krugman or the economist as charlatan

OK, again, I'm just using Mr. Krugman as a symbol of the profession of modern astrologers he represents. Really, he makes himself the easiest target, but you know, he won the Nobel prize, so he should in someway represent something. I was tooling around last night and I found this on Mr. Krugman's blog:

In the end, I’d argue, what must happen is an effective default on a significant part of debt, one way or another. The default could be implicit, via a period of moderate inflation that reduces the real burden of debt; that’s how World War II cured the Depression. Or, if not, we could see a gradual, painful process of individual defaults and bankruptcies, which ends up reducing overall debt.

Just like that, you contradict everything you've written about debt being no problem and all we have to do is create more. But even better, he does it with our modern astrologers' conventional wisdom that you can just inflate you're way out of the debt problem, after all says Mr. Krugman, that's what WW II was about, right? Never mind the great pain and chaos that goes along with revaluing currencies, or the destruction, our money-wizards just pull the levers and all will be emerald in OZ.

But, lets get to Mr. Krugman's better point, default. Let's start the party, and not with individuals, let's start the process of debt restructuring with our banks, mega-corporations and nations. Let's clean up the books and start the necessary restructuring of the larger economies, indeed, the necessary restructuring of the corporate global economy from which Mr. Krugman and his ilk all made comfortable livings as shills.

Phew, unaccountable power, but that wasn't even the worse of it last week. You also had Bob Woodward release a new book about the power behind the curtains, and it gets to the front page of the NYT, even though his books have proven filled with such unmitigated tripe over the past decade. I suggest better to go back and read his sickly paean to the "Maestro." Though best, you had Mr. Clinton puking on about how the US needed to rebuild its manufacturing base, ho-ho-ho Bubba, this from a politician who based his entire career celebrating its dismantling.

Why won't these people go away?