Joe, this goes beyond another Krugman flight of fancy to something that we battle everyday.
To recap, Krugman tried to claim that carmakers must build their plants in Canada because workers in places like Alabama are too dumb to do the job. Yes, yes, Mercedes-Benz has a plant in Alabama, and BMW of course has one in South Carolina, but Krugman must argue, indeed his entire would view depends on, the notion that high taxes and high social spending translates into the best of all possible worlds for the populace.
That’s the backstory, Krugman saying something not true about Alabama that he must have known, or reasonably could be expected to know, was counter-factual. Where this matters for policy debates in Raleigh, and indeed in every major city in the state, is that Krugman-spew reflects the prevailing agenda that trickles down from the Times to regional papers. Not anything like marching ordes, of course, but the Times op-ed page clearly helps frame the world for many reporters and editors in the Carolinas.
The Krugman column is a pitch-perfect example of the belief that Southern states, and counties and cities and towns, can only hope to compete in the world by aping a high-tax, high-spending model; that ever-growing “needs” must be met by ever-growing public-sector spending. To do otherwise simply is not reasonable and out of step with reality, you see. This view is duplicated, in vary degrees, by much of the news coverage and op-ed debates we see locally.
Yet here we have Krugman so utterly detached from the real world as to be operating in some sort of imaginary land where numbers and words have only the meaning he ascribes to them. As a result, news professionals need to wonder when, should they continue to trail the Times’ lead, they’ll be in the postion of the Anniston Star. That Alabama paper, which printed the offending Krugman column, was reduced to running an open letter back-tracking from the opinions Krugman offered and looking pretty foolish in the process.
