Still Fresh!

I'm reading Paul Krugman's (aka Krugsandra) The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science, a book published back in 1999 from a collection of essays and one never-published Wall Street Journal Op-Ed which has an amusing history.  Krugman is already America's most accurate pundit so it's not surprise that this book reads as if it was written last year, only the names of the guilty have changed (somewhat).

In a particularly prescient passage, Krusgsandra writes,

The public must not know how well the rich have done compared with the rest.  If a new study points out just how much income and wealth have been concentrated, deploy the forces of the conservative media to attack the data with every spurious argument imaginable.  There are always plenty of places to publish such attacks and people to write them because the rich are different from you and me.  They have (a lot) more money.  In particular, they own magazines and newspapers, and readily support think taks staffed with people whose job, whatever its formal description, is to support the interests of their donors.  As H. L. Mencken once pointed out, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.

We in Wisconsin are quite familiar with this phenomenon thanks to the machinations of the Koch brothers and their interference in our state politics.

This is what the public must never know or be allowed to understand: