Krugman Should Read Buchanan
22 December 2006
The Editor, New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036
To the Editor:
Lamenting the demise of the budget surpluses achieved on the watch of President Clinton's Secretary of Commerce Robert Rubin, Paul Krugman says that "the whole conservative movement shared Mr. Bush's squanderlust, his urge to run off with the money so carefully saved under Mr. Rubin's leadership" ("Democrats and the Deficit," Dec. 22). I'll ignore Krugman's own inconsistent call for Democrats now to spend regardless of the budgetary consequences. What galls me is his apparent ignorance of the work of my Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan.
Buchanan - whom Krugman would no doubt classify as a leading member of the "conservative movement" - has for a half-century consistently and forcefully argued for fiscal responsibility. Indeed, it was Buchanan's brilliant 1958 book, Public Principles of Public Debt, that first exposed the foolishness of the then-dominant view that public debt is innocuous because, as the myth went, "we owe it to ourselves."
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
The Editor, New York Times
229 West 43rd St.
New York, NY 10036
To the Editor:
Lamenting the demise of the budget surpluses achieved on the watch of President Clinton's Secretary of Commerce Robert Rubin, Paul Krugman says that "the whole conservative movement shared Mr. Bush's squanderlust, his urge to run off with the money so carefully saved under Mr. Rubin's leadership" ("Democrats and the Deficit," Dec. 22). I'll ignore Krugman's own inconsistent call for Democrats now to spend regardless of the budgetary consequences. What galls me is his apparent ignorance of the work of my Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan.
Buchanan - whom Krugman would no doubt classify as a leading member of the "conservative movement" - has for a half-century consistently and forcefully argued for fiscal responsibility. Indeed, it was Buchanan's brilliant 1958 book, Public Principles of Public Debt, that first exposed the foolishness of the then-dominant view that public debt is innocuous because, as the myth went, "we owe it to ourselves."
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Posted by Don Boudreaux on
Saturday September 8, 2007 at 9:53am