Sen. Rand Paul is drawing liberal fire from many left wing commentators, now including Prof. Paul Krugman. Many of the criticisms are badly off base. As noted in yesterday’s column there is so much simply factually incorrect about The New Republic‘s Danny Vinik recent Rand Paul Has the Most Dangerous Economic Views of Any 2016 Candidate— for example — that one hardly knows where to begin.
Vinik by no means is the only commentator to go into hyperbolic meltdown over Rand Paul. Nobel Prize economics laureate Paul Krugman, recently, in Money Makes Crazy:
Right now, the most obvious manifestation of money madness is Senator Rand Paul’s “Audit the Fed” campaign. Mr. Paul likes to warn that the Fed’s efforts to bolster the economy may lead to hyperinflation; he loves talking about the wheelbarrows of cash that people carted around in Weimar Germany.
Prof. Krugman, a polemicist, characteristically exaggerates. Mr. Paul “likes to warn?” The record demonstrates two brief statements of concern, made in obscure venues, by Dr. Paul. If there are any more they must be obiter dicta in venues even more obscure, showing these “likes” to be far less than a leitmotif of Paul’s rhetoric, much less agenda.
Krugman goes on to indict the Republicans as “monetary crazy” — based mostly on a few stray comments and some utterly irrelevant, outlying, positions such as one derived from Ayn Rand. Few of the positions he cites are any part of the real discourse now ongoing among the center right. Continue Reading