well, you'd have to say that the left/right split in american politics has gotten pretty direct and pretty raw. the right is signing pledges for no new taxes and spending reductions. it's extremely rigid and doctrinaire. but i guess i find even more strange and disturbing and fundamentalist the position of people like paul krugman, who also speaks, for example, for msnbc pundits etc: i think krugman thinks that government spending and the taxation to drive it are morally good in themselves. it almost doesn't matter what you spend it on: krugman just believes - and in this he follows the drift of the left for a century - that a very large state is self-evidently morally good. i have to say that the idea that it's obvious you should increase government spending as debt rises above gdp just seems fundamentalist: the state will save us; sacrifice your firstborn unto it. the very idea that we'd even talk about medicare is completely anathema. like the whole left, he squawks about "an end to Medicare’s status as a program available in full to all Americans, regardless of income." by which, oddly enough, he means the very rich, people on whom he also thinks there should be much higher taxes. he prescribes increased government spending as the solution to unemployment. well, one might try to find out just how efficient government spending is in creating jobs overall. for example, let's say we increased medicare or social security spending. is that an engine of job growth?
i'm just telling you that whatever the circumstances, whatever the problem, krugman will recommend more government spending. and that will tell you what he really is and what he really wants: subordination of every aspect of human life to the state. this is why it's not at all implausible or mere rhetoric to connect this position historically to stalin, say. really, ask yourself in what circumstances paul krugman would call for a decrease in government spending. say we were running surpluses, for instance. he wouldn't be recommending tax cuts. and then notice that 'government spending' isn't an abstraction: it comes from actually extracting money from the economy (or borrowing it) and then, among other things, controlling what people do through the application of that $$.
