http://politicalmath.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/willful-omissions-from-paul-krugman/

And an interesting explanation of wait times with “Health Care Reform.”

http://politicalmath.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/obama-health-care-reform-and-wait-times-visualization-in-lego/

MNP

The great irony of Krugman — I flatter myself that I am one of the few to appreciate it — is that he could have been far more effective as a partisan than he actually has been. From a pro-market POV, the Times just shot themselves in both feet when they hired him.

Way back in the 90s, I actually read some of his popular writings on trade theory. Frankly, they were terrific. Very few economists write worth a damn. The ones who can are usually lightweights as economists, and vice versa. And Krugman had the gift.

And, sometimes, he fought the good fight. He called bullshit on a lot of the trendy left on global trade issues, and it took some courage to do so when he did it. Like Hamlet, he is only mad when the wind is from certain quarters.

So, you take a man with a towering academic reputation (the Nobel AND the John Bates Clark Medal), who also can write for the masses. And is a staunch left-liberal. The Times must have thought they had the hire of the century when he agreed to do two columns a week.

But then he completely blew it. He became the country’s most tragic victim of Bush Derangement Syndrome. The other BDS vics were mostly hacks to begin with. But when Krugman committed intellectual seppuku, there was actual blood on the floor.

The guy just couldn’t help himself. He threw away his dignity, much of his reputation; possibly, his sanity. Twice a week he assailed the Bush administration with all the subtlety and futility of a moth slamming into a light bulb.

Now he carries on in just the same way in the Health Care Wars. In a Times column just a couple of weeks ago he descended so far into ad hominem territory that he may never be able to dig his way back out. He concludes that citizens at townhall meetings who have been loudly complaining to their elected representatives about the proposed healthcare “reform” measures are “angry white voters” who are “swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear.” He thinks that the legislation “may well fail.” But only because all of us skeptics are racists.

For this we need a guy who can explain Pareto optimality?

If he had been able to modulate himself just a little, take on some of that more-in-sorrow-than-anger/high gravitas that some columnists do so well, he could have been devastating. Fortunately for the Republic, he just isn’t that crafty.

Krugman either has never read Von Mises or didn’t understand him. So much of his analysis assumes that market failures are static and permanent. He instead should be asking how long it would take normal market measures to correct the problem, and also what institutional barriers are operating that prevent such corrections from happening.

For example, there are very significant barriers to the exchange of information in health care markets, such as the strict regulation of medical advertising. Even if we concede such things were passed with the best of intentions (a pretty major concession, in my view), to then turn around and say “look how markets fail at providing information” is disingenuous. Ditto for the enormous body of regulations dictating what kinds of policies health insurance providers can write and why.

Krugman’s ideological forebears worked to pass laws that crippled markets, and then point at crippled markets as evidence of market failure. It’d be funny, were it not so tragic.

Keep it up! Health care is too important to be left to pundits.

–BF