If they're libeling you you've got their attention Tom Smith

Herr Doktor Professor Krugman and others are now trotting out the story that the tea parties are "astro-turfing"  -- that's slang for phony corporate-paid activism made to look like grass roots activism.  My point is merely that this is a good thing.  If people are lying about you, it means they are worried.  They think you are worth lying about.

The notion that you would have to pay people to get them to angry about taxes -- that's pretty risable. If these folks ever got out of Princeton or Manhattan they could figure this out for themselves.  I for example have no plans to go to a Tea Party soon, just because I don't like crowds and meeting new people.  But I am plenty angry about taxes, already obscenely and economy-destroyingly high in California and poised to go up.  I am supporting the Tea Party movement in absentia.  I bet a lot of people are.  It certainly looks spontaneous and amateurish to me.  That could, I realize, be just what the VRWC wants us to think.  Far from exaggerating the level of ire among those neither too poor to pay taxes nor too rich to care, I think the Tea Parties vastly underestimate the anger so to speak.  For every person who shows up at a rally, I bet there are a hundred or more who are saying to themselves "you tell 'em."

You can read the original here.  Eeeeeew.  Krugman may not like America, but if he's going to do political analysis, he really should learn more about it.  Just a bit less than half the voters voted against Obama and somewhat more than a third of the population, according to polls, strongly disapprove of Obama.  Are they all nuts?  Right wing loons?  Are the Chinese part of the conspiracy too for dumping our bonds?  Maybe Krugman thinks he's rallying the base or something.  I don't think poor people who pay no taxes are irrational or stupid for wanting the rich to be taxed more and for the government to redistribute more, any more than I think people who have managed to accumulate wealth are crazy loons for not wanting the government to take it so it can be redistributed to politician's friends.  Maybe it's because he's a macroeconomist, but Krugman seems to leave at the door any sense that people understand their own interests and tend to act on them when he starts talking about politics.

THIS is amusing.  Some commentor has figured out that Krugman's utterance about Tom Delay is a paraphrase of a misquote of a malicious paraphrase of a quote delivered by an intermediate source. But otherwise fair.

Maybe I read too many fantasy novels, but does anybody else feel like some yeoman farmer watching as the tax collectors round up half your livestock, mouthing platitudes and lies about how they will go to help the worthy poor, while on the other side of the realm, King Obama sits on his throne, courtiers simper, and the Jester Krugman prances about in tights (a sobering sight)?  I wish I could get that image out of my head.

Comments

[William Sjostrom]

Krugman is an international trade theorist, not a macroeconomist, which partly explains his incoherence on macroeconomics. (Brad DeLong, on the other hand, is a macroeconomist, and he joined the ankles brigade even earlier than Krugman.) Greg Mankiw used that fact to take a nasty shot at Krugman for not knowing the empirical macroeconomics literature, at http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/03/wanna-bet-some-of-that-nobel-money.html
I recommend it.

[dearieme]

The original Tea party was a protest against the lowering of tax. When the import duty on tea was reduced to nearly zero, those gentlemen who had made a living smuggling tea could no longer compete with the legal importer and so heaved the East India Company's tea into the briny. This adds what people now like to call irony to this whole business.

[krome]

Compared to Krugman and his ilk, Marx & Lenin are center right.

Thus the tax protesting stuff could be viewed as a far right activity (understanding that the "far right" includes the middle of the bell curve folk).