My buddy Nick Schulz (editor TechCentralStation) is reading Paul Krugman’s old book Peddling Propserity. He discovered that according to Krugman conservatives dislike Keynesian economics in part because he was gay. From page 33:
“Why do conservatives hate Keynesian economics? Part of the answer is that they dislike Keynes the man – aesthete, homosexual, and member of the dread Bloomsbury group. Indeed, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, attacking Virginia Woolf and her friends, has been explicit in tying the rejection of Keynesian economics to the Republican concern for family values: ‘There is a discernible affinity between the Bloomsbury ethos, which put a premium on immediate and present satisfactions, and Keynesian economics, which is based entirely on the short run and precludes any long-term judgments…’”
I just love this. Does Krugman really think that if Keynes was a real he-man National Review would have loved The Great Society? I’m a big fan of Himmelfarb’s but she’s hardly a major contributor to conservative thinking on economics and her conservative phase post-dates rightwing dislike of Keynes by a long while. I mean, Marx and Stalin were straight, right?