Category: reason

The ‘California Dream’ Isn’t Dead. Yet.


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Chatter about the “California Dream” has always been hyperbolic, but there’s little question that our culture here is less tied to fussy traditions than any other place in the country. Writers have waxed poetic about that dream for 170 years—and one can find endless essays that alternately promote or debunk the Golden State as a mythical land of opportunity.

The notion, of course, started in the Gold Rush. “The promise of wealth forever altered the life expectations of the hundreds of thousands of people who flooded California in 1849 and the decade that followed,” PBS explained. The idea that one could achieve instant wealth morphed into a less-exciting reality, it noted, where it became tough to find gold and miners ended up working hard-labor jobs for mining corporations.

The California Dream mythology received new life in the 1950s, where “fawning coverage in national magazines and TV ads featured sun-kissed couples playing tennis and cruising in their spectacularly finned sports cars on freeways that paralleled the shimmering Pacific waves,” Boom‘s Rebecca Robinson wrote in a review of Kevin Starr’s history books. Plenty of writers have detailed the not-so-shocking alternative world of traffic jams and poverty.

Even Starr shifted between gauzy prose and pessimistic reflection, but best-captured reality in his one-volume history of the state: “There has always been something slightly bipolar about California. It was either utopia or dystopia, a dream or a nightmare, a hope or a broken promise—and too infrequently anything in between.” When it comes to California, it’s not always easy to find balanced observations.

Here we are again, as the battle over California rages in the context of our divided national politics. Obviously, California is a progressive state where Democratic officials use it as a laboratory for their environmental and social-welfare nostrums. Many of their ideas hope to prod the rest of the country in our direction. They’ve gotten new life in a Biden administration that’s filled with Californians—and plenty of pushback.

“Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few years, you’ve probably noticed that conservatives hate California,” wrote Max Taves in The Sacramento Bee. “(A)s they portray it, the Golden State is a Banana Republic. It’s a violent, poverty-stricken homeless infernal dystopia overrun by MS-13 and misled by incompetent criminal-coddling politicians whose radical, immigrant-loving, left-wing agenda is horrible for businesses, which are leaving the state in droves.”

Certainly, conservatives and libertarians—including this writer—have spent a lot of time dissing California’s public policies. I take issue with some of the conservative attacks on the state because they often fail to make necessary distinctions and paint with too broad of a brush. California’s problems are indeed daunting, but even troubled San Francisco is still a lovely city. It seems as if many of these critics haven’t spent much time here.

Nevertheless, Taves echoes the clichés of lefty writers who insist that California is a model for the nation: “But the fact that we attract more capital, create more wealth, take home higher incomes, have safer streets, die less on the job and live longer contradicts everything GOP orthodoxy predicts,” he insists in his own cherry picking of the data.

Some people are oblivious to the word “despite.” Sorry, but many of us who criticize California’s political approach are not California haters. We love the place and it breaks our heart to see its decline. We live here and have raised families here, but are dismayed at the direction that our policymakers have been taking. There are plenty of statistics to bolster our concerns.

California has the highest poverty rates in the nation. The population has been slowing for years and now is falling. Taves needn’t take our word for it, but can check the U.S. Census Bureau’s cost-of-living-adjusted poverty statistics and the state Department of Finance’s latest population numbers. Businesses really are leaving amid crushing tax burdens and regulations—including the tech firms that skew our higher-than-average personal incomes.

I’m not a Republican and certainly don’t subscribe to its orthodoxies, but it’s hard to see how our median-home prices—more than $758,000 statewide and $1.3-million in the Bay Area—advance the public’s well-being. By almost any measure, California’s public schools are performing poorly and our transportation system remains overburdened.

Crime rates aren’t as bad as some other states, but are climbing. Our homelessness crisis is severe. Our elected officials have no solutions beyond spending more money. It doesn’t please me to point out these verifiable facts because, contra Taves, I’m not a California hater. I’d love to see Americans drawn to Los Angeles rather than Dallas.

Sure, it’s foolhardy to promote a California Dream that’s more myth than reality and critics are wrong to paint the state as a dystopia. But the state needs to do a lot better. No amount of California boosterism will hide that fact.

This column was first published by The Orange County Register.

