Krug attacks!

When Paul Krugman dies, he’ll be primarily remembered for three things: He won the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics; he has been one of the world’s most-read and most-influential political pundits; and he said with total seriousness (watch the video) that a way to fix America’s economy would be for the government to spend a ton of money preparing for a nonexistent alien invasion because at least that would get people working.

I’ll save you the trouble of writing in with the riposte, “Where’s your Nobel Prize?” The Nobel committee is not infallible (the guy who invented the lobotomy and declared it “always safe” got a Nobel), but even if it was, Krugman’s award was not for political philosophy but for an arcane point of technical analysis, and even if it were for political philosophy, many economists with the opposite philosophy (Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Friedrich Hayek) have also won the Nobel.

Krugman is a most unusual economist. Others may measure their words, issue caveats, acknowledge that the research isn’t conclusive, admit that their biases influence their reading of facts. Not Krugman. Krugman is remarkable for his freewheeling writing style, which frequently leads to lively metaphors (“invisible bond-market vigilantes,” “confidence fairy”). He is often dismissive, misleading and tendentious. He changes the subject, ignores inconvenient evidence and plays playground bully to people he sees as ideological enemies (a list longer than Nixon’s). He blasts away at others’ work without even providing the basic courtesy of a link to what he’s talking about, which is a disservice to readers who might like to review the other side of the argument to decide for themselves.

In his new book “End This Depression Now!” (W. W. Norton & Company), he compares Ben Bernanke to the moronic Chance the Gardener in “Being There” — and Bernanke is the man who hired Krugman at Princeton.

Krugman “writes with more vitriol than I find attractive,” writes Harvard economist and fellow Times columnist Greg Mankiw. He treats anyone who disagrees as “a mendacious idiot,” writes George Mason University economist Alex Tabarrok. “Krugman should stop bullying people,” wrote columnist Michael Kinsley.

In short, to use the kind of colorful language the great Nobelist favors, Paul Krugman is a jackass.

Take his recent, bizarre feud with economist Veronique de Rugy. Whenever she cites a number, he wrote recently, “You can pretty much assume that it’s wrong.” Rugy writes from a pro-free-market perspective. Krugman’s principal job may be to throw his readers the liberal equivalent of red meat (organic, sustainable, fair-trade soy with nontoxic pink dye?). But is this the professional courtesy one academic has for a colleague in the field?

Rugy holds a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. She has been published in the LA Times and The Wall Street Journal. She even appears regularly at The New York Times site, as a contributor to their “Room for Debate” blog. Can she really be so much of a ninny that we should automatically dismiss everything she says?

Moreover, the point she was making was one that’s difficult to ignore. Rugy had produced a chart showing that there haven’t been big government cutbacks in Europe. (Krugman didn’t link to it). To call the chart a blockbuster is to understate the case. It showed that France, Italy, Spain, the UK and Greece are all spending about the same as they were a couple of years ago and far more than they were spending five years ago.

Imagine this: Leading intellectuals are having a national conversation on how drastically we need to increase gun control due to a mass shooting — and then a detective calmly ducks under the crime-scene tape, looks around and says, “Actually, nobody here has been shot. They were all stabbed.” Krugman did three things he does time and again: He ignored the substance of what Rugy had found, changed the subject and changed the terms of the debate. He started talking about Ireland (which Rugy hadn’t even mentioned!) and noted that lots of European countries have raised taxes (which is Rugy’s whole point — European austerity has consisted mainly of tax hikes, not spending cuts). He said that though Ireland’s spending is at the same level as it was in 2007 and 2008 (pre-crash), we shouldn’t count a lot of that because some was bank bailouts and some was welfare spending.

Yet, as a Keynesian, Krugman usually maintains that it doesn’t matter what you’re spending on, as long as you’re spending: Just shovel the bucks in the furnace, we’ll all warm ourselves by the glow.

Hence his “Independence Day” stimulus scenario: To you and me, that looks like a colossal waste of money on laser cannons that will never be used and will sit there rusting and burning up maintenance dollars for the next hundred years. But you and I aren’t geniuses like Krugman.

Blithely ignoring evidence that there have not been savage spending cuts in Europe, he continued making the same argument in his May 17 column, saying (he must have a hot key for this by now), “Europe’s answer has been austerity: savage spending cuts” (note he didn’t say tax hikes). Free-market economists (also known as the Austrian school, hence Krugman’s clever combo term for his enemies as “Austerians”) can hardly be blamed for Europe’s weak economies if those countries are doing the opposite of what Austerians prescribe, which is to cut out a lot of spending while reducing taxes. Krugman has been saying we shouldn’t make economic choices to placate a nonexistent “confidence fairy,” but now the Austerians are razzing him for believing in “an austerity fairy.”

