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Comment by stfu | Hacker News Reader

Whatever Kurgman says, it is good to keep in mind that he is an economist turned partisan-politics hack. Whatever he looks at, he looks at it from his lens of ideological reasoning. His ideology clearly aligns with the status quo of economic policy, promoting quantitative easing and keeping up the artificial smokescreen of the superiority of the US dollar.

Therefore any competing ideas (e.g. gold, bitcoin) need to be disregarded, especially as economists by now have realized the importance of trust and its cognitive impact on markets.

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Krugman isn't being a political partisan hack here. Every mainstream economist from the Republican and Democratic administrations agree that a currency backed similarly to gold (as opposed to a central bank) is not a good idea.

Central planners like central banking? Get out.

Mainstream economists aren't central planners. I don't mean just economists from both administrations. I meant mainstream economists from every school on the US News and beyond.

But Krugman isn't complaining about Bitcoin's monetary policy here; he's complaining about the operation of the network itself. It's a pretty weak argument; he's claiming that the network costs too much without doing any kind of serious cost-benefit analysis, just an inapt comparison to gold coins.

When the entire mainstream media portrays a complex and controversial issue as entirely one sided, this gives you confidence?

"mainstream media" != "mainstream economists"

I'd prefer the opinions of PhD economists with a special emphasis on currency transactions over yours or anyone else's, actually.

Economists who don't agree with Keynes aren't credible because they're not the majority? I prefer science over mob mentality.

Are you serious? Just because you're not Keynesian, it doesn't mean you do not believe in a central bank. Milton Friedman believed in a central bank.

Interesting. I didn't realize the IS-LM model (which is the relatively simple lens Krugman uses for 80% of the reasoning on his blog the past 3 or 4 years) was

(a) ideological, (b) partisan, or (c) a smokescreen.

I thought it was used to analyze the relationship between investment, interest rates, and economic production. It's been able to (for example), explain why inflation would be nowhere in sight in the face of government borrowing or quantitative easing given the current state of our economy. Or why any finite currency (gold, bitcoin) would lead to rampant deflation and thus depression conditions.

Can you please elaborate as to why IS-LM the ideological ruse you claim it to be? Krugman may be a hack, but I start to believe the hacks who are continuously right most of the time, and ignore the ones who are often wrong. Just the empiricist in me.

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