They give Nobel prizes for this?

Paul Krugman, winner of this year's Nobel prize in economics, has you going right up to the end in this column. He's talking sense about America's miserable economic mess; you nod your head and think that this guy has finally seen the light. Then he pulls this chunk of stupidity out of the air and shoves it in your face:

If you want to see what it really takes to boot the economy out of a debt trap, look at the large public works program, otherwise known as World War II, that ended the Great Depression. The war didn’t just lead to full employment. It also led to rapidly rising incomes and substantial inflation, all with virtually no borrowing by the private sector. By 1945 the government’s debt had soared, but the ratio of private-sector debt to G.D.P. was only half what it had been in 1940. And this low level of private debt helped set the stage for the great postwar boom.

Is it possible that Mr. Krugman does not know what happened during that "large public works program" called World War II? 100 million people died; entire nations--the most advanced in the world--were reduced to ruin and rubble; scores of millions of men were drafted into armies and sent to die by the millions on land and sea; civilian citizens of these countries suffered horrifying privations while their governments diverted their productive abilities to making war planes, bombs, tanks, artillery pieces, mortars, rockets, and war ships for the sole purpose of destroying the war planes, tanks, artillery pieces, and war ships of enemy nations. And Mr. Krugman thinks that this state of affairs was a good thing (economically speaking)? Tell that to the ghosts of the dead in bombed-out London, Dresden, Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Tokyo.

That America managed to preserve its industrial capacity is the consequence solely of geography: none of our enemies had sufficiently large navies to take the fighting to our shores and, fortunately for us, the technologies of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that have nullified this geographical advantage didn't become available until the late 1950s. American industry profited greatly in the post-war decade because the rest of the industrial world was in ruins. Government "public works" had nothing to do with it. Even a nitwit like Paul Krugman could have succeeded under those circumstances. This happy condition persisted (but with ever- decreasing annual returns) until about 1968-1970 when the rest of the world, having recovered from the war, began out-competing American industry in every field. Today's America is a hollowed-out shell of a once-great industrial nation. We've been living on debt for the last generation to disguise the fact that our real incomes have stagnated or fallen because of our diminishing production. And now Paul Krugman, who oddly can diagnose the problem correctly, bizarrely advises us to borrow and spend more in order to fix the mess that our previous borrowing and spending spree created.

And this guy gets the Nobel Prize for such nonsense!

Read it here