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.
