This is just painful to watch because of how wrong these two Brits are:
Austerity isn’t economics. It’s religion. You might as well be trying to tell a member of Opus Dei that that really isn’t the blood of Christ, but Welch’s grape juice.
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SnarkyShark
The guy was all in a huff accusing K-Thug of calling him a liar. I wanted our man to rise up screaming ” Yes, Yes, a thousand times yes!” and then smite him upside his evil petty little head.
K-Thug came pretty close though so I smiled!
Win
BGinCHI
The fascism of the rich is to get rid of the poor via ideology rather than death camps.
NancyDarling
I listened to this the other day and those Brits sounded straight out of Victorian England when they talked about “morality”.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@BGinCHI: Plantations are death camps.
Turgidson
Jesus fucking Christ that was horrible. We’re doomed.
jl
Thanks. I watched this a few days ago, and was going to look for it to listen more closely. But, this is Balloon Juice, a full service blog!
I like the cheesy sneery upper class twit dirty debating tricks dressed up in a fancy Brit accent, so they seem all so posh and intellectual.
At one point krugman says he disagrees with a study, and the very constructive and engaged response was
“Ah, so you are saying the study is total rubbish, then.”
slag
Poor Kthug. I hate when he has talk slow to people. He looks almost pained in spite of himself.
Linnaeus
I loved the “come tell us about the Estonian economy” at the end.
PeakVT
Republican talking points are still stupid when delivered with a British accent.
Linnaeus
@PeakVT:
This reminds of something I read in Esquire a couple of years ago. They had a pseudonymous contributor called The Angry German who would write pithy anecdotes, and one was his observation that a lot of Americans think British people are smarter than they are because of the cultural prestige of (certain) British accents. So The Angry German said something in a business meeting, and everyone else kinda blew it off but 10 minutes later, a British guy said pretty much the same thing that The Angry German had said and everyone else thought it was brilliant.
SatanicPanic
Moral dimension? What the hell is wrong with these people? Krugman is a saint for not standing up and slapping these idiots
Lynn Dee
My God. So England’s conservatives are as ideological, dishonest and stupid as ours are.
Tokyokie
I watched this yesterday, following a link on Digby’s blog. Not often you get to see idiots act condescending to a Nobel laureate when discussing said laureate’s field of expertise.
burnspbesq
You can be as skeptical as you please about whether what’s in the chalice is actually transformed into the body of Christ, but at least get your facts straight. It doesn’t start out as Welch’s grape juice.
jonas
Oh, God, the stupid burns like acid under a thousand blazing suns! I will point out, however, that in fairness to medieval doctors, if you accept the humoral theory of medicine, bleeding patients in certain instances *does* makes sense. Far more sense than trying to starve your way out of a famine as a way of saving more food, which is essentially what these two twits were trying to argue.
Shinobi
@Linnaeus: This also happens in America quite frequently if you have a vagina, or non white skin. (Especially if you have both.)
PurpleGirl
Love the title, John. I haven’t watched Are You Being Served in a while.
cathyx
The problem is that those 2 Brits and all the other elites are the leaches sucking on everyone’s blood and they are getting nice and fat in the process.
John Cole
Fine. It’s cabernet sauvignon.
And it isn’t being “skeptical.” It’s not the blood of Christ. Take it to any lab, analyze it, and if they say by golly, this really is blood and not wine/grapejuice/whatever your church uses, I’ll eat my words.
Kent
You forgot Estonia!
slag
@SatanicPanic: The Moral Dimension looks just like this dimension except that Evil Spock has been downsized off the Enterprise and has resorted to parlaying his starship experience into soft-core punditry about the Neutral Zone in order to survive.
Shinobi
When will people begin to understand that the government is not the same as a household? I also really appreciated how he was pointing out that they were really trying to drive two totally different agendas with the same steering wheel, Shinking the government and improving the economy, I don’t see how that can end well.
Also Serious BS, what young grad actually has the skills necessary to run their own business? Experience actually IS helpful it turns out, I’ve learned way more since I started working than when I was in college.
Comrade Mary
@John Cole: It’s wine is most Masses, but I’ve heard of grape juice being used when THE CHILDREN were allowed to drink from the chalice. (Not the pestle. Not the flagon.)