For Krugman to be wrong about such a prominent subject matters: He not only has a lot of readers; some of them actually hold positions in government. They assume that King Krug can’t be wrong about anything.

Krugman makes it easy to ignore opposing views because he doesn’t link to them. Why? Maybe he doesn’t want to dignify his opponents or give them traffic. But if he wouldn’t dignify them with a link, why does he bother to dignify them by mentioning them (then distorting their claims)?

I think Krugman purposely and disingenuously conceals contrary evidence from his readers. He doesn’t want readers to ponder for themselves. Here is another trait that is very unscientific: He wants simply to be venerated, a rock star, the Mick Jagger of economics (sadly, we missed out on Mick Jagger becoming the Mick Jagger of economics when he dropped out of the London School of Economics to sing in a band in 1963).

Krugman’s problem, as he reminds us in “End This Depression Now!” is that he is a fanatic in the grip of a religion called “Keynesianism” which says you should borrow and spend your way out of a recession.

An Austerian, Russ Roberts (who, like Rugy and Tabarrok, is affiliated with the Avengers-like superhero squad of free-market economists at George Mason University, whose staff also includes such plain-spoken, highly readable economist-bloggers as Tyler Cowen, Donald Boudreaux, Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan) fessed up to having a bias, which is a problem everybody has. It can cloud our perceptions. Krugman stomped all over him, saying this proved Roberts was a political hack, not a tough-minded science-y guy like himself. Roberts replied that this was a mighty strange line of attack coming from someone whose blog is “called the Conscience of a Liberal and not the Conscience of a Truth-Seeking Objective Bias-Free Scientist.”

Krugman’s Keynesian faith is at best an unproven theory. It’s a pretty good rule not to throw trillions of dollars at unproven theories.

The problem remains: We’ve got a debt that’s approaching $16,000,000,000,000. Center-left columnist Kinsley wrote, “I have been waiting for Paul Krugman to tell me how we are going to handle the debt, once we get this recession out of the way. No, really. There’s no economist whose judgment I trust more . . . But don’t we at some point have to start paying the money back? Why have taxes at all? Why deny ourselves anything money can buy? If $15 trillion in debt can be a freebie, why not $30 trillion or $60 trillion?”

Krugman, typically, humiliated Kinsley on a technical point about inflation vs. hyperinflation and let this whopper of a question sit there, knowing that if he had his way, the debt would be several trillions larger than it is.

Earlier this year Krugman wrote, “People think of debt’s role in the economy as if it were the same as what debt means for an individual: There’s a lot of money you have to pay to someone else. But that’s all wrong; the debt we create is basically money we owe to ourselves, and the burden it imposes does not involve a real transfer of resources.”

In 2003, when the debt was less than half what it is today, he wrote, “We’re looking at a fiscal crisis that will drive interest rates sky-high . . . But what’s really scary — what makes a fixed-rate mortgage seem like such a good idea — is the looming threat to the federal government’s solvency . . . How will the train wreck play itself out? . . . My prediction is that politicians will eventually be tempted to resolve the crisis the way irresponsible governments usually do: by printing money, both to pay current bills and to inflate away debt.”

Inflation to pay current bills, a reference to hyperinflation, is exactly what he would later ridicule Kinsley for worrying about.

In 1996, Krugman (who, as Wall Street Journal blogger James Taranto never tires of reminding us, is a former Enron adviser) said Social Security has a “Ponzi-game aspect in which each generation takes out more than it put in.” Last year he said it “is and always has been mainly a pay-as-you-go system, which is nothing like a classic Ponzi scheme.”

Of unemployment benefits, Krugman wrote in his textbook that “The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker’s incentive to quickly find a new job.” Later he ridiculed Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) as “bizarre” for saying, “Continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

When Harvard Professor Mankiw doubted the Obama administration’s projection of 15.6% real growth between 2008 and 2013, Krugman accused him of “deliberate obtuseness” in a post titled “Roots of Evil.” Mankiw offered to wager on the matter but got no response. That was smart: The economy will have to catch fire and grow at about 7% between now and the end of 2013 for the Obama projection to come true.

This month Krugman gave us a great summation of why he refuses to even stick to one set of wrong-headed ideas. He has a short attention span, like politicians focused on the next election cycle.

“It’s usually far from clear,” Krugman wrote, “what exactly the long-run policy is supposed to be, other than the fact that it involves inflicting pain on workers and the poor.”

Far from clear? Such uncharacteristic modesty!

You knew Krugman was just building up to a one-liner, the one that showed how careless he was about consequences: “In the long run, we are all dead.”

Kyle.Smith@nypost.com