Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes

- By The Notorious CFP®

The Krugman Paradox

If you're unfamiliar with Paul Krugman... you're really missing out on a great story (pun intended). Wikipedia calls him "a public intellectual," which is the first (of many) red flags that's he's not. He is most well-known for winning a Noble Prize back in 2008 for economics. Yes, that was a year before President Obama won one for peace. By now, you've probably heard that the Noble Committee just gave the 2022 Noble Prize to former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, who who is credited with helping saving the US economy after almost destroying it. (In the 21st century, it seems the jokes really do write themselves, I'm just plagiarizing them at this point.) You do kinda' get the feeling by now, they're just trolling us.

Today, we know the Noble prize is mostly glorified political masturbation for the Baby Boom generation (like Grammy's, Oscar's and Emmy's). Most people under age 50 would be more impressed with 100,000 Twitter followers, and trying to explain to them the Noble Prize criteria (hint: there is none) would only invite confusion and jokes (which is delicious.)

If you're unfamiliar with our friend, Paul Krugman, allow me to provide some historical context...

In the late 90s, Paul Krugman seriously predicted that the Internet was a fad akin to the fax machine, and that the IT programming profession would shrink from that point on before eventually dying out. Yes, I said the late 1990's. And this guy didn't just think about it and opine about it at private parties. He literally predicted it in print.

To provide some perspective, the internet is the thing you are using right now. Without it, I'd be writing this clap-trap on the walls of the Kerr County jail. He is almost as (in)famous for coining the 'broken windows theory,' which essentially argues that natural and economic disasters can actually be good for society because they lead to increased economic activity. For example- and to steal his most famous example- when someone breaks a window as part of some criminal misbehavior, Krugman deems that a social positive because it creates a job for the glass maker. No, really... that's his contribution to economics.

This is a man who has clearly spent too much time in academia. I suspect he throws parties after every hurricane and thinks the George Floyd riots were akin to the invention of the printing press instead of the final straw for the residents of Minneapolis. He has literally been wrong about almost everything he has ever thought for over two decades.

Let me remind you- so you truly understand - that liberals consider Krugman the smartest economist on the planet. His columns are the most widely-read commentaries in America. His self-produced textbooks have educated tens of thousands of Ivy League students, who go on to leverage their worthless liberal arts degrees, certain religions and ethnicities, nepotism, mental disabilities and family connections to run your country.

Krugman's thoughts influence millions of imbeciles who actually hold great sway over other imbeciles who set government and corporate policy, and influence organizations of pure evil - like the World Economic Forum- that set brilliant policies like eating bugs and becoming permanent renters. And despite all this, Krugman's solution to the last financial crisis was to print more money, and keep rates artificially repressed- a deadly combination we now call financial repression (for a reason!) and literally has brought the entire world economy to its knees. And yet this guy walks free without any fear of light poles. ('Cuz living in NYC, I guess that's the least of your problems.)

Krugman's running columns in the NY Times (yes, he still has a job!) are mostly absurd esoteric high-brow ramblings where he continues to write economic fiction doubling down on his economic delusions. He produces, traffics and supports the most fantastical economic gibberish from his ivory tower in NYC and has been a professor at virtually every school in the Ivy League. He writes best-selling and expensive economic textbooks with his wife- who won't take his last name- and forces them upon any student dumb enough to take his class. He is perhaps America's greatest manifestation of the elite intellectual literati that has infected national discourse. (It's a tight race between him and Larry Summers.)

In my opinion, Paul Krugman represents everything that could go wrong when politics collides with journalism (present company excluded) but yet is somehow still the guy many politicians on the left reach out to in order to understand economics and markets. Which I guess is kinda' like consulting inmates about crime. This is because politicians are also isolated from reality by definition, so it is perhaps logical for them to seek financial guidance from other patients of the same institution, sorta' like Tom Cruise consulting the Church of Scientology.

It's worth noting that Krugman is also paid obscene amounts of money to sell his financial fiction to the masses, most of whom were taught math at public schools and liberal arts colleges, don't fund their Roths annually and send their children off into the world with student debt (yet still believe they have an opinion on national finances- I'm gobsmacked...) Despite being mostly discredited about most of his financial philosophies for most of the 21st century, plenty of people still view him as an economic savant. He's like the Anthony Fauci of finance.

