Among the hundreds of economists who signed the Cato Institute’s ad–pointing out that, contrary to what President Obama says, there is a lot of disagreement over whether the federal government needs to stimulate the economy– wasDuke University’s Mike Munger. The Pope Center has released an interview I did with him about the economy and the sad state of economic understanding in America.

The president is, I’ve heard, getting quite testy over Republican attacks on his “stimulus” bill, but Munger is not a Republican (he ran as the Libertarian candidate for the North Carolina governorship last year), and his criticism has nothing to do with partisan politics. If, as appears to be true, Obama would rather play the partisan card than listen to serious intellectual arguments, that tells us something very unpleasant about him.