Paul Krugman Is Back Out From Under His Desk

Paul Krugman Is Back Out From Under His Desk
He’s still a fool and a liar, though.
by John Hayward
09/16/2011

The New York Times​ fully endorses Paul Krugman​’s disgusting 9/11 column, since they haven’t fired him for writing it. A great number of their readers did not endorse it, so Krugman spent a few days hiding under his desk, with comments for both his initial screed and a subsequent expansion of his tinfoil-hat ravings turned off. Today he crawled back out to pen a little screed about how Republicans want everyone to be “free to die.”

What got Krugman thinking about this important subject was an exchange during the GOP presidential debate in Tampa:

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.”

And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”

Never forget that Paul Krugman is a liar, in addition to being a coward. The crowd did not “erupt with cheers and shouts of yeah!” when Wolf Blitzer said that. One or two people threw out a rowdy “Yeah!” It’s hard to tell if it’s the same person shouting it twice, so let’s just be charitable to the New York Times’ pet propagandist and say two.

Ron Paul’s answer to Wolf Blitzer’s question, transcribed precisely, was “No.”

What made the crowd erupt in cheers was Paul saying, “That’s what freedom is about: taking your own risk.” Granted Paul Krugman responds to such ideas by blinking in numb incomprehension, and maybe sputtering something about how it would be nice if aliens attacked the Earth so we could have more infrastructure spending without public opposition, but I assume he’s still capable of understanding the actual words.

They applauded wildly again when Paul said that “we never turned anybody away from the hospital” during his medical practice days. He went on to make another point that a statist flatliner like Krugman can never understand, about the difference between a healthy and free society providing charitable emergency care for the truly needy, and a dead-end socialist bureaucracy taking over the entire medical industry – a process with results that Krugman famously lied about in August 2009 by penning this immortal line:

In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false.

This line became a favorite chew toy of the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto, who never fails to mention it when reporting the latest horror story from the world of British socialized medicine. Quite a few of them involve dead people, so I guess their system has made them “free to die,” eh, Krugman?

Now, let’s be clear: Paul Krugman is a slow-witted man living inside a hermetically sealed bubble of information, but it’s impossible that he didn’t know about the failures of British socialized medicine. He wasn’t quibbling about a story here or there – he made a blanket declaration that all of them are false.

Likewise, there is no way Krugman could have watched the GOP debate last Monday night, or read an accurate transcript of it, and honestly come up with the column he published today. Don’t believe me? Watch it for yourself:

Krugman’s entire column proceeds from his lie about the Blitzer-Paul exchange, and the false premise that people who resist totalitarian socialism are heartless monsters who want the sick and needy to drop dead.

Given the agreed-upon desirability of protecting citizens against the worst, the question then became one of costs and benefits — and health care was one of those areas where even conservatives used to be willing to accept government intervention in the name of compassion, given the clear evidence that covering the uninsured would not, in fact, cost very much money. As many observers have pointed out, the Obama health care plan was largely based on past Republican plans, and is virtually identical to Mitt Romney​’s health reform in Massachusetts.

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

In the reality Krugman desperately wants you to forget about, so his arguments make some kind of minimal sense, both RomneyCare and ObamaCare have wiped out jobs, driven up health care costs, and reduced the number of people with health insurance.

And ObamaCare has only just gotten started destroying private insurance plans. This process will eventually force most Americans into the kind of government-run socialist program Krugman favors, but that is emphatically not how the program was sold to Americans. Not only that, but we were fed nonsense about how ObamaCare would cost the taxpayers very little, but if we’re all forced into the public exchanges, its cost will blow our already horrific national debt into the stratosphere. In other words, ObamaCare was a lie. That’s probably why a liar like Krugman would be so comfortable with it.

I call upon the editors of the New York Times to compel Krugman to write an apology and correct the factual inaccuracies in his column. Then their ombudsman should write a detailed explanation for why Krugman was allowed to publish such an obvious falsehood in the first place. If they’re not going to fire this tedious slander artist and fraud, they should assign editors to review what he writes, before he does any more damage to what remains of the Grey Lady’s reputation.

Meanwhile, I'm really looking forward to Wolf Blitzer going after Barack Obama​ like a prosecutor during the general election, and barking "Who pays?" at him during a question about ObamaCare, or anything else.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.