"There's been a kind of missionary quality to his writing since then," muses Princeton's Blinder. "He's trying to stop something now, using the power of the pen." But that's not all. The change is deeper: Krugman now takes politics seriously. As Kuttner puts it, "The interesting thing about Krugman is that he was a mainstream neoclassical economist who was moderately liberal as a citizen, but tended to look at politics as an illegitimate distortion of the perfection of the market economy. He viewed the left and the right as symmetrical evils. Krugman has now discovered power."
Krugman seems to agree. "I think we were all living in a fool's paradise in the late 1990s. There probably wasn't as much energy in my criticism of the right. I was wrong, obviously," he says. "If I'd understood where politics would be now, it would have been quite different. I thought that Reich and Magaziner were proposing bad ideas, but that's not the same as being frightened of where they might be taking us. We can have arguments about trade policy later. Now I'm frightened."
Me too.
And check out this comment by the Mickster:
"The Bush tax cut is based on lies. But it's not enough to criticize a policy to say that it's based on lies. You have to say whether it's good or bad for the country."