Keyneso-Bizarro

Paul Krugman’s obsession with Ron Paul has not stopped.

In a new post at NYT, he doubles down on his charge that Ron Paul’s warning about price inflation makes him Bernie Madoff-like:

It seems increasingly clear to me that what we’re looking at here has nothing to do with intellectual discourse as we normally understand it. It is, instead, about tribal identities: there’s a certain kind of person who rails against policies that debase the dollar, and that kind of person admires others who do the same no matter how wrong their predictions and disastrous their financial advice. As I said in a brief note on Ron Paul, it’s a form of Madoff-style affinity fraud, even if the perpetrator of the scam believes his own derp.

For the record, Dr. Paul has made clear his warnings about future inflation are based on the theories developed by economists such as Ludwig von Mises,Nobel prize winner F.A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard, who draw link increases in money supply with a tendency toward price inflation.

You can agree, or disagree, with this line of thinking. I happen to agree, but to call such a perspective lacking in intellectual discourse is simply bizarre, More accurately, calling such a theory Madoff-style affinity fraud seems to be lacking a bit on the intellectual discourse front.

Reprinted with permission from Economic Policy Journal.