Arsonists Prosecuting Firefighters

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/arsonists-prosecuting-firefighters/

Paul Krugman
December 22, 2010, 10:09 am
Arsonists Prosecuting Firefighters

Via Mark Thoma, Jean-Paul Fitoussi:

Indeed, today the global economy’s arsonists have become prosecutors, and accuse the fire fighters of having provoked flooding.

I think that’s basically a reference to the rating agencies — it’s not the most clearly written piece, though it makes up for that with passion. Anyway, he’s right: the rating agencies, and in general the poo-bahs of finance, brought this crisis on the world — and are now solemnly lecturing nations about the evils of the deficits incurred mainly to fight the crisis.

What’s particularly striking is the way the story of our crisis has been Hellenized. Listen to Very Serious Europeans, in particular, and you hear entire discussions framed by the assumption that irresponsible budgets paved the way to crisis. Yet that was true only for Greece; it wasn’t at all true of Spain or Ireland, which was, remember, hailed by George Osborne as a “shining example” of long-run fiscal responsibility.

A lot of this is self-serving, of course. But there’s also a strong element of trying to shoehorn whatever happens into an ideological frame; it must have been about fiscal irresponsibility, because isn’t everything?

Gary Younge reminds us of another great Orwell essay, In Front of Your Nose:

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

Yep.

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