The Wrong State

George Monbiot has an article you should read.

It is a wonder (OK, maybe I'm using the word rhetorically) that, over the past three decades and a bit, the same political movements that have demanded that governments should get their hands out of the economy (where their involvement is crucial and can be beneficial) have been so sanguine at seeing them obtain increasing powers over their constituents, including their private lives' (where they really have no business interfering) with a total lack of accountability.

That is another way in which this is, in Monbiot's appropriate title, the wrong state. Wrong in what it does, but also in the way that, while abdicating its responsibilities where it should be the main actor, it is grabbing power where it should be absent.

Greg Mankiw at it again...

Greg Mankiw came up with a defense of the top 1% (note: I provide the link because that's the done thing. I don't actually recommend that you follow it...). Many people, such as Dean Baker, Harold Pollack, Paul Krugman and even The Economist take this apart (and this time I do recommend you follow the links), take this apart.

And yet, they are being much too kind.

Greg Mankiw has written an Economics textbook that is very well regarded, and is still the leader in the undergraduate universities market in the US (although Paul Krugman's seemed to be catching up fast). Because of that, a lot of people will like him or, at any rate, not want to appear to have too bad a word for him. Yet there is a point where this becomes enforced blindness.

A telling chart

I tend to recommend that people read what Paul Krugman posts in any case, and indeed I link to his blog, but I thought I'd highlight a graph he published recently there.



And with this incredible record (I do mean incredible. It defies belief), the powers that be keep insisting that we must do more of what they have been demanding for the past, well, 5 years.

The euro will bury us all.