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The World Loves Free Speech—Except When They’re Offended


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Freedom of expression wins strong endorsements around the world when people are asked, say researchers, so why have protections for speech consistently slipped for over a decade? Part of the problem is that many of those surveyed embrace a convenient attitude toward the issue: they support protections for speech of which they approve, but not of speech that offends them. Unfortunately, a right you’re willing to extend only to yourself and your allies is no right at all and leaves freedom available only to those who wield power.

“Support for free speech is generally expressed by great majorities in all countries when people are asked their opinion,” finds Who Cares About Free Speech?, a report recently published by Danish think tank Justitia, Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression, and Aarhus University’s Department of Political Science. In February of this year, researchers surveyed an average of 1,500 respondents each in 33 countries to come up with that seemingly encouraging result. The devil is in the details, though. 

“While citizens in most countries think that criticism of the government should be allowed, many people are unwilling to allow statements that are critical or insulting of particular groups, their religion, or the nation,” the authors add. “Moreover, citizens do not always prioritize free speech when there is a potential trade-off with other things they value, such as national security, good health, and the economy.”

Some of these exceptions are stark. Majorities in 14 countries say that governments should be able to prevent people from making “statements that are offensive to your religion and beliefs.” Most of the countries on that list aren’t a shock; is anybody surprised to discover that majorities in Egypt, Russia, and Turkey think that free speech protections shouldn’t extend to criticism of their own ideas? But Brazil is on that list, too. And even Germans are divided, with 47 percent agreeing that governments should be able to muzzle expression they find offensive.

Germany is similarly divided when it comes to insults to the national flag, with 48 percent supporting government restrictions—the same share as in Australia. But 56 percent in France agree, placing that country among the 21 countries where majorities say that governments should be able to prevent people from insulting the national symbol.

Germans and Australians, along with Britons, rank among the majorities in 22 countries who think that governments should be able to prevent people from saying things that are offensive to minorities. (Germany, by the way, is the birthplace of a new wave of Internet “hate speech” censorship laws sweeping the world.)

Majorities in Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, and Tunisia say that governments should be able to prevent people from making statements in support of homosexual relationships.

Majorities in 19 countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, say that government should be able to prevent media organizations from publishing information about “sensitive issues related to national security.” Will we have to just take officialdom’s word for it that suppressed articles were national security-related? The survey doesn’t say.

Given the exceptions that many people carve out in their generic endorsement of free speech, and that “public opinion about free speech (popular demand) tends to go hand-in-hand with the actual enjoyment of this right (government supply)” according to the survey, the consequences are no surprise.

“Global freedom of expression is in decline, now at its lowest for a decade” according to the 2019/2020 report from Article 19, a British organization named after the portion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights addressing free speech protections. “More than half of the world’s population – around 3.9 billion people – live in countries rated in crisis.”

The slide has been accelerated by the worsening condition for liberty in countries with large populations, including Bangladesh, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.

People suffering creeping censorship may gain new appreciation for shrinking liberty. Among the top ranked countries in Justitia’s Free Speech Index are Hungary and Venezuela. They rank well not because of their protections for citizens’ rights—Hungary has an elected but increasingly illiberal government while the totalitarianism of Venezuela’s socialist regime is limited only by its decaying resources—but because their residents voice strong support in the survey for the freedoms they’re losing.

Offering some comfort is that Americans are also highly ranked, at third place after only Norway and Denmark. Even on the contentious issue of social media, 29 percent of Americans say there should be no regulation, while 37 percent say any regulation should be done only by the social media companies themselves; only 34 percent want to government to play even a shared role in social media regulation.

On the other hand, 43 percent of Americans say their ability to speak freely about political matters in this country has worsened in the past 12 months, compared to 17 percent who think it has improved (40 percent say it is unchanged). That may foreshadow a long-term shift, since, as other researchers have found, younger Americans are less supportive of free speech. The consequences can be seen, in part, in the erosion of the ACLU as a civil liberties advocate, as younger staffers push it away from its traditional emphasis on freedom of expression.

Variance in support for free speech extends beyond age differences. “In the US, young people, women, the less educated, and Biden voters are generally more restrictive regarding free speech,” notes Who Cares About Free Speech? That said, while the strength of support varies in the U.S., majorities of men and women alike, and across ages, education levels, and partisan affiliations, still favor free speech.