Shinobi
@John Cole: Ours was always Manischewitz. Close enough to Welch’s IMHO.
Hunter Gathers
If you live in a fancy parish, then yes. Otherwise it’s whatever box wine was at sale at Kroger last week.
flukebucket
@John Cole:
In the Baptist church it is usually grape juice and Zesta Saltines.
elm
Clearly they’ve never listened to themselves.
K-Thug: “The average young person is not going to start a business.”
Right-wing talking head: “Why not.”
She apparently thinks it’s reasonable to expect 50% of the population to start businesses. Words fail me.
elmo
@Comrade Mary:
They broke the chalice from the palace.
Now the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true!
(and OMG I love you forever for that reference, I am not the only one out here!)
patrick II
At 4:30 “Those jobs will be generated when people move from the public sector to the private sector”.
While the ostensible purpose of austerity is to improve the economy, the actual purpose is to reduce the size and power of government. If the debt was the real problem being solved, and it was “simple mathematics” as the lady asserted, raising taxes by a billion dollars would reduce the deficit just as much as reducing spending by a billion dollars.
cathyx
Young people should just borrow money from mumsy to start a business.
Kent
It always astonishes me when these plutocratic types suggest that all young people should just start businesses. We already know what a society looks like with no teachers, nurses, doctors, policemen, firemen, environmental engineers, traffic engineers, etc. Where all the young people are in business for themselves working on the streets selling their wares and talents.
It’s called Mogadishu Somalia
Chris
@BGinCHI:
Nah, they still need the poor. But it’s important to degrade them as much as possible, lest they forget who the boss is.
Comrade Mary
Linnaeus, I found your Angry German.
Mass and grape juice, part deux: if you stop the fermentation of grape juice early enough, it’s called mustum, and it is offically acceptable, even though its alcohol content is negligible. But good luck bringing wine to a mass in jail.
LanceThruster
I remember wincing quite often while watching “Are You Being Served” because despite all the droll British humor, these people were at the bottom of the employment rung and were just one jerk away from being pretty much destitute.
Stiff upper lip and all that, eh wot?
Yutsano
@patrick II: Yesbut…then her cronies couldn’t buy that second yacht for Buffy, and we can’t have that kind of austerity now can we? No no no, better to press the rubes into attempting failed businesses while cutting their safety net so taxes can be slashed even more. See? Austerity WORKS!!
Rathskeller
@Shinobi: In fact, as a male manager in IT, when I was first informed about this practice, I was able to notice it immediately in business meetings, especially when there are more than six people. It’s pretty amazing to watch a young male engineer enthusiastically propose an idea that a woman proposed in the same room, not five minutes previously.
it’s not an every daything. the practice does to diminish when you point out that B is actually re-proposing A’s idea, if it only because it makes people listen instead of waiting to speak, another common male and/or engineer failing.
back to the topic at hand, obviously the two smug, conservative Brits weren’t persuadable; but I am very curious how the conversation appeared to UK viewers. As a longtime k-bot, I need little more convincing about the austerity=religion point, but the debate did frequently circle about dueling assertions about evidence that was barely described.
cokane
I just wish Krugman hammered it home a little more that austerity is going to be bad for government debts as well. Otherwise loved the video. Really liked the comment by the moderator early on, calling out the dismissive condescension from the Tories towards a Nobel prize winning economist. You just don’t seem to get that kind of realism from American news-debate shows.
John Weiss
OMG! Those “conservatives” are painful to listen to. How many times does one have to fail before one learns? Apparently, for those two, longer than a lifetime.
SatanicPanic
@elm: Yes, start a business selling Chiclets. I swear that’s what they mean.
Mark S.
Estonia?
And is “Start your own business” the new “Let them eat cake”?
piratedan
@Shinobi: yeah, I never remember Dad having to campaign to remain head of the household although I have to admit, I was born before these halcyon days of current election finance.
pragmatism
kthug is a modern day cassandra.
Shinobi
@piratedan: My Dad was lucky that my sister and I hadn’t started voting Democrat yet, or he would have been outta there. Mom was always much more liberal (with the cash hehehe).
