David Frum is (Mostly) Right
David Frum asks, provocatively, on his FrumForum: "Could it be That Our Enemies Are Right?".
First, he quotes the only thing Susan Sontag ever said that I've wholeheartedly agreed with:
In February 1982, Susan Sontag made a fierce challenge to a left-wing audience gathered at New York’s Town Hall:
Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?
And then -- you knew this was coming -- he turns it on the right:
Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Wall Street Journal editorial page between 2000 and 2011, and someone in the same period who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of the current economic crisis? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?
Yeah, I know: irritating. But one paragraph seems illuminating:
When people tell me that I’ve changed my mind too much about too many things over the past four years, I can only point to the devastation wrought by this [economic] crisis and wonder: How closed must your thinking be if it isn’t affected by a disaster of such magnitude? And in fact, almost all of our thinking has been somehow affected: hence the drift of so many conservatives away from what used to be the mainstream market-oriented Washington Consensus toward Austrian economics and Ron Paul style hard-money libertarianism. The ground they and I used to occupy stands increasingly empty.
If Frum is arguing that mindless DC-friendly crony capitalism -- tax deals, regulatory capture, bailouts, TARP, and the rest of it -- are the now almost totally discredited, well, okay, we agree.
And if he is arguing that the corporatist Republican party of the past (what I think he's calling the "Washington Consensus") was ultimately destructive, I mostly agree with him, though I'm not sure the Clinton administration was any less corporate-friendly than either of the Bush administrations that book-ended it.
And if he's arguing, on a more populist note, that the Republican party drifted from being the party of Main Street business to Wall Street business, then hear-hear. That's me, clapping along.
And if he's saying that the result of this miserable and ceaseless economic slowdown -- caused by fat, subsidized enterprise unable to respond to market forces; a money system divorced from reality; a corrupt Washington establishment; the culture of too-big-to-fail; and a Republican party that lost its connection to the working class American -- is Ron Paul Libertarianism, the Tea Party, and the recent debt ceiling debate, I agree with that, too.
Surely the response to that parade of horribles -- DC corruption; fat cat bailout capitalism -- is to starve both. Let the banks fail. Choke off DC at the tax-collection pipe.
I don't read him all the time, but I'm pretty sure Paul Krugman didn't suggest either one of those solutions.
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Oct '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
People would be better informed by reading Paul Krugman? I mean, I certainly agree that the Wall Street Journal editorials weren't the best during the Bush years (and even today theres the occasional dip into populist nonsense) but Krugman's advice of "Spend more! Borrow more! We're the reserve currency, we can tax the rest of the world through inflation to pay for this!!" is hardly "informed" (well, he never says the last part explicitly, but it's implied in the economics).
Apr '11
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Umm, I believe the WSJ was waving the big red flag starting in the early part of the decade regarding Fannie/Freddie, easy money and the coming bubble burst. Don't particularly remember Krugman going down that path.
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
You're a bit hard on Susan Sontag, "Illness as Metaphor" and "Fascinating Fascism" were brilliant essays.
Jul '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
I can't take Frum seriously, and comparisons like that are the reason.
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Frum lost me at Krugman...
Sep '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
I'm probably just repeating what's been written above, but I think Frum has (again) made a false comparison. It is demonstrably obvious that communism failed more as a result of what the Right thought than what the Left thought. But it is not at all true that our economic turmoil has continued more as a result of what the Right thought than what the Left thought. Krugman's approach seems clearly to have failed, however unwise or foolish looking the WSJ editorial writers were during the Bush years.
Edited on Aug 3, 2011 at 9:12pmRe: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Poor David Frum! In order to be "with it," he embraced Barack Obama, and he now finds that once one has gone there, there's no coming back -- so now he embraces Paul Krugman. Where will it end? I doubt that he can go back to Canada. Both the Liberals and the Tories there have been acting more and more in keeping with the dictates of Austrian economics. Does Frum speak French? In France, clowns like Paul Krugman really are taken seriously.
