The favorite collectivist-economics boosting celeb of the leftist dinosaur media is at it again.
Economist Paul Krugman recently tweeted his seeming praise of COVID19 pushing the Dow Jones to, for the third time this month, drop a record amount.
Why?
Because it will hurt President Trump.
Seriously.
Economists, myself included, often make a point of saying that the stock market is not the economy, which it isn't. It *is*, however, pretty much the Trump presidency. Take away his magic talisman and there's nothing left.
Now, we all know he didn’t mention the virus itself, but we also know that the trigger for these sell-offs has been the vast and deep economic ramifications of the effect of the virus on productivity and supply chains. What Krugman just did was ghoulish and almost impossible to comprehend.
But, of course, it’s easy to comprehend, when one considers Krugman’s history of errant economic diagnoses, witchdoctor-like “remedies,” and pathologically bizarre collectivist, money-pumping theories.
This is the man who for years resisted calling the 2008-2011 economic troubles a "recession" (he could have called the period a depression, because it was so deep and lasted so long), but kept calling it an “economic downturn” (perhaps to protect Mr. Obama from criticism). This is the man who actually said that all the U.S. economy needed to rise from that “downturn” was an ALIEN INVASION or the threat of one.
This is the man who embraces John Maynard Keynes’ ludicrous and repeatedly disastrous idea that in order to “stimulate” an economy, it’s a wonderful idea to have the central government or its licensed monopoly bank create a bunch of valueless currency and spend it or hand it out to people, to have the government “employ” people by paying them to dig ditches and fill them in again, a-la FDR’s pathological potpourri of alphabet agencies.
Such policy proposals, he has claimed, lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. And, of course, he’s utterly wrong.
Wealth is not created by conjuring currency out of thin air, which is one of Krugman’s go-to solutions to pretty much anything, perhaps even a sore throat. Creating currency that has no connection to a reserve of a valuable commodity merely destroys the buying power of each unit of currency, handing advantages to the politically connected who get the new money first (usually government and political pals in banking), and drives up prices and malinvestments until average consumers begin to see that prices are far too high compared to the actual value of something, and they begin to curtail their spending.
The boom-bust cycle is the result, leaving resources wasted, people unemployed, and economies in shambles.
It’s one thing to note that the stock market is already over-valued due to the money-printing and bogus government bailouts of banks and politically-favored corporations since 2008. It’s a whole different ballgame to continue calling for that kind of policy poison even as one applauds a market crash that signifies not only harm to people’s savings, but signifies a humanitarian crisis due to a deadly virus.
Krugman’s post is inexcusable, and smacks of the opportunism of Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton, when Rahm told an audience to “never waste a good crisis” and Hillary echoed his sentiments.
We’ve been advised to self-quarantine during this particular crisis.
Perhaps Krugman should do the same for his unctuous ideology and harmful policy prescriptions.