Last year New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called for space aliens to invade earth so that the government would spend money to mount a defense thereby stimulating the economy.
As aliens have yet to comply with Krugman's wishes, he advocated on HBO's Real Time Friday that scientists should get together and lie about an imminent attack to boost federal spending (video follows with transcript and commentary):
PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: This is hard to get people to do, much better, obviously, to build bridges and roads and healthcare clinics and schools. But my proposed, I actually have a serious proposal which is that we have to get a bunch of scientists to tell us that we're facing a threatened alien invasion, and in order to be prepared for that alien invasion we have to do things like build high-speed rail. And the, once we've recovered, we can say, “Look, there were no aliens.”
But look, I mean, whatever it takes because right now we need somebody to spend, and that somebody has to be the U.S. government.
High-speed rail to defend ourselves against space invaders?
As absurd as this seems, folks should realize that to a certain extent, scientists are already doing this.
Consider those in the scientific community on Al Gore's side of the anthropogenic global warming debate.
They have indeed fabricated a doomsday scenario related to carbon dioxide emissions with the expressed intent of getting governments around the world to spend what could end up being trillions of dollars fending off a phantom just as fictitious as Krugman's aliens.
As the Nobel laureate said, "Whatever it takes." This is the Machiavellian way zealots view their causes.
And this man not only has a column in the New York Times from which to publicize such nonsense, people actually give him awards for it.
When you think about it, that's scarier than an actual alien invasion - unless it's already happened!
