Nutty Perfesser Explains Why Elections & Krugman Suck

Gary Gutting probably has tenure, so he's untouchable. But read the link above and read James Taranto's commentary to see just how zany Gutting gets in his ivory tower. Anyhow, below is Taranto's asides about Gutting and the irrepressible Paul Krugman, a "social scientist," meaning an oxymoron that has as much relation to science as social has to High Society:

The guys at the New York Times editorial page, bless their hearts, have broken new ground in self-parody with an online op-ed by Gary Gutting, a Notre Dame philosopher who's made it into this column before. Gutting engages in a "Socratic" dialogue with himself, which is to say he transcribes a conversation with Socrates he says he dreamed.

Socrates more or less convinces Gutting that elections are superfluous: "We Greeks, you know, did all right choosing leaders by lot." (Really? How's that working out these days?) Even better, the 2,481-year-old philosopher turns out to be a Keynesian:

G: But surely you'd prefer to let Obama make his case to the American people rather than let blind chance decide the outcome?
S: I think letting the American people decide is no different from leaving it to chance. The vast majority of you don't know enough about the issues or the candidates to make anything like a reliable decision. (It was the same in Athens in my day.) Take the economic issues all your commentators say will be decisive. I think [former Enron adviser] Paul Krugman makes a decisive case that, for all its flaws, Obama's approach to the economy is likely to be far more effective than anything Romney and Ryan have in mind. But there are prominent economists who reject Krugman's argument. If Krugman's right, you can't trust the experts who disagree with him. So why should you trust the judgment of the non-experts whose votes will decide the election?
In a surprise twist, Krugman in his column today denounces the Democratic Party for relying on his authority: "What does it say about the party when its intellectual leader evidently gets his ideas largely from deeply unrealistic fantasy novels?"

In case you don't recognize the reference, here it is from a Times miniprofile that accompanied a book review he wrote in 2009: "What most readers probably don't know is the reason Krugman became an economist in the first place. 'I went into economics,' he wrote in an e-mail message, 'because I read Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels, in which social scientists save galactic civilization, and that's what I wanted to be.' "

Krugman might have been a good/great science fiction author, but he certainly is a bad economist.