Mike E
@flukebucket: I worked a mega-church Easter service at my theater where they dipped bread into cups of grape juice. The pastor went all Godwin and said the Holocaust, Slavery, and sex trafficking paled in comparison to not having the Big Guy in your life. Really.
Chris
@Lynn Dee:
The main virtue of Europe is that the system in most of these countries has its foundations laid farther to the left than here… but there just like here, there are people who want to change that. And since the Washington Consensus, Very Serious People have been drinking the same kool aid as ours.
El Cid
Hey, if like this lady you become convinced that something is “math” and that it’s even “simple math”, you no longer have to make a coherent argument at all.
Ordinary people usually face a requirement to prove that the “math” they are using is not only arithmetically correct but actually applicable to the argument they are making and used in the correct method to support an argument, but conservative moralizers are better than us.
Scott de B.
While we’re being pedantic, I’m pretty sure nobody, Christian or no, thinks the wine is transformed into the body of Christ.
Shinobi
@Rathskeller: It’s good that you notice it. I wish I thought it was always just people not listening, but I’ve definitely had my ideas rephrased and restated by someone more male in a meeting in such a way that suggested they were trying to take credit for it. These are usually people too dumb to come up with their own ideas though.
pragmatism
@Mike E: have you seen the prefilled communion cup and wafer combo?
http://www.kingdom.com/Pre-filled-Communion-Cup-with-Wafer-Supplies-p/ccwa.htm
Nylund
I really do think the most telling point is when the guy starts complaining that Krugman’s book is flawed because it neglects the “morality of debt.”
I thought Krugman’s comeback about how it was more immoral to not have any jobs for the young was pretty good, but part of me wished he’d just screamed, “Who gives an eff about whether or not a policy to help people hurts your delicate upper-crust sensibilities.”
But more importantly, their whole argument hinged on the idea that the private sector cannot grow unless the public sector gets out of the way. During full-employment, there’s some truth to that, but when you have millions of people willing to work, stock-piles of corporate cash, and extremely low interest rates, there’s absolutely no reason to think that the gov’t is stealing resources from the private sector! There’s tons of money and people to be used if the private sector wants to expand.
The whole problem is that private firms don’t want to expand, not that they’re unable to. And they don’t want to because people are broke and can’t buy their crap. How these Brit Twits think that firing more people and taking away more money from individuals will fix that is beyond me. It’ll only make things worse.
Krugman’s bleeding analogy is very good. “The beatings will continue until morale improves” works we well.
Stooleo
I’m struck with the inability of these people to observe the facts of what is actually going on. Britain is facing a double dip recession and these guys are screaming for more cuts. Talk about making your own reality.
Andy
As a Brit living abroad I rarely get to catch up on these types of interviews so thanks for posting. I always suspected that the Tory’s were just gambling that they would not wreck the economy while setting about the public sector as planned. I never really believed that they believed their own BS. But apparently they are genuinely ignorant of the most basic principles of economics and the fact that they have caused a recession is just proof that they have not gone far enough. Unbelievable.
Mike E
@pragmatism: Wow, lunchables for the devotee on the go!
MikeJ
@SatanicPanic:
Big society!
patrick II
Conservative economists such as these want to raise capital and start businesses as the answer to this recession. Krugman points out what is needed is an increase of demand.
Supply side theory posits that an increase of supply is always the answer to a slow economy, but when the problem is that there is already a supply larger than people will buy, increasing the supply will lower the prices further and will diminish any expectation for profit, and thus destroys business’s incentive to expand. At it’s heart, supply side theory is incoherent.
Jamey
English teeth look especially bad when one is lying straight through them.
Jamey
@Kent: My nom for the newest category.
pragmatism
@Mike E: the Lord demandeth thrice the plastic packaging be torn asunder prior to taking the body and blood of Christ.
i first saw the combo cup when we tried out a megachurch that a bunch of people raved about. we decided it wasn’t for us. too much concert-type entertainment. too much marketing. too much call and response: “Everyone say Jeeeee-suuuuuus!”
