Shorter Paul Krugman: “The Senate won’t do what I want them to so America is on the road to ruin.”
It might be a nicety lost on progressives who never get west of the Alleghenies but your views are held by about 10% of the American people. And telling people how stupid, unruly, and unappreciative they are probably isn’t a good strategy for convincing them.
Also, a brief note for those who look forward to the time when the United States isn’t the sole superpower: nobody else wants the job. Come what may we’re going to be stuck with it for a long, long time. If the EU wanted the job, they would actually have to start taking steps to do it. They aren’t. Standing on the sidelines bitching is ever so much more comfortable.
China has problems of its own which it will take all of its ingenuity and energy to handle.
Who is this candidate for “top nation” of whom you speak?
Krugman has really been on a roll recently. The capacity for progressives to blame failure on everything but their policy preferences never ceases to amaze me.
There are multiple sorts of progressives, the most important being the technocrats and the populists. I think that Dr. Krugman is of the former sort.
The views that he expresses are inherent in a technocratic approach to polity. If he really is an expert, experts should be in charge, and what he designates isn’t being done then those who oppose him are stupid, vile, and obstructionist.
As I’ve said before here I oppose technocracy for a variety of reasons. Among those are that it seems to be construed as experts in some one narrow field running everything which isn’t technocracy at all but autocracy.
Dave,
As you probably know, my profession is intelligence analysis. What I’ve learned over the years is that cognition is more important to estimation and problem solving than theory, data or any other input. Experts, particularly technocratic ones like Krugman, develop mindsets that prevent them from applying theory and analyzing information outside of a framework imposed by the mindset. This explains why “experts” are usually bad at predicting and why those who are the most knowledgeable on a topic are often the least innovative. Krugman, in my mind, is a classic example. So I think you’re spot on about the problems of technocracy.
BTW Dave, I recently ran across this blog I thought you might be interested in. They have some gems.
Well I’ve got my hand-crank powered flashlight and radio. Got them via a commercial I heard on the Art Bell radio show.
…why…why are you all looking at me like that?
Dude, Art Bell.
It’s actually closer to 58% on Krugman’s main objective (single-payer health care – see page 9).
Krugman isn’t running an election campaign. He can say basically what he wants as long as the editorial board at the NYT lets him.
Only if we choose to keep it. Unfortunately, that seems likely; history suggests that hegemons don’t generally yield up the key position without some severe outside pressure and internal weakness (witness Great Britain trying to hold everything together in the system they dominated long after they had ceased to be the most powerful state, or even the second-most powerful in economic and military terms). And one look at the US QDR suggests that their view is on more – more unconventional warfare, more preparation, more intervention, more empire-building.
Brett,
Questions “e” and “g” on the KFF doc you link to are related and be sure to read the * at the bottom. The short story is that the popularity of these provisions are highly dependent on how the question is phrased.
You still get 50% support for it even in the “g” question phrasing, which is “Having a national health plan – or single-payer plan – in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan”, versus the 58% from “Having a national health plan in which all Americans would get their insurance through an expanded, universal form of Medicare-for-all”.
That’s still quite sizeable (far beyond Dave’s “10%”), and the former definition hits all the buttons, specifically mentioning that it would be a “single government plan”. Krugman probably has other ideas that garner less support, but single-payer is not one of them.