Dark Ages Redux

OK I get the gold medal.

Yesterday I wrote a blog entry entitled: “The Dark Ages Are Back”. And today Krugman has a blog headed “The Dark Ages, Returned in Full”.

His, of course, is short and to the point. Mine, of course, rambles on endlessly. Still I won the race with the thought.

What I missed is the quote he repeats, and which I copy here:

This, as Krugman explains, is a famous quote from Joseph Schumpeter – he of “creative destruction of capitalism” fame – that is constantly brought out by softies like me to demonstrate the utter callous heartlessness of classical economics. The classical folks and their followers argue that we should allow the market to “purge the rottenness from the economy”. Those were the words of J.P. Morgan as he advised Hoover. We should not, in Schumpeter’s words, leave the “work of depressions undone”.

And that is the great divide in economic and policy making today. Seven or more decades after Keynes taught us how to mitigate the awful consequences of depressions, there are still people who argue that such events are both “natural” and beneficial”.

They are fools. Anti-social fools.

If we have learned how to save millions of families – our fellow citizens and neighbors – from destitution, famine, and the permanent loss of wealth, why on earth do we not want to do just that?

Simply to defend a rotten ideology?

Apparently.