The Heritage Foundation?s Brian Riedl provoked an online slugfest a while back when he published a paper challenging the basic absurdity of the Obama administration?s stimulus policies ? that government can use deficit spending to create demand and thus ease recessions. If you believe in this theory you must also believe that draining water from one end of a swimming pool and pouring it into the other end will make the water level rise.
The usual suspects trained in Keynesian claptrap, such as The New York Times‘ Paul Krugman, jumped into said pool and splashed around boisterously. Some of their attacks on Riedl and like-minded University of Chicago economist John Cochrane are little more than clumsy personal insults, the kind of thing that the Left in North Carolina now traffics in, too. The rest of the attacks are reruns of debates that free-market critics of Keynes won a quarter of a century ago.
You can follow all this uproarious fun by starting with a post on NRO?s The Corner this morning and following the various links. It?ll be worth it, I promise.
