Tuesday, March 2, 2021

The Worst Column Paul Krugman Has Ever Written

Paul Krugman

In his latest New York Times column, Paul Krugman writes:

It’s true that both Economics 101 and conservative ideology say that more choice is always a good thing. Milton Friedman’s famous and influential 1980 TV series extolling the wonders of capitalism was titled “Free to Choose.”

The spread of this ideology has turned America into a land where many aspects of life that used to be just part of the background now require potentially fateful decisions. You don’t get a company pension, you have to decide how to invest your 401(k)...

Some, maybe even most, of this expansion of choice was good. I don’t miss the days when all home phones were owned by AT&T and customers weren’t allowed to substitute their own handsets.

But the argument that more choice is always good rests on the assumption that people have more or less unlimited capacity to do due diligence on every aspect of their lives — and the real world isn’t like that. People have children to raise, jobs to do, lives to live and limited ability to process information.

And in the real world, too much choice can be a big problem... I’d suggest that an excess of choice is taking a psychological toll on many Americans, even when they don’t end up experiencing disaster...

So the next time some politician tries to sell a new policy — typically deregulation — by claiming that it will increase choice, be skeptical. Having more options isn’t automatically good, and in America we probably have more choices than we should.


 How idiotic can a New York Times columnist get? 

More choices mean more flexibility and if there develops a situation where it is too difficult for many to choose via myriad options, why wouldn't the market develop simple options?

This is probably Krugman's worst column he has ever written.

It presents an absurd scenario where the only solution is less choice for all and more government authoritarianism.

Krugman is clearly out front, ahead of the pack, for the 2021 Stalin Award.

-RW

15 comments:

  1. Krugman does not write his own columns. It's beneath him.

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    1. His cat does it for him. Or maybe the cat's toxoplasma.

      I'm wondering why this Krugman windbag even deserves being noticed?

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  2. So much choice is taxing on us little people's brains! It requires so much strenuous thinking and decision-making, it's just intimidating, stressful and draining! Someone needs to treat us like children and make the choices for us!

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  3. What he means to say is that there are choices that should be left to people who think like him. Could you imagine having Krugman deciding what is allowed and what is not? We'd have no internet if Krugman got to make that choice for us. Considering the alternative, I'll accept the risk that comes from having more choices.

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  4. It's of a piece with how much leftists really believe in the saying "my body, my choice."

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  5. Actually this is far pat idiotic it is pure evil. The arrogance and hubris of this man knows no bounds. It truly is a wonder. What his words actually convey is a lust to rule over those he deems of lesser intellect all the while signaling to them that he does this and offers his wisdom or that of other more enlightened persons out of the goodness of his heart. as the Brits would say Bollucks.
    Krugman is one of the most detestable reptiles in the public eye and has been for decades.
    The Stalin Award is very appropriate.

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  6. Krugman writes: "But the argument that more choice is always good rests on the assumption that people have more or less unlimited capacity to do due diligence on every aspect of their lives . . . "

    Apparently Krugman rests on the assumption that people in government have more or less unlimited capacity to do due diligence on every aspect of our lives for us.

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  7. Another sign of being slim between ears in this country of preposterousness.

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  8. So many horrible columns it's hard to pick just one.

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  9. That is exactly how the political market is organized. Very little choice and almost irrelevant for those who want to change the status quo.

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  10. As I recall, this is the same argument made by the "Massa" on the slave plantation: Let the simple-minded Negros pick cotton while I the superior minded white-man pick what they eat, wear, live, etc as they aren't mentally fit to do so. Seems the socialist-authoritarian mindset is simple chattel slavery writ large with more clever rhetoric disguising what it really is: pure dehumanizing evil.

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  11. He must have been talking with Bernie about all those unnecessary choices consumers have to make about which deodorant to buy....

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  12. The Idiocracy has spoken how dare you not take word of the Idiocracy

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  13. I think I know what happened here. I haven't heard Krugman's name much recently. What a blissful break. Guess he wanted some attention so he had to say something really outlandish.

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  14. My wife and I watched an episode of Friedman's "Free to Choose" last night (the episode about equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome...i.e. having a system that allows people to freely pursue inequality of outcome without government intervention is the surest way to achieve the most equality of outcome).. Every sentence out of Friedman's mouth is, not surprisingly, incisive and spot-on (even at the end when he's with a panel of "experts," warding-off the progressives' stupid arguments about the need for government policies promoting egalitarianism. Thomas Sowell excepted of course). He would've made mince-meat out of Krugman, and all his nonsense about the utility in restricting people's freedom to choose.

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