Free speech isn’t the only quality of free societies eroding in recent years. 

“[D]emocracy has not been in robust health for some time,” The Economist‘s Democracy Index 2020 observed earlier this year. “In 2020 its strength was further tested by the outbreak of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic… Across the world in 2020, citizens experienced the biggest rollback of individual freedoms ever undertaken by governments during peacetime (and perhaps even in wartime).

Other sources report similar erosion of liberal democratic norms, accelerated by government power-grabs during the pandemic. Now we can add free speech to the mix, with populations in some places skeptical of core protections for expression. Government officials surprise nobody when they reach for expanded power; defeating them and reasserting fundamental freedoms will be difficult without popular support.

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The World Loves Free Speech—Except When They’re Offended


ptsphotoshot935551

Freedom of expression wins strong endorsements around the world when people are asked, say researchers, so why have protections for speech consistently slipped for over a decade? Part of the problem is that many of those surveyed embrace a convenient attitude toward the issue: they support protections for speech of which they approve, but not of speech that offends them. Unfortunately, a right you’re willing to extend only to yourself and your allies is no right at all and leaves freedom available only to those who wield power.

“Support for free speech is generally expressed by great majorities in all countries when people are asked their opinion,” finds Who Cares About Free Speech?, a report recently published by Danish think tank Justitia, Columbia University’s Global Freedom of Expression, and Aarhus University’s Department of Political Science. In February of this year, researchers surveyed an average of 1,500 respondents each in 33 countries to come up with that seemingly encouraging result. The devil is in the details, though. 

“While citizens in most countries think that criticism of the government should be allowed, many people are unwilling to allow statements that are critical or insulting of particular groups, their religion, or the nation,” the authors add. “Moreover, citizens do not always prioritize free speech when there is a potential trade-off with other things they value, such as national security, good health, and the economy.”

Some of these exceptions are stark. Majorities in 14 countries say that governments should be able to prevent people from making “statements that are offensive to your religion and beliefs.” Most of the countries on that list aren’t a shock; is anybody surprised to discover that majorities in Egypt, Russia, and Turkey think that free speech protections shouldn’t extend to criticism of their own ideas? But Brazil is on that list, too. And even Germans are divided, with 47 percent agreeing that governments should be able to muzzle expression they find offensive.

Germany is similarly divided when it comes to insults to the national flag, with 48 percent supporting government restrictions—the same share as in Australia. But 56 percent in France agree, placing that country among the 21 countries where majorities say that governments should be able to prevent people from insulting the national symbol.

Germans and Australians, along with Britons, rank among the majorities in 22 countries who think that governments should be able to prevent people from saying things that are offensive to minorities. (Germany, by the way, is the birthplace of a new wave of Internet “hate speech” censorship laws sweeping the world.)

Majorities in Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, and Tunisia say that governments should be able to prevent people from making statements in support of homosexual relationships.

Majorities in 19 countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, say that government should be able to prevent media organizations from publishing information about “sensitive issues related to national security.” Will we have to just take officialdom’s word for it that suppressed articles were national security-related? The survey doesn’t say.

Given the exceptions that many people carve out in their generic endorsement of free speech, and that “public opinion about free speech (popular demand) tends to go hand-in-hand with the actual enjoyment of this right (government supply)” according to the survey, the consequences are no surprise.

“Global freedom of expression is in decline, now at its lowest for a decade” according to the 2019/2020 report from Article 19, a British organization named after the portion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights addressing free speech protections. “More than half of the world’s population – around 3.9 billion people – live in countries rated in crisis.”

The slide has been accelerated by the worsening condition for liberty in countries with large populations, including Bangladesh, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.

People suffering creeping censorship may gain new appreciation for shrinking liberty. Among the top ranked countries in Justitia’s Free Speech Index are Hungary and Venezuela. They rank well not because of their protections for citizens’ rights—Hungary has an elected but increasingly illiberal government while the totalitarianism of Venezuela’s socialist regime is limited only by its decaying resources—but because their residents voice strong support in the survey for the freedoms they’re losing.

Offering some comfort is that Americans are also highly ranked, at third place after only Norway and Denmark. Even on the contentious issue of social media, 29 percent of Americans say there should be no regulation, while 37 percent say any regulation should be done only by the social media companies themselves; only 34 percent want to government to play even a shared role in social media regulation.

