Krugman is a Keynesian because he wants bigger government. I’m an anti-Keynesian because I want smaller government. Both of us can find evidence for our worldviews. Whose evidence is better? I’m not sure it’s a meaningful question. My empirical points about Keynesianism won’t convince Krugman. His point don’t convince me.

Russ got jumped on by a good portion of the blogosphere for this claim with the powerful argument of “Aha! See, those libertarians just want smaller government no matter the evidence. We lefties are all looking for evidence first and foremost, and that’s why we’re Keynesians.”

For a more detailed post, you can read Russ’ long defense, but I think that he’s making a claim more about philosophy than economics. Is Krugman a Keynesian because it’s what his values align with or is he a Keynesian because he walked into Econ 101, bringing no bias with him, completely open-minded, and decided that Keynesianism as a general economic guide makes the most sense? Krugman and his defenders are basically claiming the latter, which seems pretty preposterous.

Regardless, that has now led Adam Ozimek at Modeled Behavior to posit that Russ Roberts is wrong because he and others can favor policies that run in opposition to their worldview at any given time. He’s called this challenge “Now Less Than Ever.”

Deregulation is important, and necessary, and too much regulation is a problem. But it’s not the problem the economy is facing right now. Attempts to focus on regulation are a distraction, and we’re not going to deregulate our way to full employment. We need to focus on deregulation now less than ever.

So now it’s your turn. Help prove Russ Roberts’ cynicism wrong, and tell us what favorite policies of yours we need Now Less Than Ever.

Ezra Klein also asks conservative bloggers to take the challenge. Far be it from me, a humble freelance conservative, to claim the mantle of all conservative bloggers, but I’ve got an easy one: tax cuts!

As a conservative who believes our looming entitlement-driven budget crisis is possibly the greatest policy problem facing the country right now, tax cuts are a nice long-term goal but something certainly unnecessary as the United States faces a tidal wave of red ink. The CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario, which is usually my baseline for budgeting, puts our tax burden at around 19% of GDP in 2020. That’s a fine number. It could even stand to be a bit higher. But I don’t think that tax cuts are something in the cards right now. Paul Ryan’s budget (which I’ve had high praise for) is lacking in specificity on tax reform, and also includes slight cuts relative to this baseline. I think that’s a mistake.

Tax reform is certainly needed, but even though I think a state that taxes at a lower rate than 19% of GDP is going to have more growth, the deficit that the United States faces due to out-of-control spending is a much larger problem. In fact, the CBO warned that debt is going to be a significant drag on growth in their standard ten-year budget window. We need tax cuts now less than ever.

The Korean firm supplies memory chips, display panels and other components for Apple products… Apple was Samsung’s second-largest client in 2010 after Japan’s Sony Corp, accounting for four percent of its 155 trillion won ($142 billion) annual revenue.

While this wouldn’t ordinarily be a huge deal, the worldwide patent battles between the two hardware giants makes a status-quo business partnership between the two odd. Animosities are brewing; Samsung recently pulled its new tablet from the Australian market in light of a court injunction.

Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman had a good rundown of the clashes between the two companies in a number of different countries.

[A] German judge upheld an injunction barring Samsung’s German subsidiary from selling its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the European Union, even though a Dutch court disagreed on the validity of Apple’s registered Community Design. Still, the Dutch court did issue an injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphones based on an Apple patent for photo management on a mobile device. Samsung has until October 13 to find a workaround for that infringement, which may simply require a software update for an included photo gallery app.

The German decision is strange because it focuses on what the photo application for the Galaxy S looks and operates like. Do consumers care? Do consumers even pick up a Galaxy S and think “Wow, they sure ripped off Apple here”?

Accusations of patent infringement has become a favorite tool of both large corporations looking to maintain market share, as Apple and Samsung are proving, and small “patent troll” firms that make a quick buck by registering dozens of patents, filing lawsuits and settling. Tim Lee ran down these problems in a National Review piece a few weeks ago, and comes to a reasonable conclusion with a pessimistic outlook:

software patents are unnecessary because software is already eligible for copyright protection. Not only is copyright law simpler and less expensive than patent law, it also doesn’t have patent law’s problems with inadvertent infringement. As long as programmers write their own code from scratch, they can be confident they aren’t infringing others’ copyrights.

