This is just the kind of article that has made economists like Krugman whipping boys on my blog.
It contains almost all of the ingredients I most detest about that profession, gathered into one tidy place. The one exception is his insight re Smoot-Hawley not have caused the Great Depression, but rather having been a consequence of it. This Smoot-Hawley causation theory has been an article of faith among American thinkers, think tanks, and economists ever since, a total chimera.
Who is his target audience?
Even you can find it, if you look closely.
I will spill the beans: Corporate America. (This term, itself, is an artificial economists' choir boy, since as a result of economists' globalization ideology there are not really really big corporate America players which are not really, under the skin, mainly global entities in their goals and allegiance.)
It's that global readership that he accuses, tips his hand there really, is in denial. It is not average, or poor Americans, or even upper middle class ones. He refers to them. They don't know yet that they're being betrayed. He tells them, but he knows it doesn't matter. He hasn't thought of the Kennedy Fallacy yet; it is not in the economists' lexicon. It is really the big management boys he is speaking to here, not so called big labor; the Kennedy Fallacy is not up for discussion.
It is Global Corporatism that is his real audience, but he can't say that; he is still behind a mask.
Remember his recent post, Populism, real and phony?
Do you think he cared about the lower levels of society there, when he wrote it, that that was his audience there?
Do you think he cares about them here? An open question.
No, his target audience was the same one as here, but you must understand that it is global populism. He cares as little about the average, or below average, American as Putin or Trump do.
Krugman shines a light on one of the most enormous flaws in our constitutional system of government: the problem of too much authority over trade lodged in the Executive (amid not enough authority for the whole system in general.) Thank you Paul Krugman.
This has been one of my favorite themes here for years, trading American interests, Opening America's Market, etc. Thank you for confirming what I have been telling the few weird individuals who may nave read this for years.
"When it comes to trade, America is not that much of a superpower." PK
Whom do we have to thank for that?
Game over, smell the coffee.
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