If The Price Of Everything Is Going

You Know That Republicans Will Yell About The Evils Of Partisanship Whenever Anyone Tries To Make A Connection Between The Rhetoric Of Beck, Limbaugh, Etc. And The Violence I Fear We’re Going To See In The Months And Years Ahead. But Violent Acts Are What Happen When You Create A Climate Of Hate. And It’s Long Past Time For The Gop’s Leaders To Take A Stand Against The Hate-mongers.

These Days, However, The Main Problem Comes From The Right - From Conservatives Who, Unlike Most Economists, Really Do Think That The Free Market Is Always Right - To Such An Extent That They Refuse To Believe Even The Most Overwhelming Scientific Evidence If It Seems To Suggest A Justification For Government Action.

What Happened After 9/11 - And I Think Even People On The Right Know This, Whether They Admit It Or Not - Was Deeply Shameful. The Atrocity Should Have Been A Unifying Event, But Instead It Became A Wedge Issue. Fake Heroes Like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, And, Yes, George W. Bush Raced To Cash In On The Horror. And Then The Attack Was Used To Justify An Unrelated War The Neocons Wanted To Fight, For All The Wrong Reasons....the Memory Of 9/11 Has Been Irrevocably Poisoned; It Has Become An Occasion For Shame. And In Its Heart, The Nation Knows It.

America's Political Landscape Is Infested With Many Zombie Ideas - Beliefs About Policy That Have Been Repeatedly Refuted With Evidence And Analysis But Refuse To Die. The Most Prominent Zombie Is The Insistence That Low Taxes On Rich People Are The Key To Prosperity.

Our Popular Economics Writers, However, Are Not In The Business Of Giving Their Readers A Ringside Seat On The Research Action; With No Exception I Can Think Of, They Use Their Books To Do An End Run Around The Normal Structure Of Scholarship, To Preach Ideas That Few Serious Economists Share. Often, These Ideas Are Not Just At Odds With The Professional Consensus; They Are Demonstrably Wrong, And Sometimes Terminally Silly. But They Sound Good To The Unwary Reader.