P-Kroog's new prescription for growth: Whimsy-Cal!

Military spending does create jobs when the economy is depressed. Indeed, much of the evidence that Keynesian economics works comes from tracking the effects of past military buildups. Some liberals dislike this conclusion, but economics isn’t a morality play: spending on things you don’t like is still spending, and more spending would create more jobs. But why would anyone prefer spending on destruction to spending on construction, prefer building weapons to building bridges? John Maynard Keynes himself offered a partial answer 75 years ago, when he noted a curious 'preference for wholly ‘wasteful’ forms of loan expenditure rather than for partly wasteful forms, which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.' Indeed. Spend money on some useful goal, like the promotion of new energy sources, and people start screaming, 'Solyndra! Waste!' Spend money on a weapons system we don’t need, and those voices are silent, because nobody expects F-22s to be a good business proposition. To deal with this preference, Keynes whimsically suggested burying bottles full of cash in disused mines and letting the private sector dig them back up. In the same vein, I recently suggested that a fake threat of alien invasion, requiring vast anti-alien spending, might be just the thing to get the economy moving again. NYTimes

So, all you lefty bedwetters who wanted to defend Krugman as being "not serious" about the alien invasion thing...what now? I guess you have a new answer: Krugman was NOT serious, but he had overdosed on that new Keynesian diet supplement: "Whimsy-Cal!"

The alternative is that we need GW Bush back in office. Right? Elective wars are good for the U.S. and good for the digestive system. Or was that madcap P-Kroog just being "Whimsy-Cal" again?

UPDATE: Some pretty good reasons why this "Whimsy-Cal" thing is pretty dangerous.