On the other hand, 43 percent of Americans say their ability to speak freely about political matters in this country has worsened in the past 12 months, compared to 17 percent who think it has improved (40 percent say it is unchanged). That may foreshadow a long-term shift, since, as other researchers have found, younger Americans are less supportive of free speech. The consequences can be seen, in part, in the erosion of the ACLU as a civil liberties advocate, as younger staffers push it away from its traditional emphasis on freedom of expression.

Variance in support for free speech extends beyond age differences. “In the US, young people, women, the less educated, and Biden voters are generally more restrictive regarding free speech,” notes Who Cares About Free Speech? That said, while the strength of support varies in the U.S., majorities of men and women alike, and across ages, education levels, and partisan affiliations, still favor free speech.

Free speech isn’t the only quality of free societies eroding in recent years. 

“[D]emocracy has not been in robust health for some time,” The Economist‘s Democracy Index 2020 observed earlier this year. “In 2020 its strength was further tested by the outbreak of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic… Across the world in 2020, citizens experienced the biggest rollback of individual freedoms ever undertaken by governments during peacetime (and perhaps even in wartime).

Other sources report similar erosion of liberal democratic norms, accelerated by government power-grabs during the pandemic. Now we can add free speech to the mix, with populations in some places skeptical of core protections for expression. Government officials surprise nobody when they reach for expanded power; defeating them and reasserting fundamental freedoms will be difficult without popular support.

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Rose Island


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After his homemade car is impounded because it lacks license plates, the socially awkward but inventive Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa (Elio Germano) dreams up a way to escape the government’s arbitrary intrusions: With help from some friends, he constructs a 400-square-meter steel platform in the international waters of the Adriatic Sea.

The seasteaders drill for fresh water, build a bar (naturally), and attract attention from mainlanders eager for something different from the dull and heavily regulated beach club scene in nearby Rimini. From there, it’s just a small step to asking the United Nations to officially recognize the Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj as a sovereign nation. (That, they hope, will fend off the Italian Navy.)

Rose Island, released on Netflix and based on real events from the tumultuous summer of 1968, portrays Rosa and his allies as romantic radicals. Sydney Sibilia’s film struggles to maintain an even tone—some scenes veer into whimsical, Wes Anderson–esque territory, particularly a comic encounter with a patrol boat—but it never wavers in its appreciation for our heroes as they piss off all the right people in pursuit of their slice of utopia.

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Tacky’s Revolt


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In 1760, hundreds of Jamaican slaves began an insurrection against their British overlords. For 18 months they fought, hoping not only to reclaim their freedom but to seize the sugar plantations where they had been forced to labor. Scholars, drawing mainly on texts from the white plantation owners, called the rebellion “Tacky’s Revolt” after one of its leaders.

In his exhaustively researched new book, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, the Harvard historian Vincent Brown draws on letters, lieutenants’ logs, cartography, and other sources to make a convincing case that this was more than just an isolated event. Its duration, he adds, had less to do with Tacky than with complicated geopolitics.

Brown argues that Tacky’s Revolt was really four wars at once. Slaves fought their white owners for freedom and survival. They fought formerly enslaved Jamaicans—the runaways and their descendants known as Maroons—for control of territory. They fought fellow slaves in a continuation of conflicts that began in Africa, before they boarded those slave ships. And then there was the Seven Years’ War between the British and the French. The Jamaican uprising wasn’t exactly a front in that conflict, but it still played a vital symbolic role: If Britain couldn’t control its slaves, it looked weaker.

Brown argues that slavery itself was a perpetual state of war and that these revolts featured more military precision than the haphazard insurrection the plantation owners described. Tacky and other leaders of the uprising had been experienced warriors on the Gold Coast. Their rebellion was a real war—one that in turn spawned other wars, including the successful fight for Haitian independence.

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Rose Island


minisroseisland

After his homemade car is impounded because it lacks license plates, the socially awkward but inventive Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa (Elio Germano) dreams up a way to escape the government’s arbitrary intrusions: With help from some friends, he constructs a 400-square-meter steel platform in the international waters of the Adriatic Sea.

