SEE DAVID KAISER'S CURRENT POST KRUGMAN VS. BROOKS

This is just an introductory remark, re Krugman.

Let's just agree that Krugman once seemed to be a New Deal Democrat.  I think he postured himself as one, but I seriously question that he ever really was a dyed in the wool New Deal Democrat so much as he was a liberal economist in the largest sense of the term.

However, in practice and in theory, that meant that he seemed more or less for Keynsian fiscal domestic policies, but these would not be allowed to trump a liberal globalist trade and investment agenda also promoted by him, in tandem. 

If you look Krugman up on Wikipedia, it very quickly becomes crystal clear, as I have always known, that he primarily an economist of economics under globalization, and specializes in some of its aspects. This was the direction economics as a social science took from the beginning, a perspective larger than and other than the state. 'If there were an Economist's Creed, it would surely contain the affirmations 'I understand the Principle of Comparative Advantage' and 'I advocate Free Trade'.' Say no more! Nuf said! 

These two aspects of liberal economics, Keynesian domestic and post Keynesian globalist international, have increasingly come into opposition, for a variety of reasons. The upshot of the situation has been that globalist trade, production, and investment policies and institutions such as the IMF and the WB, Harry Dexter White's UN, and Bretton Woods, have, over time, rendered Keynsian domestic fiscal and investment policies ineffectual if not now thoroughly obsolete. 

I like to call the situation The Globalization Trap, or The Economists' Trap.  

He says something like, the paradox of toil, and the paradox of flexibility, exacerbate a liquidity trap.... something like 'the worm at the heart of being'.

This is not something that was not foreseen. Kindleberger saw it clearly. The ultimate goal, especially by the end of WWII, as Kindleberger pointed out, was the withering away of the nation state itself into larger and larger ostensibly safer and more peaceful economic units, ultimately ending up as a single utopian global economic unity.

Nationalism now is the scorched earth that remains after globalization. 

Krugman will not stand on it or defend it at this point. 

It is already now the biggest lost cause.

And that leads us next to a brief discussion, following DK, of Brooks' surprising brand of nationalism.