I get paid nothing ~~but criticism~~ for my incoherent and inconceivably long musings, and I'll be lucky if this post doesn't get me cancelled. 10% of you are already completing transfer paperwork with a new financial advisor (primarily because you've become so immune to contrasting opinions). Yet, I'm more right than Krugman. And I'm borderline illiterate. So where's my Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences???

And for his magnum opus, Krugman became famous once again for being the most famous critic in the world of former President Obama's unwillingness to print more money in the aftermath of the Great Financial Crisis. Yes, you read that right. His decades in academia lead him to the thesis that the solution to the housing crisis was we needed to print more money.

If I need to explain to you the sheer utter incompetence of that singular idea... then I'm not the advisor for you. And this is not the blog for you either. Might I recommend The New Yorker or some other high brow elitest (dying) young adult fiction instead.

JHFC... It's times like these you realize the unemployment rate should be much higher. Who is paying these people?

I bring up Krugman a.) to remind myself I'm not crazy and b.) to trigger liberals, yes (hint: it's almost as easy as the MAGA crowd). But also c.) because it made me laugh last week when I counted nine (9) references to former President Trump on the front page of the Washington Post website. Not total, but on the same day. Yes, this was September. Of 2022. (Yes, I admit that I couldn't help myself and even did a Control+F search on their website for the words "George Bush" and "WMD" before moving on to a more legitimate news source.) And yet I still know people who still pay to have newspapers delivered to their home or Inbox. I've offered to happily deliver something of similar value and at least as grotesque on their porch for half that price. But still no takers. Caveat emptor.

My point is that while modern society seems to have an endless appetite for human waste masquerading as journalism and seems staunchly reticent to hold any 'expert' accountable when they are obviously wrong, this kind of misinformation has real consequences for society (as we are witnessing with the imploding of our economy based fully on human errors in the last three years.) The internet was supposed to make us smarter, but Krugman is the perfect example of how it actually makes us dumber. You almost wonder at what point Krugman will be forced to move his articles to the comics section, or his young adult fiction schtick to TikTok. Or possible OnlyFans.

Ukraine

Compounding this is an ever-growing media drumbeat for war in Ukraine, a country that no one I know has ever visited nor could identify on a map before this year and a government that the media literally hated up until last year, due to neo-Nazi nationalistic tendencies, a culture of mind-boggling corruption (much like Latin America), inconceivable zenophobia and multiple controversies surrounding the Biden family.

I'm old enough to remember 15 minutes ago when the media universally HATED Ukraine. But their animosity is largely controlled by - and dependent on - who is the ruling party at that moment. Like racism.

I understand you thought the Ukraine conflict started in 2021, when Kamala threatened NATO membership for Ukraine. Bless your heart. Call me and let's talk global politics and my three dozen trips backpacking through Europe and Asia!

Suddenly it seems that the matters of foreign countries have suddenly become more aligned with the preferred narrative than highlighting and investigating the true source of our own country's true (including economic) troubles. We send enough on Ukraine in a month to eradicate poverty in the entire country (but presumably not enough to make defense contractors self-sufficient). With our modern domestic media, it's rarely what they report but more often what they do not report on that exposes their true agenda. Which is why no serious person watches cable news anymore, and most of the rest of the country does.

Hence, our current direction as a country. We have people who were educated in publically-funded, federally managed daycares for young adults thinking, behaving and speaking As anyone who has has travelled abroad more than a half-dozen times the last three years (and not to a beach), it's remarkably painful to see the rest of the developed world laugh in my face when I tell them I'm American. I'm GenX, born when the Greatest Generation was still running things, and I still remember Reagan's "Shining City on a Hill." I still remember three-hour, six-course meals in Prague (and a few tall beers) for $17 very valuable USD. Now it sometimes seems like we're just trying to decide which model of socialism we prefer to emulate: USSR or Venezuela.

Why is that?

If even a borderline illiterate hick from Central Texas can see that Russia is purposely slow-rolling (i.e. sand-bagging) this conflict to inflict maximum suffering on not only Ukrainian but also the rest of Europe in the fall and winter (when temps drop below zero and they will have drastically reduced energy and heat supply), thus breaking the EU's snowflake-like resolve and destroy the remnants of NATO and US influence in the region... then surely the MSM on the ground understands this, too?
Why would they aide and abet Russia's evil campaign by lying about Ukraine's chances of success to the American people? Cui bono?
Why would President Biden purposely maintain painfully high WTC oil prices, which funds the Russian military, knowing full well that < $50 oil brings this war to a close by the start of the NFL season and saves the mid-terms from the jaws of humiliating and historic defeat?