The seasteaders drill for fresh water, build a bar (naturally), and attract attention from mainlanders eager for something different from the dull and heavily regulated beach club scene in nearby Rimini. From there, it’s just a small step to asking the United Nations to officially recognize the Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj as a sovereign nation. (That, they hope, will fend off the Italian Navy.)

Rose Island, released on Netflix and based on real events from the tumultuous summer of 1968, portrays Rosa and his allies as romantic radicals. Sydney Sibilia’s film struggles to maintain an even tone—some scenes veer into whimsical, Wes Anderson–esque territory, particularly a comic encounter with a patrol boat—but it never wavers in its appreciation for our heroes as they piss off all the right people in pursuit of their slice of utopia.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/35doXjs
via IFTTT

Tacky’s Revolt


minisTacky's Revolt_harvarduniversitypress

In 1760, hundreds of Jamaican slaves began an insurrection against their British overlords. For 18 months they fought, hoping not only to reclaim their freedom but to seize the sugar plantations where they had been forced to labor. Scholars, drawing mainly on texts from the white plantation owners, called the rebellion “Tacky’s Revolt” after one of its leaders.

In his exhaustively researched new book, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, the Harvard historian Vincent Brown draws on letters, lieutenants’ logs, cartography, and other sources to make a convincing case that this was more than just an isolated event. Its duration, he adds, had less to do with Tacky than with complicated geopolitics.

Brown argues that Tacky’s Revolt was really four wars at once. Slaves fought their white owners for freedom and survival. They fought formerly enslaved Jamaicans—the runaways and their descendants known as Maroons—for control of territory. They fought fellow slaves in a continuation of conflicts that began in Africa, before they boarded those slave ships. And then there was the Seven Years’ War between the British and the French. The Jamaican uprising wasn’t exactly a front in that conflict, but it still played a vital symbolic role: If Britain couldn’t control its slaves, it looked weaker.

Brown argues that slavery itself was a perpetual state of war and that these revolts featured more military precision than the haphazard insurrection the plantation owners described. Tacky and other leaders of the uprising had been experienced warriors on the Gold Coast. Their rebellion was a real war—one that in turn spawned other wars, including the successful fight for Haitian independence.

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Brickbat: Judge Not


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The Pennsylvania Court of Judicial Discipline has found Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Lyris Younge guilty of “repeated, clearly improper conduct” and found her misconduct while presiding over Family Court was “blatant and inexcusable.” The court found Younge illegally jailed parents, had parents improperly handcuffed in her courtroom, and belittled people who appeared before her. The court suspended Younge for six months and placed her on probation for the rest of her term, which runs through 2026. She may no longer preside over Family Court and must write letters of apologies to those she wronged.

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Brickbat: Judge Not


judge_1161x653

The Pennsylvania Court of Judicial Discipline has found Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Lyris Younge guilty of “repeated, clearly improper conduct” and found her misconduct while presiding over Family Court was “blatant and inexcusable.” The court found Younge illegally jailed parents, had parents improperly handcuffed in her courtroom, and belittled people who appeared before her. The court suspended Younge for six months and placed her on probation for the rest of her term, which runs through 2026. She may no longer preside over Family Court and must write letters of apologies to those she wronged.

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Paul Krugman’s 10-Year History of Being Wrong About Bitcoin


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Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Krugman is one of the most influential individuals in his field, which means people listen when he talks about bitcoin. Unfortunately, most of what he has had to say about the cryptocurrency over the years has been misguided, uninformed, or just plain wrong.

It’s sometimes difficult for the average person to understand what economists and politicians are talking about when they debate policy, but the value proposition of bitcoin can be easily understood by anyone through its NgU technology (NgU is an abbreviation of Number Go Up and is a meme based around bitcoin’s deflationary monetary policy). While Krugman has stated that his 1998 prediction that “the Internet’s impact on the economy [would be] no greater than the fax machine’s” was supposed to be a fun and provocative thought experiment, it may be much more difficult to explain away his many confused and oftentimes arrogant takes on bitcoin over the past ten years.

Krugman first wrote about bitcoin in The New York Times back in September 2011. In this post, Krugman mainly compared bitcoin to gold in a rather negative light. “To the extent that the [bitcoin] experiment tells us anything about monetary regimes,” he wrote, “it reinforces the case against anything like a new gold standard—because it shows just how vulnerable such a standard would be to money-hoarding, deflation, and depression.”

