The liberal economist, Paul Krugman, has seen fit to advise the president elect on how to solve all the country's ills in the latest edition of the Rolling Stone magazine. The article is entitled "What Obama Must Do - A Letter To The New President". As of this writing it was not available online.
I will leave it to the trained economists to debunk all the economic fallacies Mr. Krugman puts forward in this article. My goal here is to focus on his contradictory views of war.
Many on the left are holding up President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (FDR) New Deal as a guide for Mr. Obama. Mr. Krugman is no exception. He clings to the fallacy that FDR got us out of the Great Depression. While acknowledging that the New Deal didn't end the Depression (he thinks it wasn't aggressive enough) Mr. Krugman states in the article that "It took the giant public works project known as World War II - a project that finally silenced the penny pinchers - to bring the Depression to an end." The idea that WW II ended the Depression or that military spending can bring prosperity is easily debunked. (See here.) Why, Mr. Krugman, strangely, provides us with an excellent example on the next page. He writes, "It's possible that reviving the economy might cost as much as a trillion dollars over the course of your first term. But the Bush administration wasted at least twice as much on an unnecessary war." Let me get this straight, Mr. Bush spending of more than two trillion dollars failed to keep us out of the recession, but Mr. Obama spending less than half as much will get us out?!?! Mr. Krugman contradicts himself, tripping over his own feet as he engages in nothing but naked partisan propaganda.
As if that weren't bad enough Mr. Krugman seems to be endorsing war, or at least preparation for war, as a means of keeping the economy growing. True, he nowhere explicitly states this, but notice that he has not taken care to clearly state his opposition to war as economic policy while claiming that WW II got us out of the Depression. That is an implicit endorsement of the war economy. The immorality of killing for profit needs no further going over.
The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can throw the rascals out at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policies.
This is leading us down the road to Fascism. At this point many readers are perhaps thinking that I've just ruined this article. But when one takes a good look at what Fascism really is one sees that it's the direction we're going in. The only difference between our system and pure Fascism is that we get to elect our dictator. As John T. Flynn warned in his book "As We Go Marching" back in 1944:
Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans who have been working to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our nation's greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination, all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers, with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society.
We can only save our liberties by turning away from these Fascistic policies and embracing freedom. This country can't take another FDR. I only hope it's not too late.
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