Klockren Krugman om Paul Ryan

Paul Krugman om den republikanske kongressmannen Paul Ryan, ordförande i husets Committee on the Budget, och om dagens höger generellt och vad de vill:

"I think what people like Paul Ryan are trying to do is set us on a glide path to a much harsher society. A country in which, step by step, more and more people are cast out into a situation of not having health insurance and poverty, and so we slide back to a Victorian notion that life is full of evils and that’s too bad but that’s the way that God made the world. That large numbers of the poor, large numbers of the elderly just live in dire poverty and don’t have health care because life is tough." (min markering)

Krugman intervjuad av Benjamin Wallace-Wells i "What's Left of the Left", New York Magazine 24 april

-Välfärdsstaten är ett system för att hantera och fördela risker* (socialförsäkringssystem). Att storskaligt skära ner på eller avskaffa välfärdsstaten är att privatisera risker och chanser och låtsas om att marknadens ("den blodiga osynliga handen") resultat i sig är ett rättvist resultat - "that's the way that God made the world".

Det är läge för att omformulera en gammal 1968-slogan: valet står mellan "välfärdsstat eller barbari".

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*Jfr Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy (1986).

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Uppdatering 21 september
Krugman utvecklar temat, och utgår från något som:

"what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, 'That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.' Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether 'society should just let him die.'

And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of 'Yeah!'

The incident highlighted something that I don’t think most political commentators have fully absorbed: at this point, American politics is fundamentally about different moral visions."

Krugman, "Free to Die", NY Times 15 september