It Hurts So Good

Pardon our absence. Other stuff - particularly the conversion of olive farming from the expensive hobby it is in the current market to something else - required attending to. A touch of that much ballyhooed 'lifestyle transformation' (in this case, manual labour) might be the result. Not the first time.

We followed with interest recently-minted international superstar Paul Krugman's visit to Spain the week before last. We were struck, and duly added his name to our list of pundits with big skin in the disaster game, by exactly how tremendously ambitious this man gives the impression of being. The most beautiful television image was of him earnestly pontificating (nay, scolding) on the economic challenges facing Spain to a starstruck president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The reader might try imagining how Mr. Bean might react to a good, stiff caning at the hands of Angelina Jolie to get a good idea of the scene.

The jist of Krugman's advice for this country and its chronic lack of productivity and competitiveness, given that exchange rate adjustments are not possible, lay in the suggestion that national wage rates would have to go down. From the point of view of workers not employed in the civil service, who have seen their earnings remain essentially stagnant since 1997 as successive PP and PSOE governments refused to deal with the wage-deflationary effects of uncontrolled illegal immigration, this merely adds insult to injury - and is going nowhere.* As for the possibility that well-shielded public functionaries would be more amenable to sacrificing a bit of scratch for the wellbeing of the motherland, the writer asked his wife - direct employee of the Junta de Andalucía - where she might stand on the issue. Plugging parts of the resulting Castillian tirade elicited by the suggestion into some internet translation site, we came up with this:

Not a fucking chance! Just let the sonsabitches try it!

Thanks for your help, Paul.

We recall a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith with regards to his opposition to monetarist economics. If memory serves us right, he doubted that feeding only the elephants would result in so much spillage on the ground that all the other animals would benefit in the end. It seems to us that the economics profession, as if it were to need more impediments, is also left with the unenviable task of trying to put together a full meal on what is left over after national political appetites are satisfied.

*Personal observation of power-conserving populist demagogues of the 'anti-establishment' type, which Mr. Krugman gives every appearance of being, notes the widespread use of the strategy of repeated clamouring for change that politically will not happen. This has the double advantage of maintaining current the alpha clamourer's program (and claim to leadership) and of easily keeping the mob blindly convinced of the righteousness of their claim to redress.

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