Unfortunately, given the political influence of large companies with substantial patent portfolios, there’s little hope of Congress’s reversing the legalization of software patents by the courts. The best hope for reform is that the courts will correct their own mistake.

The lack of sour grapes between Apple and Samsung in their announcement of their business cooperation is a sign that patent lawsuits have become standard operating procedure for tech firms. This is a troubling sign.

What is necessary is that the Global Financial system is stable; that the geopolitical realm is as calm as can be managed; that both the Enlightenment and Global Capitalism continue to thrive. And, as a bonus that the First Republic of the United States still stands.

If we can have all that, I am going to call it a win.

Sadly, however, only three GOP candidates gave me confidence that they could contribute to this result. Those were Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman. Tim Pawlenty dropped out. Jon Huntsman is going nowhere fast. That pretty much just left Mitt Romney.

While I don’t disagree that this is an acceptable bar to have to clear, I do disagree on who would clear this bar – it’s going to be pretty much everyone currently in the GOP field, save for Ron Paul. The degree to which the DC establishment GOP machine will infiltrate the presidency of any of the candidates might astonish Karl. And outside of Ron Paul, I don’t see a candidate with the conviction to ignore their professional advisors on a question of, say, abolishing the federal reserve.

He also underestimates what has become the lament of grassroots laissez-faire conservatives: the immense pressure to “do something” in light of a crisis. So if we agree that TARP was necessary to secure one of Smith’s above criteria (global financial stability), who do we think would, given the extraordinary power of the Presidency, actually do nothing as they watched the world collapse around them?

At this point in the election cycle, the speechwriters and rhetoricians are running these campaigns. It’s a question of who-says-the-biggest-piece-of-news, not who-has-the-best-plan. That gives publicity to the extreme statements of the Bachmanns and Perrys.

So here’s a question back to Smith: Which of the potential candidates, if they garnered the nomination and won the Presidency, would wreak more havoc upon the world than Barack Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush? Bush is a man described by a good number of historians as the worst president of all time. Would he say that a Bachmann Administration, or a Perry Administration, or a Gingrich Administration are, in his mind, instantly contenders for worst Presidency of all time?

I’m not psyched about the current crop of GOP candidates either. They’re all certainly sub-par and, though I’m a Republican, would be tough to tell if they’d be marginally better than another four years of Obama.

Now, maybe I could be naive and wrong. Maybe these people are legitimately insane and would take a burning sword to the United States’ complacent, affluent status quo as global leader, advisors and beltway elite be damned. But I don’t foresee a global collapse of the financial system, a nuclear war, or Hell on Earth coming during a 2012-2016 GOP presidency.

Well, unless Ron Paul is sitting in the Oval Office.

On Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show recently, Paul Krugman said

If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive build-up to counter the alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months… there was a Twilight Zone episode about this in which scientists fake an alien threat to achieve world peace. Well this time we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

World War II nostalgia seems to run rampant on the left. If only we could tap into some kind of mankind-unifying principle, in which people stop responding to financial incentives and place patriotism over dollar, we’d have fiscal stimulus big enough to drag us out of any depression.

Krugman readily acknowledges the role that science fiction has in his life. Foundation, Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi series revolving around the lionization of a social scientist, partly influenced Krugman to go into economics. Here he also draws upon the Twilight Zone as a thought experiment. But perhaps the most apt comparison is to Alan Moore’s Watchmen, in which an explicitly left-liberal utilitarian businessman (Adrian Veidt, known as Ozymandias) unites the world by artificially engineering a fake alien threat. Veidt calculates that the world is going to destroy itself via nuclear war, and thus concocts the outside aggressor. In the process, he kills half the population of Manhattan.

