(important piece) (progress on the cosmopolitan method of lying)
Krugman is one of the most artful liars in the modern world. We tend to criticize him on his errors. But casting his work as error is too generous: he is simply an extremely artful liar.
If you could ask the Genii how to create the world’s most objectively evil lie, it would include the use of half truth, used as a means of suggestion, to evoke a moral altruistic response, to force an intertemporal predictive bias, that obscured the loss of difficult-to-measure-capital, as an increase in current consumption. You would convince the lion to eat it’s tail.
This is Krugman’s technique.
That this subtle technique is the origin of The Monotheistic Lie, (The First Great Lie), as well as the 19th-20th century cosmopolitan pseudo-sciences: Boaz, Freud, Cantor, Marx-Keynes (The Second Great Lie), should not surprise us.
What Marx achieved through loading, framing, overloading, and suggestion in dialectic, Keynes achieved by abandoning loading, and relying upon framing, overloading and suggestion, with innumeracy.
This is Keynes’ achievement: to convert the pseudo-moral, into the pseudo-scientific. But the result is the same: obscuring the consumption of capital accumulated over millennia (k-selection for eugenic quality) into short term consumption (r-selection for dysgenic quantity). In other words, the Cosmopolitan’s second attempt at The Great Lie using the same means.
In 2009 I wanted to start blogging about his technique, but rapidly I realized his ability to generate deceit was inexpensive, and the required effort to demonstrate the construction of his lies was terribly expensive. So I’m thrilled that those more capable of it – Bob Murphy – are doing it instead.
Once you understand the mechanism of Krugman’s deception is merely an instance of the Great Lie Technique applied to economics, and his use of suggestion on one hand, and ridicule on the other, you realize he’s just using moral cognitive biases as a very sophisticated slight of hand by which to justify, encourage, and obscure the transfer of capital to consumption, so that the state can expand and the unproductive can obtain commission on the redistribution of capital to consumption.
We can only do what we did in the past, and use science – the discipline of truth telling – to over come the Great Lies.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine