P.S. I haven’t quite turned ToddSeavey.com into a blog yet but will very, very soon, I promise. So in the meantime, as compensation (and for those too far away to attend the debates), here is an anecdote of the sort I might put on the blog if it were up and running:
I once went to see economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman speak at the 92nd Street Y, and after he spent about an hour talking about wanting more regulations and taxes comparable to Canadian levels (and claimed, in response to a question from me, to think that government is already as lean as it can get and thus that no budget cuts are really possible), he confessed that his childhood ambition had been to be a “psychohistorian,” the fictional profession depicted in Isaac Asimov novels that entails planning the entire long-term future and political destiny of humanity with an engineer’s precision, based on detailed knowledge of statistics. As Krugman said, not without humor, there are no psychohistorians in real life, but being an economist and writing for the Times is the next best thing. I think this explains a great deal.
(NOTE: The above was sent as a mass e-mail in the days prior to the debate and was posted on this blog retroactively in April 2007. Click here for other Debates at Lolita Bar.)
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[...] With the stock market in tatters, we’ll be seeing more and more columns crowing that this was always the inevitable fate of go-go, run-amok capitalism (some of them probably written by economist, Gore-like liar, would-be psychohistorian, and now Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman). The UK’s Guardian had a less-than-humble headline proclaiming that this is leftists’ big chance to create a whole “new world” (Sarkozy, who in many ways I like, said much the same thing). Naomi Klein, a highly intellectually-dishonest critic of Milton Friedman even at the best of times, is happy to make it sound like capitalists want disaster, suffering, and even torture (like that endured by some people at the hands of communists, as noted in my entry yesterday) inflicted on the masses (and she stretches the record in countless ways to make it sound, through guilt-by-association, as if free market advisors are responsible for every nefarious deed committed by governments from China to Chile). Now we’re seeing the bitter fruits of free-marketeers’ always-sadistic efforts, she says. [...]
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