Krugman on "Marxism!"

Crazy Climate Economics - NYTimes.com

Was I sounding too Right wing in the last post?  Time for a corrective, then.

An excellent column yesterday by Paul Krugman on the craziness of the ideological rhetorical (much of) the American Right has adopted in the last decade.   A taste:

Everywhere you look these days, you see Marxism on the rise. Well, O.K., maybe you don’t — but conservatives do. If you so much as mention income inequality, you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin; Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word “class” is “Marxism talk.” In the right’s eyes, sinister motives lurk everywhere — for example, George Will says the only reason progressives favor trains is their goal of “diminishing
Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.”

Ha!  Didn't Atlas Shrugged indicate that a certain author who had a fetish about individualism thought trains were OK?  (Actually, at Slate, they looked at this question in detail a few years ago.  Libertarians apparently still like trains - as long as they are privately owned trains.)

Krugman predicts that the Right's reaction to Obama using the EPA to address CO2 (because they won't let him use market based methods) will again be to claim "Marxism":

You can already get a taste of what’s coming in the dissenting opinions from a recent Supreme Court ruling on power-plant pollution. A majority of the justices agreed that the E.P.A. has the right to regulate smog from coal-fired power plants, which drifts across state lines. But
Justice Scalia didn’t just dissent; he suggested that the E.P.A.’s proposed rule — which would tie the size of required smog reductions to cost — reflected the Marxist concept of “from each
according to his ability.” Taking cost into consideration is Marxist? Who knew?

As he goes on to argue, very reasonably:

Why is this crazy? Normally, conservatives extol the magic of markets and the adaptability of the private sector, which is supposedly able to transcend with ease any constraints posed by, say, limited supplies of natural resources. But as soon as anyone proposes adding a few limits to reflect environmental issues — such as a cap on carbon emissions — those all-capable corporations supposedly lose any ability to cope with change.

Now, the rules the E.P.A. is likely to impose won’t give the private sector as much flexibility as it would have had in dealing with an economywide carbon cap or emissions tax. But Republicans have only themselves to blame: Their scorched-earth opposition to any kind of climate policy has left executive action by the White House as the only route forward.

The Right in the US has (in large part) become an intellectual embarrassment, and we are all waiting for the recovery.