The American Spectator

Among the Intellectualoids

What Conservatives Want

By William Tucker on 5.5.08 @ 12:08AM

(Page 2 of 2)

WHO IS PUTTING up all these houses? Is it the top .01 percent -- the "superrich" that so fever Krugman's imagination?

Or is it just possible that prosperity in this country is far more widely distributed than Picketty and Saez have been able to discern from picking over tax filings? (To see where the two French economists went wrong, read any of Alan Reynolds' many writings, including this study, or his book, Income and Wealth.)

There is inequality in this country. The main inequality is between people who have a college education and those who do not, people who have stable families and those who do not, people who go to work and earn a living and those who do not.

But of course none of this impresses Krugman. For him the problem is the whole system. "Americans, understandably, have lost confidence in the prospects for a return to real prosperity. They have also, I'd suggest, lost confidence in the integrity of our economic institutions.....[T]he subprime crisis...has resurrected the sense that something is rotten in the state of our economy."

To liberals there are never any manageable problems. Instead it is always a new dawn. We have just spent a whole century discovering that when "people lose confidence in the integrity of economic institutions," what they put in its place is likely to be something far worse.

I'm not surprised that my 22-year-old son hasn't yet learned this lesson. I'm astonished that it is still a mystery to the likes of Krugman as well.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Education, Economics, Military