Krugman’s Trashy Debating Style

Tibor R. Machan

Looks like critics of the free market are at their whit’s end. At least one of the most prominent of them clearly appears to be.

Princeton economics professor and columnist for The New York Times Paul Krugman has always been discourteous to those with whom he disagrees but his latest exhibition of his way of going about debating issues takes the cake. It used to be that he would call everyone who finds even the slightest merit in free market economic theory a “market fundamentalist,” suggesting thereby that such folks are, like all fundamentalists, mindless in their convictions and merely blindly follow some sacred text or book of instructions. Besides wishing to score points for his statist economic politics by smearing the ideas and methods of his intellectual adversaries, he also regularly distorts the scholarly lay of the land by claiming that America is in the grip of such fundamentalism. This basically meant that throughout the academic landscape departments of economics are filled by people who hold and teach views similar to those held by the late Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises (among others).

While these thinkers did consider the free market superior to its statist alternatives--ones that give a decisive role to government intervention in the lives and activities of market agents--they did not, of course, hold identical views. Nonetheless, Krugman lumps them all as fundamentalists. Moreover, he rarely takes on living supporters of the free market, such as James Buchanan or Gary Becker, not to mention such current members of the Austrian School as NYU’s Israel Kirzner. Might we suppose that he doesn’t wish to engage anyone in a dialogue about economic policy but merely discredit them once they could not respond? (Just after Milton Friedman died, he and his frequent co-author Robin Wells penned an extensive and it turns out demonstrably inaccurate essay on Friedman for The New York Review of Books.) Also, despite Krugman’s allegation, there is plainly no dominance of free market thinking in American universities. Mainstream economists are mostly followers of such notables as Paul Samuelson and, of course, John Maynard Keynes, with quite a few who are influenced by the political economics of welfare statism. At the universities where I have taught throughout the last 40 plus years, economists may have been respectful toward free market theorists but were by no means fully in line with their views. So even in this elementary matter, Krugman has it wrong.

But the claim that the country is in the grips of market fundamentalism is also mistaken if it’s meant to apply to official public policies bearing on economic matters. Just for starters, the financial market place has been heavily regulated for over a hundred years--consistent free market theorists usually don’t favor a central bank such as the country’s Federal Reserve Bank (even though, somewhat paradoxically, Alan Greenspan had been such a consistent free market thinker before he was selected to head up the Fed). Furthermore, the plethora of government regulation of various elements of the economy, including virtually all professions (apart from the clergy, journalism, and writers of all stripes who are protected against such regulation by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution), is decisive evidence that free market thinking does not dominate public policy in America.

Yet, despite all this, here is a Nobel Laureate and professor from a most prestigious academic institution and columnist for a most distinguished newspaper who keeps trying to distort reality. Why? But I will not speculate, again. Who knows what Krugman’s agenda is.

One thing does clearly stand out in his approach to making a case for more and more government involvement in the economy. This is that he relies extensively on name calling, on besmirching those with whom he disagrees. In a recent column he went so far as to dismiss all those who hold views opposed to his as zombies! Yes, zombies. That means that people, some very distinguished scholars, who are convinced that a public policy of laissez-faire when it comes to a country’s economic affairs is best are all mindless. They do not merely think mistakenly but cannot think at all.

When a critic of a position needs to resort to this kind of technique with which to attract readers of his missives to his own outlook, it suggests that the intellectual merits of that position are truly hopeless. And that is precisely so. Statism in economics has for a long time been proven and shown to be utterly unsupportable, be this the Draconian sort one found in Soviet Russia and finds in North Korea or the less drastic kind that has just produced the worldwide financial meltdown, namely the more or less interventionist welfare state.