If everyone was
as reasonable as Paul;
I don’t regard anyone who disagrees with me as necessarily a mendacious idiot.
Just most people.
...all too many players in this game, very much including economists and public officials, very obviously haven’t been making that good faith effort. They’ve seized on dubious arguments, touted obviously weak evidence as definitive, looked for excuses either not to act themselves or for their friends not to act. And invariably the thrust of these bad arguments is to comfort the comfortable and give them license to afflict the afflicted.
....I like to think that I have enough integrity to change my views when it becomes clear that they were wrong.
Such as, oh,
picking at random;
...regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off. Also, they didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.
Oh, it would be nice to be able to display Krugman's
finessing of the above in his blog, but that is behind the Times pay wall. Needless to say, he didn't admit to being in outright error. I.e. had enough integrity to admit that the two FMs were holding between $1 and $2 TRILLION in subprime (or other dodgy) mortgages that they were supposedly prohibited by law from holding.
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