Ben Bernanke, Hippie

New Paul Krugman:

And, even more remarkably, a very similar story has played out over the past three years, this time about economic policy. Back then, all the important people decided that an unrelated war was an appropriate response to a terrorist attack; three years ago, they all decided that fiscal austerity was the appropriate response to an economic crisis caused by runaway bankers, with the supposedly imminent danger from budget deficits playing the role once played by Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Now, as then, this consensus has seemed impenetrable to counterarguments, no matter how well grounded in evidence. And now, as then, leaders of the consensus continue to be regarded as credible even though they’ve been wrong about everything (why do people keep treating Alan Simpson as a wise man?), while critics of the consensus are regarded as foolish hippies even though all their predictions — about interest rates, about inflation, about the dire effects of austerity — have come true.

So here’s my question: Will it make any difference that Ben Bernanke has now joined the ranks of the hippies? 

And

So the deficit is not a clear and present danger, spending cuts in a depressed economy are a terrible idea and premature austerity doesn’t make sense even in budgetary terms. Regular readers may find these propositions familiar, since they’re pretty much what I and other progressive economists have been saying all along. But we’re irresponsible hippies. Is Ben Bernanke? (Well, he has a beard.)  

More here.

Well, as a Republican appointee, it ought to be that Bernanke is insulated from the hippie charge, but I've been seeing conservatives tearing into fellow conservatives who split from the party line for several years now.  The Tea Party faithful might just choose to ignore his apostasy, but all it takes is for Rush Limbaugh, or another influential right-wing asshole, to go off on him for a couple of minutes, and then Bernanke's a communist.  I guess we'll see about that.

More generally, though, like Krugman, I've gone on and on here about how deficit hysteria is psychotic, especially right now, so there's no need to repeat myself.  Actually, I am going to repeat myself now, on another topic, but it's one that continues to weigh heavily on my mind: increasingly for our ruling class, facts and logic do not matter.  I mean, it's one thing to trash conservatives for denying global warming, or for embracing creationism.  But deficit hysteria, like the whole Iraqi WMD debacle, runs rampant in Washington, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican.  It's a bipartisan delusion.  Sure, the conservatives are way beyond the establishment left on this, by and large, because they have to be in order to continue supporting key conservative philosophies that have been shown to be total bunk in the real world.  But the establishment liberals are doing it, too, perhaps with increasing frequency.

Chris Hedges lays some of the blame for this on our society's shift from what he calls a print based culture to an image based culture, and I think he's probably right.  But it's certain that it is easier in the twenty first century for public figures to ignore facts in favor of their preferred realities.  And it's also certain that lots of regular ordinary Americans are doing the same thing.  "I believe" has become a sacred phrase.  What happens when reality can be dismissed with such ease?

I really don't know.  But it can't be good.  Indeed, it has to be, in the end, extraordinarily bad.

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