In other words, Krugman made a moral case against the adoption of bitcoin as money. In Krugman’s telling, a bitcoin standard would make the world much worse off because bitcoin has a fixed supply and central bankers would not be able to increase the money supply to stimulate the economy during economic recessions.

Even if you accept the idea that the world would be much better off under a more inflationary monetary system where central bankers have the power to stabilize the economy (I don’t), individuals tend to respond to incentives related to the betterment of their own lives, not necessarily the greater good of society. If holding bitcoin theoretically makes the world as a whole a bit worse off but acts as a better form of savings for an individual, is the average person going to choose to put his savings in fiat currencies that lose value over time out of the kindness of his own heart, or will he choose to just hold bitcoin? It’s also important to remember that the entire point of bitcoin is to persist in the face of governments that try to force their citizens into only using the government-approved form of money.

In April 2013, Krugman invoked Adam Smith to make another moral case against bitcoin, this time claiming that the use of gold, silver, or bitcoin as money was a waste of resources. “Smith actually wrote eloquently about the fundamental foolishness of relying on gold and silver currency, which— as he pointed out—serve only a symbolic function, yet absorbed real resources in their production, and why it would be smart to replace them with paper currency,” Krugman wrote. “And now here we are in a world of high information technology—and people think it’s smart, nay cutting-edge, to create a sort of virtual currency whose creation requires wasting real resources in a way Adam Smith considered foolish and outmoded in 1776.”

This was an early version of the energy and climate change–based arguments being made against bitcoin today. This is a faulty argument, however, because it assumes there is no difference between bitcoin and traditional bank accounts. The entire point of bitcoin as an asset is that, unlike Venmo or traditional bank accounts, users can retain full control over their digital money and are not simply holding IOUs. Claiming that this is a waste of resources is a subjective argument. It is no different from saying automobiles or YouTube are wasteful due to the amount of energy that is used to power them. People use bitcoin because it provides value for them, so the resources expended to make bitcoin possible aren’t a waste.

Later in 2013, Krugman simply declared that “Bitcoin Is Evil” because, as science-fiction writer Charlie Stross put it, “BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.” That said, Krugman did at least go into the argument that bitcoin lacked any sort of fundamental price floor and contrasted that characterization with gold’s use in jewelry and the U.S. dollar’s use for paying taxes.

Krugman would go on to use bitcoin’s lack of a price floor mechanism as his key argument against the cryptocurrency for many years to come. For example, as he argued in a 2015 interview, bitcoin “is a technically sweet solution to a problem, but it’s not clear that problem is one that has much economic relevance. It’s certainly not a reason to hold that currency.…If you’re looking for the idea that a currency doesn’t really have to be something physical, it can be something that is virtual, that’s the system we already have.”

But this misses the point of bitcoin, which is actually nothing like the monetary system we currently have. For one, bitcoin’s long-term monetary policy was “set in stone” when the network launched in January 2009, and it is not subject to changes by a trusted third party such as a central bank. Additionally, bitcoin solves the problem of centralization that is found in the digital equivalents of both the gold and fiat-based currency systems. Bitcoin users are able to retain full ownership over their coins with no counterparty risk; a bitcoin is not an IOU. Further, due to the censorship-resistant nature of the bitcoin network, a new financial system can be built on top of the bitcoin blockchain through the use of smart contracts to enable a greater degree of user privacy for a wide variety of activities, operating in a manner that contrasts the current surveillance state.

In addition to calling bitcoin evil, Krugman has also dismissed it as “libertarian derp” on multiple occasions. He even took pleasure in the crashing bitcoin price in early 2018. Notably, some of Krugman’s negative comments toward bitcoin popped up around the absolute bottoms of two consecutive cryptocurrency bear markets. In other words, it may be a good time to buy bitcoin whenever you see Krugman taking a victory lap.

Unfortunately for Krugman, the “libertarian derp” cryptocurrency hit a new all-time high once again in 2021, 10 years after his initial criticisms of the crypto asset were first published in The New York Times. Instead of acknowledging the reasons for bitcoin’s staying power, however, it appears that Krugman will continue to claim there is no utility for this technology and keep dismissing bitcoin as a cult that can survive indefinitely.

Fortunately for bitcoin, it can rebut Krugman by simply continuing to exist and thrive in the marketplace.

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