Pathos of the Political Operative

This post will be brief, but to the point. Paul Krugman no longer discusses economics in his column, as apparently the hard work of coordinating his writing with Barack Obama's re-election campaign means that "economics" will be passed off as little more than a demand that the government go on a tax-borrow-print-spend binge.

In his latest column, he vociferously defends Obama's latest "you didn't build that" speech, which really was nothing less than a declaration of war against entrepreneurship. (Oh, I forgot. Many, many years ago, Krugman had a post on entrepreneurship in which he tried to interpret it from a macro viewpoint, claiming that there was little or no entrepreneurship during the 1980s.Gee, I wonder if Krugman is just trying once again to be a political operative, not an economist.)

Reading Krugman's caricature of how people have responded (he wants us to believe that entrepreneurs and the "superrich" are one and the same) to Obama's attack on free markets (his claim that any success is always the result of some sort of government-enforced collectivism), I wonder how Krugman then is justified in claiming that Obama has "created jobs." Please explain to me how that is done. Did Obama risk his own financial capital? No. He took money from taxpayers and gave it to political contributors, and then called it "job creation," and Krugman is right there with him. (Anyone who will defend the taxpayer-funded fiasco called Solyndra really is no economist.)

No one is going to say that a single individual builds an entire business; however, success comes about through mutually-beneficial cooperation, but that is not what Obama and Krugman are saying. Instead, they are appealing to collectivist thinking. Furthermore, his comments about Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge demonstrated his own ignorance about the private firms that actually built these projects.

Unfortunately, neither Obama nor Krugman understand even a whit about the role entrepreneurs have played in the economic growth of this country and in the world. But, then, Krugman's MIT mentor, Paul Samuelson, believed that communism was producing a magnificent economy in the Soviet Union. Like Krugman, Samuelson never let facts get in his way.