Krugman and the “Heroic” Fed

Once an avid reader of Paul Krugman’s New York Times twice-weekly columns, I admit to rarely even glancing at his work now, since I know that anything he writes is going to have the theme of ‘Trump evil, Democrats good’ each time, and it doesn’t take long to get one’s fill of that, even if one disagrees with Donald Trump’s policies or cringes at some of his public statements. The real problem, however, is that Krugman also manages to endorse unsound and inflationary economic policies as a ‘solution’ to what he calls ‘Trumpism.’
If one reads Krugman to see what ‘vulgar’ Keynesian fallacies he is promoting, the man rarely disappoints, and a recent column in which he attacks what he believes will be Trump’s future choice to head the Federal Reserve System only burnishes Krugman’s Keynesian credentials. After claiming that Trump has been like a ‘Category 5 hurricane sweeping through the U. S. government, leaving devastation in his wake,’ Krugman then worries if the Fed will suffer the same fate. One only could hope….
Before looking at Krugman’s worshipful commentary on the current Fed leadership, a brief point is in order regarding the rest of official Washington that Trump allegedly has devastated. People like Krugman believe that Washington and its gaggle of Alphabet-Soup agencies regulating nearly every aspect of individual lives is the very source of social stability and economic prosperity in this country – provided there are little or no restraints on what government agents can do. As Krugman and his fellow progressives see it, we need more, not less, bureaucratic control of our lives, and especially control by people of progressive bent with ‘elite’ academic credentials, since they are smarter than the rest of us, so they should be able to tell us what to do.

This post was published at Ludwig von Mises Institute on Oct 17, 2017.