Pulling laughably overheated rhetoric from a Paul Krugman column is about as challenging as finding an ironic T-shirt at the 9:30 Club, but this particular hyperventilation deserves a direct response. Here’s the Krugman gem:
Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain. The bill that has inspired the demonstrations would strip away collective bargaining rights for many of the state’s workers, in effect busting public-employee unions.
Wow! That’s shocking! Not that Walker would want to turn Wisconsin into a third-world-style oligarchy — Krugman and Obama and the Center for American Progress have been warning me of that particular Republican agenda item for months — but that, according to Krugman’s reasoning, half of our states are already third-world-style oligarchies.
Josh Barro at the Manhattan Institute’s “Public Sector, Inc.,” explains that Walker’s proposal is already the norm in America:
And if you missed it yesterday, I showed how Krugman’s central point on Wisconsin — that unions are a “counterbalance” to “big money” — is also totally divorced from the facts.
