When I was a kid I often wondered about this, that commerce would take a sudden and destructive turn for no reason. But, I would think, don’t people have to eat today too? Why would all the wants and needs of the consumer suddenly shift? What I saw was totally rational behavior that was deemed irrational after the fact. During the dot com bubble, I felt that stocks were trading too high, but to call it irrational to speculate on tech stocks when people were actually making money doing it seemed wrong. It seemed that a bubble was partially self inflating as the participants bid up prices, but what was the source of the initial bid? At some point a bubble was not one, just an active sector of the economy. What pushed it up in the first place? Animal Spirits?

But to add to the stupidity of Krugman is the fact that he advocated the creation of a housing bubble, and now uses it as a lesson in the wily ways of the free market! I actually had a friend, who is not in banking (I am) referred to it as free-range capitalism. I told him that a chicken in a cage with it’s feet tied together and a noose around its neck is not a free-range chicken.

It is terrifying and sad that some people believe in freedom for chickens, but not people!

The problem there, as Mark Skousen pointed out, is that you would have to first read the unreadable Keynes — and not his “translators” — in order to follow Hazlitt.