My Secret Life as a Crop-Burning New Dealer
Brian Buckley, one-time adviser to former federal Treasurer Sir Philip Lynch, exposes my double-life as a crop-burning New Dealer:
LIKE the French royal House of Bourbon, some contemporary schools of economics have learnt nothing and forgotten everything. Paul Krugman and Stephen Kirchner (BusinessDay, 19/3) provide telling examples. Their nostrums for the world debt crisis are more government spending, or greater volumes of easy credit, or both.
Professor Krugman is a great admirer of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, but he omits to mention that FDR never got unemployment below 14 per cent, and the unemployment figure in the US was 17.2 per cent at the start of World War II.
Like Krugman, Kirchner (and Ben Bernanke), FDR was worried about price deflation — so much that he had farmers’ crops burned to keep prices up. This was in the middle of the 1930s Depression when millions of families were short of food.
posted on 24 March 2009 by skirchner
in Economics
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Comments
Ew, sue for defaminaton!
Being linked to Krugman should be enough by itself!
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/24 at 06:05 PM
Er, Krugman is a Nobel laureate. He could walk into a job with the Obama administration tomorrow. Krugman is positively mainstream these days.
Dr Kirchner OTOH is a devotee of a hopelessly discredited ideology, and associated with several extreme organisations such as the CIS and IPA.
Ew.
Its Krugman who should be suing!
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/24 at 07:40 PM
Edit: Krugman could walked into a job with the Obama administration until he tore shreds off the Geithner Plan overnight.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/25 at 07:43 AM
Krugman couldn’t walk into a job at the Obama administration. Not after he tore shreds off the Clinton administration in the early 1990s. :)
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/25 at 04:51 PM
In many ways, Paul Krugman and Stephen share the same views; certainly, they use the same analytical framework.
For example, Stephen wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal where he accepted the need for “short-term” stimulus measures. Moreover, he spends most of his time defending central bankers such as Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, who he cites approvingly. It’s quite strange in some ways, since even Anna Schwartz thinks the Fed is the culprit, and that the problem now is nothing like the Great Depression. She’s on record as saying it does not require easy money policy.
But I suppose that’s just the nature of Australian free-market economics… it’s less free-market than America. Basically Krugman-lite.
Posted by Sukrit Sabhlok on 03/26 at 12:19 AM