Today Donald Luskin has this piece at his website, "The Conspiracy To Keep You Poor And Stupid". Good read, and yes, another cut and paste. Bold emphasis mine.
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WHERE'S PAUL? Reader Rohit Dewan writes,
As an amateur student of economics, I had expected to see some interesting new insights from a New York Times article entitled "In Economics Departments, a Growing Will to Debate Fundamental Assumptions." Shame on me! I was disbused of that notion by the very first paragraph.
For many economists, questioning free-market orthodoxy is akin to expressing a belief in intelligent design at a Darwin convention: Those who doubt the naturally beneficial workings of the market are considered either deluded or crazy.Of course, being the Times, the entire article is devoted to those economists, almost universally from either absolute backwaters (University of Missouri, Kansas City) or the height of the ivory tower (Princeton, Harvard) who “question the orthodoxy” of free markets by promoting socialism and greater government control instead. This would be like a physicist claiming that “Aristotle needs another chance” even after Newtonian physics had been discovered. I didn’t realize that clinging to the economic ideas of Marx and Keynes was the kind of tilting at windmills the academic debate on economics needs, but the implication from NYT reporter Patricia Cohen is that these guys deserve a chance – well patty, they already had their chance, and we ended up with the Soviet Union, price controls, and the economy of the 1970’s.
The most interesting part of the article though is within this whole list of respected academic economists who "doubt the naturally beneficial workings of the market" and "question the profession’s most cherished ideas about not interfering in the economy."
There is one name that is conspicuously absent. I wonder if that was a mere oversight, or a tacit acknowledgement by the Times that Krugman has crossed the line from academic to partisan hack?
