According to Matt Yglesias, people who support sound money do so for psychological reasons. The possibility that there might be economic arguments for it, and that Yglesias’ assumption that “prosperity over both the long- and short-term depends in part on competent demand management from a powerful bureaucratic organization” might be not only false but preposterous, is of course not considered.
Bob Murphy observes, regarding the Yglesias post, “Note that the URL for Yglesias’ post is ‘monetary derp at Cato.’ Remember, “derp” is the extremely dorky term that our hipster Keynesian bloggers have adopted to be shorthand for “refusing to acknowledge that your views are totally falsified by the evidence.” On that note, click on this Yglesias post from mid-July.”
Bob doesn’t spoil the surprise as to what awaits you at the link. I’ll spoil it:
Obamacare’s Going to Be Great
by Matthew Yglesias
I’ve got a new column up about the White House’s plans for the rollout of the Obamacare exchanges and I wanted to once again take the opportunity to lay down a marker and say once again that Obamacare implementation is going to be a huge political success.
Again, that’s not to deny that there will be some problems. But you have to understand that the media, for non-ideological reasons, is just massively biased toward negativity about this kind of thing. You never read a newspaper article headlined “A Bunch of People Got Free Dental Care Today Because They Live In A State That Offers Dental Benefits Under Medicaid,” but if something goes wrong in a state’s Medicaid program, that warrants a story. That’s the nature of the news business. You add in the fact that Republicans have a vested interest in making hay about problems plus the fact that liberals have never been all that enthusiastic about the Affordable Care Act’s reliance on private insurers, and a lot of negative coverage is baked into the cake. But fundamentally a lot of this criticism comes in the form of comparing the reality of the ACA to an abstract idealized system rather than comparing it to the status quo.