Outside of the broken windows fallacy, there is of course something to this. If you could unite the financial system to magically drop their free-market concerns and mobilize in some kind of war effort, you might be able to create the economic conditions for effective stimulus. As Megan McArdle posits,

[W]hat if Keynesian stimulus works, but no one can ever actually afford to do it, short of something like World War II, where the government can tap into a patriotic outpouring of national savings by issuing bonds with negative real yields.

There are two problems: this world does not exist, and World War Two was a massively un-utilitarian exercise that resulted in death and destruction worldwide.

Krugman is positing something even less likely than a world war in his fake-alien-invasion idea, where no wars are actually fought, no one is killed, but somehow you actually do get that magic patriotism that countercyclical fiscal stimulus advocates are looking for. This is, of course, impossible. But it does mean that Krugman might think that Ozymandias was right.

Not so, according to many who have deemed the Twitter Revolution more hype than reality.  Twitter was certainly helpful in spreading stories of government repression and letting protesters know where to be, but it did not create the Green Movement, nor did its use suddenly empower Iranians.  Golnaz Esfandiari does an excellent job of summarizing these arguments that “Twitter’s impact inside Iran is nil.”  Twitter helped, but a year later, it is clearer that it was more useful to those outside Iran, than those doing the actual organizing and protesting.

I bring this up now because as I look at the Free Gaza flotilla, I am struck by the lack of a role that Twitter played in contrast.  The flotilla was, like the protests in Iran, organized by traditional means and its story was carried by traditional news media and blogs more powerfully than any hash tag could have.  The goal of the flotilla was to call attention to Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and when this blockade is eventually lifted, the flotilla is sure to be cited for its influence.  But where was Twitter?  It seems that Gretta Berlin hasn’t needed it in the way observers of Iran a year ago would have predicted.  Instead, it looks like the Free Gaza flotilla has demonstrated that social networking is more useful for armchair commentary while actual political changes will continue to rely on traditional organizing.  In looking back, would Twitter have brought about a different end to ills like apartheid, will it be considered instrumental in ending the blockade on Gaza, or will it be called on again in Iran?  The world will continue to change and progress as it always has, but social media appears only to be another “town crier”, and not the next “printing press” as many hoped.

Economists were absolutely divided on the stimulus at the time, and they continue to be. Two hundred economists agreed that the Obama stimulus plan was a bad idea, signing onto an incredibly controversial statement that basically subscribed to freshwater principles.

Now, Walt would have you believe that these economists “don’t count,” despite 95% of them actually being academics not the “business economists” he likes to degrade. I would mention nobel laureates Gary Becker and James Buchanan, but Walt would have you believe that they don’t count either. Then I would mention monetarists like Scott Sumner, but Walt would have you believe they don’t count either. Then I would hide behind the GMU economists, but Walt would have you believe that they don’t count either. I would mention Greg Mankiw, but of COURSE he doesn’t count either, because he disagrees with Paul Krugman. I guess, then, I would have to mention Tyler Cowen, who is the sole economist alive in America today whose opinion Walt disagrees with but still is allowed to speak with Walt’s respect.

These people are freshwater and saltwater, neoclassicists and behavioralists, Keynesians and monetarists. The reason that there was such a broad-based opposition to the Obama stimulus is because the stimulus was so poorly designed. As I’ve said all along, it was the equivalent of throwing money at the wall and just hoping some of it worked.

And of course, to the stimulus’ credit, some of it has worked. Aid to the states has proven more effective than previously predicted but, of course, many states are using stimulus money for short-term gain while exacerbating their long-term fiscal crises.

Additionally, as Walt said, the length of the downturn has provided a retort to the timeliness objection to this parcticular stimulus and to anti-stimulative efforts in general.

The stimulus has also proven less effective than predicted. In particular, infrastructure spending and projects that composed a great deal of stimulus spending have seen virtually zero effect on unemployment. Census spending has actively crowded out private efforts. Now these may not be terrible disasters, but they speak to the “throwing money at the wall” strategy and the general poor design of the whole endeavor.

Republican arguments about the stimulus not creating a single job are disingenuous. The stimulus has done some good. But it’s also been a big waste and actively harmful in a few cases. Almost a trillion dollars was spent. The bill will come due at some point. And while it’s our structural debt rather than massive one-time debt that is the bigger long-term problem, spending nearly 10% of GDP on one piece of legislation doesn’t help.

All of this measurement of the stimulus is largely moot because, at this point, we certainly don’t know what kind of effect the stimulus is having. It’ll be years before we know definitively what’s worked and what hasn’t worked. And maybe not even then (see: anti-Depression measures).

Now, as to the state of the macro community, it’s more correct to say that they’re divided but mostly in favor of some kind of stimulative action by the government when it comes to countering recessions. What I’ve just discussed is opposition to Obama’s stimulus, not general stimulative efforts. It would be correct to say that, for the most part, Mankiw-ian New Keynesians, Cowen-like behavioralists and even Sumnerian monetarists would be in favor of well-designed stimulus. That would leave the Becker neoclassicists and Kling-Mason schoolers as against it, which is a much smaller group of people.

However, to sum up, both of Brooks’ quotes were right.

Think Progress’ Matt Yglesias sees an opportunity for old-school news outlets to evolve and provide something that readers may want: analysis and fact-checking in ‘straight news’ stories in addition to reportage.

This is fine and good, and he holds up Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo as an example that the MSM could learn from. Beutler covers news from an explicitly progressive perspective, injecting his own analysis into something as mundane as a John Boehner presser.

The fight over the stimulus, he said, “was all about more government spending, not more about allowing American families and small businesses to keep more of what they earn, because when it’s all said and done they’re the ones who are gonna have to get the economy going again,” Boehner said, ignoring that about one-third of the stimulus bill’s cost came from tax cuts.

Watch as I re-write that last sentence with my own “news analysis.”

“…to get the economy going again,” Boehner said, without mentioning the obvious fact that there was no “fight” over the broad legislative consensus over the need for tax cuts.

Or, later in the piece, this:

[Boehner] “And if you look at the revenue growth over those 30 years, you’ve got a prime example of what we’ve been talking about.”

This is practically the reverse of the truth. In the years after the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, economic growth and employment were significantly lower than they were after Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increases. According to Michael Ettlinger and John Irons of the Center for American Progress, “Over the seven-year periods after each legislative action, average annual growth was 3.9 percent following [Clinton's 1993 tax increase], 3.5 percent following [Reagan's 1981 tax cut], and 2.5 percent following [Bush's 2001 tax cut].”

Not added in the piece, another hypothetical reporter’s “news analysis”,

Of course, this is a silly comparison due to the massive discrepancy in magnitude of tax cuts, types of tax cuts, wisdom of certain provisions, while not actually accounting for economic activities that have a relationship to tax cuts.

It’s nice to see some on the Left rejecting old-media standards and accepting the place of journalism that does not pretend to be gold standard while injecting news analysis. However, I suspect that this is confined, on the part of Yglesias and Beutler, strictly to those outlets that inject analysis from a progressive point of view.

Because as I’ve just shown, analysis can take many forms. Yglesias would no doubt say that my injection of my opinion into Beutler’s piece above is misleading, untruthful and disingenuous. So in the end, they are still searching for a new kind of “gold standard” journalism in which there is an objective truth to every news story. And in this new standard, that objective truth will always conform to a liberal narrative. Places like Fox, Breitbart and (dare I say!) Townhall have no place in this imagined new world.

Crossposted at Townhall.com

Rep Peter King (R-NY), ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, educated the public (well at least the public that watches Fox News) on Attorney General Eric Holder’s true reasoning behind his support of trying terror suspects in criminal courts. King:

House Homeland Security Committee ranking Republican Pete King (N.Y.) said that Holder’s refusal to say that radical Islam motivated the alleged attacker, Faisal Shahzad, makes him an incapable attorney general.

