You realize that all of Southern society was based on the hierarchical structure that was underpinned by slavery? There's a very good reason why there was never the amount class-based animosity in the South that should accompany a society with such an enormous disparity between rich and poor... a society with zero middle class. Slavery! Every white man - no matter how poor he was - knew he was still good enough to own another human being (whether he had the means to or not), and that he was far superior to any white woman. Everything about Confederate society was held together by slavery... whether you owned them or not. So, yes, even a non slave owning poor man was fighting for the right he had to own another human being if he had the means.
Robert E Lee turned traitor to his country to support a society based on slave labor that held people like him up as feudal lords. He is as despicable an American as has even lived, no matter how pleasant his mannerisms. Lincoln freed the slaves in the Confederate states and not the border states because he had to enact a decision that could not be shot down by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger Taney. This was the same pro-slave man that authored the Dred Scott decision. As states in rebellion, Lincoln could use his war powers to constitutionally free the slaves in Confederate states without fear of it being overturned. Had you ever read anything about Lincoln, you'd know that he was a practical, pragmatic politician before anything else.
I'd recommend Alan Guelzo's "Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation"
I guess it's too much trouble to actually read Krugman - or even know the facts.
How do these facts work:
"Consider, for example, the prediction Krugman made the day Obama signed the original stimulus bill into law: “I am still guessing that we peak out at around 9% [unemployment] and that would be late this year [2009]." Furthermore, Krugman declared that double-digit unemployment was “not the most likely event.” As Norquist and Lott note, unemployment hit 10.1% and remained above 9% two years after Krugman predicted it would peak.
Once it became clear that President Obama’s stimulus plan had failed to ignite the economic recovery he promised, Krugman and others began scrambling for excuses to explain why Obama’s spending spree hadn’t worked. One explanation Krugman offered was that right-wingers had erroneously claimed government spending had increased when it hadn’t:
"So as I said, the big government expansion everyone talks about never happened....And federal aid to state and local governments wasn’t enough to make up for plunging tax receipts in the face of the economic slump....[T]here’s a widespread perception that government spending has surged, when it hasn’t—is that there has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers."
As Norquist and Lott reveal, Krugman’s claims rely on a slippery game of sleight of hand; Krugman cherry-picks the only year when total government spending dropped, which was from 2009 to 2010, “and even then, it was still much higher than just a couple of years earlier.” In point of fact, note the authors, government spending has grown 12 percent since 2008 and 20 percent since 2007. "
But you can sit their in your smug, self-righteous libertarianism and keep pretending Krugman is a hack who hasn't consistently made very accurate predictions and the Nobel prize in economics is a fraud
Krugman has consitently failed to predict anything since he helped lead Enron into an abyss about 14 years ago. Almost eveything he espouses has been proven to be bunk in the wake of Greece, Spain and Portugal in Europe, and his claims of "not enough spending" on the failed Obama stimulus plans is the type of overly general crap that mean nothing. Typical Keynesian... "no matter how much we spend, it's never enough." Further, he has more than once taken obvious disengenuous positions about a true Nobel laureate, Milton Friedman. Seeing as how his sheep-like readership has never actually read Freidman, they'll never know.
If we need to choose between a billion dollars spent establishing a colony on a celestial body or spent on developing sustaining methods of producing food in impoverished nations, the production of food must take precedence.
I fail to see why the food needs of impoverished nations is more significant an issue for wealthy nations than the establishment of a permanent colony on another celestial body. The long-term viability of our species is far better served by expanding than trying to feed every child in the Sudan.
To be or not to be, that is the bottom line.