Jun '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Is Frum really saying that we'd be better informed had we read Paul Krugman the last ten years than if we'd read the WSJ editorial page? Neither have been right all the time, but until someone shows me evidence, I'll put my money on the WSJ.
Has there been a single issue on which Krugman's argument carries the day?
Edited on Aug 3, 2011 at 5:35pmJul '11
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
"Follow the Gourd" screams one of the mindless sheep in "The Life of Brian". That analogy seems appropriate here as Frum wallows from one hero to the next. He will never stray in to the real light however and I quote Bastiat.
"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
It seems to me that this is theoretically right, for whatever the question under discussion—whether religious, philosophical, political, or economic; whether it concerns prosperity, morality, equality, right, justice, progress, responsibility, cooperation, property, labor, trade, capital, wages, taxes, population, finance, or government—at whatever point on the scientific horizon I begin my researches, I invariably reach this one conclusion: The solution to the problems of human relationships is to be found in liberty."
Dec '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Could it be that those who advocate the collectivist, class-warfare redistributionist policies of the left sustain their argument with emotion, but then they reach a certain point where they falter when what is needed for their logical conclusion is reason?
Jan '11
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
It just reveals what he thought of conservatives all along. It isn't that he's changed his mind recently. This is what he always thought: non-Beltway Republicans are nutcase yahoos. He thinks we were lucky to have people like him to prevent us from our worst instincts.
Mar '11
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
David Frumm lost the plot several years ago.
Paul Krugman never had the plot.
Susan Sontag had a brilliant plot, but it was way out in left field.
The WSJ have a Hobbit problem, but I like "Best of the Web", so they are forgiven.
Oct '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Mr. Frum is quite correct: Someone who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman between 2000 and 2011 would indeed know everything there is to know about the causes of the current economic crisis.
Jan '11
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Paul Snively
Mr. Frum is quite correct: Someone who read only the collected columns of Paul Krugman between 2000 and 2011 would indeed know everything there is to know about the causes of the current economic crisis. · Aug 3 at 4:31pm
Ha! Indeed. Well said!
A Krugman Compendium would serve as the table of contents of how to screw up the greatest economy the world has ever known.
Apr '11
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Oh, and the fact that Susan Sontag and the left saw political opponents in her own country as "enemies" and not communists tells you a lot about how rational there people are.
Edited on Aug 3, 2011 at 4:50pmOct '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Filling in for Instapundit, KC? :-D
Seriously, though, thanks! If you want a real belly-laugh, though, let me suggest http://krugman-in-wonderland.blogspot.com for your recommended daily allowance of Krugman-skewering.
Edited on Aug 3, 2011 at 5:02pmMay '11
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Jerry Lewis too. Except that both Jerry Lewis and the French actually know that he's a clown. He tries to make people laugh.
Nov '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Rob Long: David Frum asks, provocatively, on his FrumForum: "Could it be That Our Enemies Are Right?".
If the first mate on the Titanic said to the captain, "Hey, change course, there's an iceberg up there somewhere", and the captain told him to shut up, David Frum would accuse the first mate of being 'closed-minded' if the resulting disaster didn't 'affect his thinking'.
That's a dazzlingly vacuous argument. One of them was right and one was wrong.
Sep '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
I don't think that corporatism means what you think it means. As far as I know it means Peron, Mussolini, Calles/Cardenas/PRM/PRI-style political organization of society by sectors in which actors are bodies such as trade unions, peasant farmer orgs, big finance, etc., and the State divides up the "national income" according to the political power each brings.
New Dealism was corporatism.
A lower corporate tax rate ain't it.
I leave it to the learned (e.g. Rahe) to correct me if I was mal-educated at Tressle-U and in commie circles of the 90s.
Jul '10
Re: David Frum is (Mostly) Right
Maybe so. I'm inclined to think that whatever insight she had in that first essay disappeared when she tried to attach it to the hiv.
Unless, of course, behavior is no indicator of character and shame is of no value as prevention.
Anyway, metaphors are often useful, and I'm not gonna waste much time worrying about whether descriptivist leftists (of all folks!) condone their usage.