Krugman, Brantley, and Alternate Realities

Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Max Brantley quoted Krugman at length in a recent post, saying "Paul Krugman sees in California's financial crisis the logical extension of the bitter enders of the Republican Party, potentially a broader threat."

Leftist reality (or more precisely statist/corporatist reality) is apparently a very different place from where the rest of us live. Unfortunately they run the system. That's how Krugman wins the noble prize even though he is from the economic school of thought that gave us the bailout, while Ron Paul gets called a "nut" for being in an economic school of thought which saw all of this coming years ago.

So I am not sure where Paul and Max are posting from, but in my reality California is not controlled by the "bitter enders of the Republican party". It is instead ruled by their polar opposites- big spending wild-eyed liberals and the poster boy for liberal Republicans (ARRRNold). I refuse to call them "moderate" Republicans as the alternate-reality corporate media does. You see in their universe, people who are ok with innocent babies getting shredded and having their brains sucked out are "moderate" while those who think the law ought to protect innocent babies from such barbarity are "extreme". In my world, protecting innocent babies is a moderate position and slaughtering them is extreme. But I digress.

Governor Schwarzenegger actually borrowed billions for fetal stem cell research while the scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that stem cells from other sources have more promise. And he pushed this even as his state was sinking into the fiscal abyss. But remember, in Brantly world, these are the "moderates" and those who oppose it are "bitter-enders". But I digress again, sorry I just can't get over the fact that two people who live on the same planet can see things so differently.

Krugman and Brantley may blame the 2/3rds majority requirement of the California legislature for the failure to increase taxes even more, but the issues were sent to the people as ballot measures, and the majority of voters told Brantley and Krugman that they were wrong. The problem was not that they were under-taxed, but that government in California over-spends.

And indeed it does. California has one of the highest tax and regulation burdens in the nation. For years productive people have been leaving California for states that will let them keep more of the fruits of their own labors instead of confiscating it to provide money for crazy liberal universities, benefits for illegal aliens, and money for fetal stem cell research. You don't have to go very far to find such exiles, my own father-in-law is an example. Decades of that have taken their toll. The chickens of 40 years of statist liberalism have come home to roost and the result is bankruptcy- moral, fiscal, and governmental. That is the obvious lesson of California in this reality, but to Krugman and Brantley the problem is that those pesky peasants refused to vote even more taxes onto themselves so that their betters in government might spend it for the glory of their ideals!

Going from the mad thesis that California's problems are that it is too thoroughly controlled by Republican conservatives, Brantley quotes Krugman, "recent events suggest that the Republican Party has been driven mad by lack of power. The few remaining moderates have been defeated, have fled, or are being driven out. What’s left is a party whose national committee has just passed a resolution solemnly declaring that Democrats are “dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals,”

Again those two completely misread the mood of the heartland. There are only a handful of non-statist Republicans left in the party. There are a number of big-government interventionist fascists and also a number of liberal Republicans mixed in with members of those two groups who are posing as conservative-libertarians in order to deceive an increasingly frustrated electorate. At the state and local levels conservatives are more common, but somehow such types wind up being under-funded at critical points in their career and only the ones willing to "play ball" with the bad guys get backing by the national party.

Remember in Pennsylvania, Senator Arlin Specter beat Toomey in the GOP primary the first time only because Bush and the RNC jumped in with both feet to protect the liberal Specter. In Florida, the RNC establishment is doing it again, rallying around liberal Charlie Crist over Speaker of the House Mark Rubio. The RNC establishment consistently picks the liberal-statists over conservatives. Maybe Krugman and Brantley live in an alternate universe where the GOP has been taken over by conservatives, but in this one conservatives don't have a major politically party. Brantley talks like Bush and Cheney were some kind of hyper-right wingers, but I challenge you to name one major area of policy disagreement between Bush and Obama (Energy policy maybe, but little else).

The only objection I have to the GOP declaration that the Democrats want to restructure America to socialist ideas is that they should be honest enough to admit that they were doing the same thing when they had power. The Heartland is frustrated.