Chairman Mao once horrified a large number of Soviet listeners in Moscow, when he bluntly told them in Russian that he thought nuclear wat would be a wonderful idea, because it would allow more room for socialism to spread once much of the world’s population was decimated. Some of the Soviet audience included bureaucrats who had ordered liquidations and quiet killings in the past, and even they found Mao a little crazy,
This kind of Maoist cynicism is very typical in today’s public debate. Let me explain.
A large number of stock market bears just love financial crises and major scandals, because they wait patiently with a variety of puts that expire worthless until one such goldmine suddenly hits them. They will even gloat about, come on national television, and say they called it a decade back. And what a lovely useless list that is of the hundreds or thousands of stock market players who “predicted” it. Nobody predicted it; the biggest banks “didn’t see it coming”, and they have the most risk averse calculation systems in place. But whatever.
The 2007 financial crisis also has had monetarists, post-Keynesians, Keynesians, Chartalists, neoclassicals and others gloating that the current crisis vindicates their views and their school of thought has been served well. Joseph Stiglitz even wrote in a column that the crisis was a “moment of vindication for Keynesians”, while some post-Keynesian economists blogged that this was a price to be paid for not being heeded. Excuse me - large lines of people unemployed, businesses crashing down, and you are loving it, because your university career just got advanced?
The PIIGS crisis also has European nationalists like Nigel Farage loving every moment of it. Of course, it does not matter that Spain is buried under a deep mess from which it may not recover for years, but only that those who resisted the EU back in the 1990s can gloat that the EU can finally crash and burn because of it (yeah, right). Their position on the PIIGS crisis can naturally imply that they would have been for the EU had it not happened, but if they think EU to be problematic either way, then the PIIGS crisis would be irrelevant.
And what about the great Patrick Buchanan, who points to every violent insurgency as proof that “globalism doesn’t work”? Never mind that every issue is different and under different conditions, but what manner of debate is it when you reduce horrifying events across the world as some vindication that your ideology of ethnonationalism works?
And of course, you remember what happened when Krugman cheerfully said that Germany will crash and burn because its policy decisions don’t match his prescriptions.