“An attorney general who eight and a half years after Sept. 11 does not realize our enemy is radical Islam is either so politically correct or so out of touch that he doesn’t deserve to be attorney general,” King said on Fox News. “I mean, this is why he wants to have the terror trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Lower Manhattan — he just doesn’t get it.”

Nevermind the highly disputable legal and policy questions undergirding the debate on capturing, detaining, and trying terror suspects going on in legal circles and in the think tank world. Indeed, simplistic partisan attacks are more fun than reviewing questions on evidence, fact, nuanced bipartisan debate, academic studies, and general rational, reasoned debate.

First, a backgrounder. Let’s remember my post on “reform” vs. “restoration” conservatives.

It’s telling that not a few leading reformers are ex-Bush Administration officials. Bush took huge chances in a lot of ways to distance himself from the old coalitions and ended up villified for the majority of them. It is pretty definitive that Bush was more reform than restoration.

I’m not here to defend the people who are currently termed, correctly or not, as “leaders” of conservatism or the GOP. Michael Steele is silly. Glenn Beck is a shock jock. Ann Coulter is ridiculous. Rush Limbaugh’s in it for the money. John Boehner’s in it to keep the party line, whatever that may be nowadays.

What I am curious about is what S. Goodspeed’s idea of the “public intellectual” is. Was the GOP and conservatism that much better off five years ago when Irving Kristol, Bill Buckley and Milton Friedman were all still alive? These intellectual giants were feeble old men at the time with little value to add. Yet George W. Bush had just been swept into office for a second time and there was much hand-wringing in the media about the prospects of a “permanent GOP majority.”

Before I continue, let me say that this is decisively a problem of spotlight, not ideas. There is no paucity of smart conservatism. There is, however, an unfortunate lack of attention given to those that ARE the serious intellectual pundits.

I can’t now name a “public intellectual leader” of the Republican party off the top of my head right now. But I couldn’t then, either. Sure, we had the three aforementioned old men, but I’d consider them elder statesmen, not prominent driving forces of debate.

Furthermore, I can’t, off the top of my head, name who the “public intellectual leaders” of the Democratic party are. Saying that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck et. al represent whatever one considers to be the “public leadership” of the conservative movement is no better than saying that Maureen Dowd, Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher constitute some kind of leading lights of the Left. Going on pure popularity/viewership/readership this is most assuredly true. But I wouldn’t be so foolish as to claim these people should be rebutted or taken seriously by smart people such as us. These talking heads on both the left and the right hold sway, power, and influence but should not be taken seriously.

I do agree that there isn’t enough of a public intellectual core of the conservative movement and that far more press is given to, as you call them, rabble-rousers. Much as I hate it, the primary representatives of conservatism are exactly who you pointed out in the mainstream media: neocons and ‘reformers.’

I hate neocons. I do, however, recognize that they are (mostly) serious about intellectualism. When I think “big time serious pundit” I think first and foremost George Will, who is the last great defender of traditional three-legged-stool conservatism (kinda… he’s more a two-leg guy, which is another point FOR him). Then Charles Krauthammer. Then all the ex-Bush administration guys (Brooks, Frum, Gerson). I also agree, mostly, on your “established/traditional” pundit list.

The “partisan conservative punditry” is where I think the future of a public intellectual base for the GOP lies (though would exclude Barone. Great electioneer, lousy pundit). Goldberg, as I’ve made known, I think is very smart, has a young voice, and is sufficiently able to articulate a vision of mainstream conservatism without descending into anti-intellectualism.

Your “up and coming” conservatives is wrong… at least with who you think represents this. Douthat is young but I would describe him as “the smartest Mike Huckabee Republican.” He is about the social issues.

If I had to choose the “up and coming” conservatives who I feel should be given more press and voice, I’d say Megan McArdle, Jonathan Adler, Veronique de Rugy, Will Wilkinson… people of this stripe represent the “intellectual pundit” part of the conservative movement. They’re all libertarian(ish) but, of course, that’s what I feel is the bread-and-butter of conservatism.