Waynski
@Nylund:
This. And the Repubs say the $2 trillion corporate America is sitting on in cash is because of the confidence fairy’s twin sibling… the uncertainty fairy. What rubbish.
cathyx
What those 2 in the interview don’t get is that businesses will not increase their hiring until there is an increase in sales. Lowering taxes will not make them hire more people. The only thing that will get businesses to hire more people is higher sales. If people have no money to buy stuff, they can’t help those businesses increase their sales.
What Krugman is saying is that the government needs to go into debt by giving people money, such as unemployment benefits and jobs programs run by the government to stimulate the spending by people. It’s really that simple.
Roy G.
“There is No Alternative!”
h/t to conservative snuff queen, Margaret Thatcher.
jon
I’ll start my own business as soon as health insurance is affordable. Deal?
Citizen_X
@SatanicPanic: I’ll point out that selling crack is a business, too. With a much higher profit margin.
LongHairedWeirdo
As a former catholic, I feel the urge to explain this to you.
The Catholic belief is in transubstantiation. This means that, although it continues to appear to be bread, although it continues to appear to be wine, it is nevertheless the body and blood of Christ. It’s a two for one miracle; not only does the transformation occur, but it maintains its form.
Now, I don’t want to diss Catholics for that belief. It’s ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than a lot of religious beliefs.
But I will grant that arguing against Austerians is equally pointless, and will meet with similarly learned responses. “Yes, yes, it does still seem to be wine, that’s part of the miracle!”
David Koch
conservatives never complain about deficit spending when a republican does it.
reagan actually tripled the debt in 8 years and he has been deified.
Amir Khalid
Two Tories vs Kthug. I reckon he gave as good as he got. Someone has to be spending to generate public confidence and demand — if not business, then the government. It’s that simple. Tax breaks for business don’t give consumers the confidence to spend on things, or businesses the confidence to invest. But they were never going to concede the argument to him, were they?
muddy
@elmo: Chalice, palace, vessel, pestle, brew, true –
Another fan here! We had it on a betamax tape. And isn’t that the one with Angela Lansbury? My son thought her name was “Murdershewrote” and pointed her out.
muddy
@Scott de B.:
Of course not, the body is the cracker. How silly it is to say wine.
Linnaeus
@Shinobi:
As I have been told and observed directly.
elm
@Citizen_X: If 50% of the population is supposed to start their own businesses, I suspect that most of those new single-proprietor businesses are going to be in drug-dealing and prostitution.
pseudonymous in nc
Those were D-list Tories — random capitalist and backbench MP — probably because they were too dumb to know that they’d have their clocks cleaned when Newsnight called. The smarter ones believe the same shit: they just don’t say it outright, and they definitely don’t say it in front of a miked-up Krugthulu.
Heliopause
Huh, they balance their public affairs shows over there the same way we do here. Two righties per Krugman.
waratah
They were very pompous in the end trying to drag in Australia economy, Krugman would have would have wiped the floor as there is no comparison with the Australian economy and the British.
Ruckus
I seem to remember a lot of kids starting their own businesses when I was in my teens/twenties. They were called dealers. Low overhead, moderate risk, possible decent profits. I’ll bet that’s not what these twits have in mind.
elm
@Ruckus: It’s Self-employment, you largely work outdoors, and it teaches you valuable lessons about inventory, supply-chain management and debt collection.
Clean Willie
Like Ron Paul, the Brits in this clip display that astonishing level of ignorance where they don’t even know they’re ignorant. They have no inkling that they’re uninformed, stupid, wrong on the record, wrong on the theory, wrong in both the classroom and the street, historically wrong and analytically inept, moronic, clueless, and dangerous.
Unlike Ron Paul, they have genteel English accents instead of a southern U.S. twang. This, unfortunately, goes light years toward putting their bullshit over with the NPR crowd.
patrick
sad that they have adopted the same economic theory as the underpants gnomes…..
patrick
as a practicing Catholic, my understanding of transubstantiation is that while it remains bread and wine, it is essentially infused with the Holy Spirit (which, due to the concept of the Divine Trinity, you know, that “3-in-1” theory that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are 3 parts of the One God) become also Jesus’ body and blood.
a bad analogy would be pickles….the cucumbers are infused with dill, salt, vinegar and garlic via extended soaking in the brine. They are still cucumbers, but they are also much more….or marinading chicken. it has been infused with flavors from the marinade, but it is still chicken…