Paul Krugman bizarrely writes about a “resurgence of faith-based free-market fundamentalism” in which proponents of free markets
attempt to wave away everything that happened to the world these past seven years and go back to the notion that the market always knows best. Hey, it’s always about allocating scarce resources (never mind all those unemployed workers and zero interest rates), and why would you ever imagine that market prices are wrong (don’t mention the bubble).
The housing bubble a result of “market prices“?
Krugman knows he is full of shit when he writes this. He knows perfectly well that the housing bubble was not a consequence of the free market but of the Federal Reserve’s policy of printing money to push down interest rates.
Don’t take my word for it. Here is is in 2006 acknowledging the fact:
A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubble.
So why does Krugman so dishonestly attempt to blame the bubble on the free market?
One, he’s writing here not as Krugman the economist, but as Krugman the liberal pundit and shill for the banks (he’s a man of many faces and consequently full of self-contradictions).
Two, Krugman needs to deflect because he actually advocated the very Fed policy that caused the housing bubble — but will never acknowledge having been wrong. Instead, he’s doubled-down on his dogma, insanely calling for even more money printing.
The US Has a Free Market in Health Care?
Krugman continues by making the same ridiculous fallacy with health care, writing that,
In the case of health care, we know that all the assumptions behind free market optimality are grossly violated. Maybe, maybe, you could still justify treating health as a normal market if free markets in health care seemed, in practice, to work well. But they don’t!
Anyone who thinks that a free market in health care can work, he adds, is simply ignoring the evidence and “selling pure faith”. If you think this, you are a “freak”, according to Krugman.
But who is really ignoring the evidence and selling pure faith? Who’s the real freak?
In another recent example, as I posted to my social media, Krugman meaninglessly remarked:
The American health care system is by far the most privatized, most market-oriented system in the advanced world; it’s also far and away the most expensive, without any sign of getting anything for all that money.
As though the miserable outcomes and ever increasing costs in the US weren’t a consequence of massive government intervention leaving no recognizable semblance of a free market in health care!
