily basis. Sowell and Williams are not some grassroots populists (both are very anti-democracy), but it's just that when some crazy things are concerned, even they sympathize with the everyman.
Krugman calls Obama a conservative in the exact same way every such NYT writer calls anybody possible a conservative.
In all honesty, every time I see a post on Krugman's conclusions, I'm blown away. There are times that I "think" I understand his thought process, but then I see a thread like this and I'm blown away. He's never consistent on anything.
I remember just a few months ago that he stated that Austrian economist adhered to supply side economics.
I've given up on trying to understand his thought process.
That leads me to conclude that ever since he was awarded the Nobel Prize that he's been on LCD or mescaline.
That's wrong, but that's at least an understandable mistake. In regards to a lot of micro-econ and some macro (aside from capital and interest), you will see much more similarity between Mises and Sowell or Paul Craig Roberts than you will for any other school.
"The Nolan Chart is incoherent. Personal vs. economic freedom? Lulz!
The Pournelle Chart is much better."
Not to my mind. Both describe the political landscape, but the Nolan chart is more applicable to the US and to modern political analysis, and what's more, doesn't require any in depth explanation to the general population because they accept the personal vs economic freedom idea, even if it is bologna.
So a statement on wage cuts to handle a trillion-dollar deficit - a propaganda statement made in reaction to the last elections - turns Obama into a 'conservative'? I always knew Krugman was a genius.