While Austrians see how individuals working through free markets have bettered their life situations, Krugman and his colleagues see only chaos, failure, and bad food. FULL ARTICLE by William L. Anderson
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/15298/krugmans-straw-man-market-system/
Krugman’s Straw-Man Market System
Previous post: They Chose Liberty
Next post: What We Can Learn from the Soviet Failure
{ 21 comments }
I know this does not fit here, but here’s one of the most respected economists in India giving a day’s worth of laughs with this brilliant statement of his.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/inflation-reflects-economic-prosperity-montek/140241-7.html
This when food inflation has hit a high of around 18.3% as per the government’s own statistics.
Ouch!! My stomach hurts.
Krugman blames every economic woe on the Chinese. Even rising food prices are their fault. A lot of nerve they have, acquiring food and filling their stomachs with it. How dare they!
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/food-prices/
Well, he redeemed himself somewhat with this:
He may have some work to do on monetary policy, but he seems to understand markets better than Krugman does (or, apparently, doesn’t).
“80 degrees in the summer”
Having lived in places like the Philippines where I didn’t have AC, heat and cold tolerances are based on being used to the area or not. Climate control isn’t a necessity of life. The human body adapts to the environment. I had just about zero fat when living in warm places and found myself piling on the pounds when I lived in colder areas. Krugman’s worldview is bizarre. Maybe he spent a little too much time in his perfect temperature control office and needs to get out more.
The market didn’t fail when I lacked AC in the Philippines nor did it fail when my family never used it when I was growing up in the Los Angeles area nor does it fail me now when I rarely turn it on unless it’s over 90 in Florida. I have better things to spend my income on than the electric bill.
“people could be made better off if only they could shake off the chains with which free markets have bound them”
Haha, yes, rise up, and shake off the chains of freedom! We can be free of this freedom!
>and no doubt Krugman would claim that this situation is another example of market failure.
Market failure: Krugman’s Nobel and his job at Princeton and the NYT. Boy, do we need regulation!
What a wonderful essay! We now have a fine implementation of Krugman’s “spend and spend more” philosophy: all houses should be compelled to install central furnaces and air conditioning units, no matter how useless. Our depressed economy is all about the failure of the free market to compel.
Yahoo!!!
You gotta hand it to Paul Krugman. He can put his foot in his mouth and misconstrue the food market in London as readukyt as he misinterprets Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Even a caveman knows more of economics than Professor Krugman. http://jesus-on-taxes.com/ON_PAUL_KRUGMAN.html
I usually find a certain self-centeredness in complaints about “market failure”; that is, the complainer thinks that the market has “failed” because it isn’t doing things the way he thinks it should.
Krugman is actually an anti-economist and if he came in contact with an economist the resulting explosion would release enough energy to meet the worlds energy needs for a couple of years.
If he ever does agree to a debate be careful not to make any actual physical contact.
Love it. LMAO. Is there any free market economist out there who is willing to sacrifice himself for the common good?
There’s a lot of logic point in the article. Example “urbanization before being able to bring in food from the country side” It makes sense to build around the food instead of trying to grow food around civilization. The first one is much easier.
“urbanization before being able to bring in food from the country side”
I found that statement ridiculous. Britain’s road system was excellent centuries before London was “urbanized”; the Romans had seen to it. The Brits also proved themselves quite adept at employing horses and new-fangled inventions like the wheel attached to a cart.
That British food was once considered unpalatable by our modern elites had nothing to do with markets or an inability to ship food — the Brits just happened to like it that way. In fact, the food I grew up on in rural upstate New York (my ancestors were English) was just the same and I found no reason (indeed, it never crossed my mind to think about the matter) to dislike it either.
Where is the evidence to support that statement? How could a populace urbanize without food? Wouldn’t they die of starvation, thus no populace to urbanize? It’s so simple even I can see the ridiculous contradiction.BTW, my grandparents being from Cornwall, one of my favorite meals is pastie. A meat pie consisting mainly of meat (usually beef in these parts), potatoes and carrots, preferably with rutabaga thrown in for extra flavor. I’m sure Mr. Krugman would not find it up to his lofty tastes.
This blows my mind. How many property developments resulted in the newly housed people immediately starving to death?
The intellectuals entered the nineteenth century flushed with the conviction that they were the new makers of history. Had not their words set in motion the earthshaking events of the French Revolution? Coleridge boasted that the most important changes in the world had their origin not in the cabinets of statesmen or the insights of businessmen but “in the closets and lonely walks of theorists.” Heine was more blatant: “Mark this ye proud men of action; ye are nothing but unconscious instruments of men of thought who, often in the humblest seclusion, have appointed you to your inevitable tasks.” Few of the educated knew in the first decades of the nineteenth century that they had an Industrial Revolution on their hands.
