Is Krugman a Troll?

An internet troll, that is.

Krugman on CNN last weekend, talking about economic policy:

If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months, and then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren't any aliens, we'd be better--

He was cut off there, but likely he'd have finished with "-off than we are now."

Greg Cochran, a few years back:

If the President had decided (because of a stroke with truly interesting side effects) that we could no longer stand idly by in the eternal conflict between penguins and skuas ( penguins = Good, skuas = Evil) and sent an expeditionary force to Antarctica, an expedition in which a thousand soldiers froze to death and ten thousand others lost limbs to frostbite - an expedition that cost one hundred billion dollars, a conflict in which the skuas and blizzards left the issue in doubt, one in which we discovered that penguins are thoroughly unlikable when you get to know them better - if he had done this instead of invading Iraq, the country would be substantially better off than it is today.

Not that Krugman couldn't have thought of that himself, but I find the two quotes eerily familiar in structure and tone. Krugman has shown other hints that he is sympathetic with some "paleo-conservative" thinking on other occassions. I wouldn't doubt that he reads Randall Parker's blog (as Tyler Cowen often links to him) and could well have encountered Greg's gem there.

As to his main point about the stimulus, he may be right that such huge stimulus spending - regardless of the value of what's produced - would be a positive for the economy, but I'm skeptical. But he's ignoring the fundamental basis of his parable - that full mobilization, all other concerns be damned, is what is needed.

But such stimulus is not remotely possible today. To do so, Obama would have to throw environmental concerns to the wind, tell Labor to shove their rules up their nether regions, and tell his Diversity cronies to take a hike. (A Republican would have his own cadre of leaches he'd have to dis). Never going to happen. The only solution is government paralysis leading to a cathartic depression, cleaning out the poison in the economy. It will be painful, but at least we know that works, as it's happened throughout history (the last time being 1982-83).