AN INNER PEACE

I read Krugman again today and a funny thing happened: I smiled. Oh, it's not as though he was dopey as usual rattling on about taxes and redistribution and fair share and all the other little phrases that the loony left like to use , but I finally realized that about the only real success that economists of any ilk have had at any point is to create the impression that economics is some form of hard science like physics or math and to get a goodly body of the public to buy into that ridiculous notion. It of course isn't and every day events give witness to that fact.

It's not that I don't like economists...some of my best friends are economists like my really smart friend, Larry. It's just that it seems what economists do is to come up with a theory and if they are any good with numbers, work the math until they get confirmation of that which exists in their mind. As a matter of fact, if you look at the departments in many major universities toddy, there are fewer and fewer departments of economics and more and more departments of econometrics; we have measured our theories and found them to be true and correct. Yeah, sure.

Fact of the matter is there is no theory that has withstood the test of time; indeed, most have been ravaged by time or to put it another way, what MAY have seemed to have worked in 1932 or 1392 or 1952 is almost guaranteed not to work in 2010. The theory may have remained but the time and the circumstances have rendered it meaningless. More stimulus, less stimulus, easy money, hard money--these are all merely theories that are rendered true or useless by the conditions of the moment and these conditions into such a world as we have evolved, so complex, so interconnected and at the same time so fractured, make them in any constant sense, meaningless. I'm sure little Paulie has figured this out and I am sure it makes him furious because it makes him irrelevant, because at some point he will have to admit that he is merely an observer and not the controller. The same is true for those of equal conviction on the other side of the political spectrum. Having figured this out, I am at peace; no longer need I froth at the mouth over Krugman, I shall just let the events of our time shape the future in a manner that he cannot control, recognizing the truths that this vile little man refuses to recognize. OOps, sorry, Paulie. I really should stay in a state of peace.

We'll talk more about MY truths and how they affect our present situation tomorrow.