=====
Everywhere the intellectuals were strutting, posturing, and declaiming, each fancying himself a man of destiny. Then one morning they woke up to discover that power had fallen into the hands of their middle-class relatives, their lowbrow brothers, uncles, in-laws, who had not only taken possession of everything they could lay their hands on, but aspired to impose their values and tastes upon the whole society. The revulsion from a middle- class society that came to dominate the nineteenth century alienated the intellectuals from the machine age. Writers, poets, artists, philosophers, and scholars poured their scorn on the money-grubbing, mean-spirited, sweating, pushing, hard-working philistines who dared vie with God. “The steam engine,” cried Baudelaire, “is a negation of God.” Flaubert described his joy at the sight of weeds overrunning abandoned buildings, “this embrace of nature coming swiftly to bury the work of man the moment that his hand is no longer there to defend it.” One also wonders how much the refusal to countenance history made by a despised middle class contributed to the tendency of the learned during the nineteenth century to downgrade man as a maker of history.
The cold war between the intellectuals and the middle class that started more than a century ago has been gathering force in the twentieth century, and the intellectuals seem to be coming out on top. In many parts of the world the intellectual is just now at the center of the stage as ruler, legislator, policeman, military leader, and large-scale industrialist.
Eric Hoffer
THE TEMPER OF OUR TIME
New York: Harper & Row, 1964
Will,
As Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom…
Too bad that Dickens gave the wrong impression of the Industrial Revolution because he also didn’t understand what was happening around him. Those poor starving kids eventually were able to get a job and live longer than infancy and eventually increase the standard of living in England that is what Capitalism can do.
Haha. Krugman “suggests” something about Mexico and then “hypothesi[ze]s” about Britain and has the nerve to follow it up with “if you take such things seriously.” Haha!
No, we don’t take “such things” (unresearched speculation) seriously. Maybe if you (and others) didn’t then you wouldn’t say so many stupid things.
This reminds me of an account Hugh Nibley shared to illustrate this kind of fallacious “reasoning.”
traveling is a good way to cure ignorance:One of the best italian restaurant i ‘ve been it was in Berlin(they open till 1 am,by the way),and on the standar/cheaper side there’s a chain call Tabachi,very good and afordable.Anyway the German food,contrary of the urban legends,is very nice too.That’s call global economy,something that Krunchman those not understand.
Just to say that was a great post.
As usual, the assinine Paul Krugman displays his ignorance of both history and economics! The poor quality of British food (as distinct from the type of food available in Britain – many people enjoy pork pies, or stilton say, or fish and chips if the quality is sufficient) is entirely unrelated to ‘industrialisation’. It stems largely from WWI/WWII food rationing and the vast scale of intervention of the government into the food and agricultural production sectors. Has he ever heard of the ‘national loaf’ or the Milk Marketing Board? I doubt it! It also reflects the relatively poor economic performance of Britain during the post-war period compared to many other countries, in the main the result of disastrous government interventions into the economy (only some of which have been rectified). It is only since the liberalisation of some markets during the 1980s and onwards that choice of food has improved, combined with enhanced economic growth as a result of liberalisation. As he observes himself, Britain now has a wealth of choice and some of the best restaurants in the world, only in part the result of immigration (although immigrant labour has helped keep wages lower which is beneficial). Unfortunately, his ‘conscience’ – as usual – blinds him to the cause of the beneficial changes brought about by a free market! Krugman would also do well to note that the British were far better supplied with food and a sufficient calorific intake after the industrial revolution than before it. The industrial revolution reduced the frequency of hunger and malnutrition by creating a global market for agricultural production. For instance, cheaper methods of storage, transportation and preservation of foodstuffs developed in the later c19th which meant that a far wider range of foods was available year round and offering far greater nutritional content than hitherto.
If British food was bad, in a partially free market during the 1980s, he ought to have tried out Chinese or Soviet cuisine from the time. If he could have queued up and got any without first being shot by a secret policeman.
So Krugman’s premise that this was somehow a ‘free market’ trapped in equilibrium is wholly erroneous. Moreover, it should also be pointed out that Krugman’s concept of utility is bogus – it might have been that the British (in general) derived a different level of utility from ‘good’ food to him. Utility is subjective, so what he may construe as having high utility is irrelevant, and who is he to determine what anyone else’s utility might be? But then, this is the ‘fatal conceit’ of statists and collectivists from time immemorial – I know best what is good for others, so I’m going to impose it on them by force. He is no Liberal, and I wish he wouldn’t abuse the term.
Comments on this entry are closed.