Nobel Disinterment

I doubt that any Nobel Prize winner in any field has ever had a full column in a major publication dedicated to unearthing their distortions, creative accounting and downright lies.

Until now.

So it's very interesting to see what the author of that column, Don Luskin, has to say in this week's National Review about the recent award to Princeton economist Paul Krugman, of the Nobel Medal in Economics;

"Prior to 2008 the Nobel Prize had never been awarded posthumously. So great minds such as John Maynard Keynes and Fischer Black never received the coveted award. But all that has changed. This year, the prize for economics is going to Paul Krugman, an economist who died a decade ago.

To clarify, the person named Paul Krugman, the living and breathing man who will accept the Nobel in Stockholm this December, is merely a public intellectual — a person operating in the same domain as, say, Oprah Winfrey.

The living Krugman’s rabidly liberal New York Times column has, for nine years now, traded on the dead Krugman’s reputation as an economist, a reputation that only will be burnished by the award of the Nobel Prize. Yet his column is pure politics, not economics. It is the equivalent of astronomers Mather and Smoot — the 2006 Nobelists in physics — writing on astrology.

This living Paul Krugman can’t be the same person as the dead economist. The dead economist wrote eloquently of the supreme importance of globalization and international trade as engines of prosperity. But the living public intellectual remains silent on these subjects when the Democratic party’s nominee for president threatens to abrogate the North American Free Trade Agreement."

Read the entire thing, and some further thoughts at Cafe Hayek on the how Krugman's columns prove that "the economic way of thinking is no longer of concern to him."

Only one question remains; what will he do with the $1.4 million prize?

Will he pay taxes on it at the low rates established in 2003 by George W. Bush, a president and a policy that Krugman has worked so assiduously to discredit? Or will he voluntarily pay at the higher rates he advocates?