“I sometimes joke that there are only around 15 true libertarians in America, and they all wear bow ties”—Nobel Prize dude Paul Krugman, holding forth in today’s NYT.
Assuming that that’s true, one can only pity Paul’s friends, if he has any. I know a number of “true libertarians”, though probably not 15, and none of them wear ties of any description. Paul gets off this alleged funny in the course of discussing a well-known scatter-plot, shown below.
This scatter-plot, developed by Lee Drutman to accompany his 2017 article Political Divisions in 2016 and Beyond: Tensions Between and Within the Two Parties, divides the electorate into four groups, according to their views on economic and social issues. The upper left, economically “liberal” but socially conservative, is inhabited by both Democratic (blue) and Republican (red) voters, while the upper right “conservative conservative” is almost all red, while the lower left, “liberal liberal” is almost all blue, and the lower right, economically conservative but socially liberal, is the uninhabited libertarian zone.
The thing is, a lot of people, with some trimming, would fit in there—the old “country club Republicans” like Nancy Reagan, for example, and the neo-liberal, Wall Street friendly Clinton/Obama crowd—even Dr. Krugman himself, really. Many years ago, Paul wrote an excellent essay, whose title I have forgotten and whose internet address I neglected to save, but Paul himself surely remembers it, a sadder but wiser missive—quite wise, as a matter of fact—written by a man who didn’t get a plum job with the incoming Clinton administration in 1993 because he insisted on telling Bill what Bill didn’t want to hear, that there just wasn’t much a president—or even the whole federal government—can do to make the economy grow. Specifically, Paul wasn’t willing to tell Bill that cutting tariffs would create jobs, or that increasing tariffs would cost them. Naturally, Bill, like every incoming Democratic president, fancies himself as the second coming of FDR, and didn’t like being told that his fate was to be largely ineffectual.1
One can also say that Clinton had the last laugh, so to speak, on that one, because the U.S. economy under Bill was a roaring success, though he was probably saved from himself on occasion. I can’t prove that his universal health care program, whatever it might have looked like in some alternative universe, would have been a disaster, but I suspect it would have been. The Clintons simply didn’t know what they were doing in the early stages, and success for them could easily have been more disastrous than failure. And, of course, it was the Republican Congress that guaranteed that there would be no “riotous” spending—not with a Democrat in the White House, at least.
1. In the “bigger” picture, Paul “confesses” that it’s pretty much impossible to explain basic economic “truths” to people who have nothing more than high school math—so that, basically, you can’t convince lay people of anything worth knowing about economics, because they don’t understand the “language”.
