We have an odd family friend. Fundamentally, she is a nice person and sports a very unconventional view of the world that occasionally emotes great insights into the human condition. She has a major flaw, however, one that she admits as a character flaw: she is an unabashed hater. Despite her husband, kids and friends being conservative, she targets her venom at conservatives. We who love her nonetheless, understand: “conservatives” remind her of her father, a redneck sort of fellow who was a very bad father. She blames him for her mother’s suicide, which occurred when she was very young.

 

If you dig deep into people’s psyches, you can often find the reason for visceral hatreds and, usually but not always, they have to do with childhood experiences. As Oprah (an abused child) famously remarked, some people seem incapable of shedding their childhood baggage.

 

So, what is it with Paul Krugman, once a brilliant economist and now a dark troll fulminating ugly thoughts under stone bridges in Liberal-land? This article, contributed by Peter Foster in Canada’s Financial Post, does a brilliant dissection of Krugman’s visceral hatreds and the warped views he espouses on economics, conservatives and climate change (some of which have been repeated rote on this blog by certain participants).

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/06/28/peter-foster-the-demons-in-krugmanomics/

 

What the article doesn’t do is explain from whence do Paul Krugman’s demons arise. What happened to cause his descent into madness?