Sunday, November 06, 2011

Paul Krugman: meet a libertarian

One thing that amazed me in Mungo's Krugmanectomy below is Paul saying, "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."

Let's ignore the loaded phrases like "useful goal" and "we don't need" as those are purely statement of preferences (i.e. unproven and unprovable), and concentrate on the claim that people who object to the Solyndra Subsidy are silent on big Pentagon programs.

Paul, meet me and my ilk. We are libertarians.

We are against out of control military spending and bogus business subsidies. Not just to "green" firms like Solyndra but to big corporations and big agriculture. We rail against Solyndra, perpetual wars, ethanol subsidies, $700 billion dollar defense budgets and all manner of policies that distort incentives and cause people to act in sub-optimal ways.

2 comments:

Tom said...

You gotta love P-Kroog's choice of the F22 for the total wasteful spending side of his analogy. To quote Wikipedia, "...the high cost of the aircraft, a lack of clear air-to-air combat missions ..., and the ongoing development of the planned cheaper and more versatile F-35 resulted in calls to end F-22 production. In April 2009 the US Department of Defense proposed to cease placing new orders,..." Yes, even the DoD thinks the F22 is wasteful.

Anonymous said...

Great post but you don't have to be a libertarian to oppose stupid counterproductive subsidies and spending on unnecessary defense procurement.