“The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant -- that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.”

—  Paul Krugman

&quot;Virus Strikes Again&quot;, Originally &quot;Supply-Side Virus Strikes Again: Why there is no cure for this virulent infection&quot; http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/virus.html, undated draft at web.mit.edu of a &quot;The Dismal Science&quot; column for Slate <br class="br">The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From The Dismal Science (1998)

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Paul Krugman106
American economist 1953

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