An Economic Achilles Returns to the Fray!

A hearty welcome back to General Glut!

General Glut's Globblog: Lonely crank!: Lonely crank!: If for no other reason than this, I'm coming out of retirement (yes, again -- you'd think I was Bill Parcells or something):

For a long time there we were told not to attack the fake centrists because at least they attacked Bush, too. But that position is now untenable because it became obvious that fake centrists only attacked Bush's means, not his ends. Fake centrist economic schemes, which were and are merely slight variances on the corporate-whoring of wingnut policies, used to only be attacked by lonely cranks like General Glut. Now Duncan Black and Thomas Frank and others attack economic Technocrat "Centrism" on grounds of principle as well as on the obvious point that such policies have lost the working class for the Democrats.

That's high praise indeed. If the blogosphere doesn't need another lonely crank, I don't know what it needs!

This is very nice to see--I, a centrist attacking Bush's means say--although you don't know that you are really having an impact until they call you not a "lonely crank" but a basement-dwelling bathrobe-clad lonely crank.

And Felix Salmon writes:

RGE - "It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.": [W]e welcome the General's return, since he's clearly come back in high spirits, as is evidenced by his musings on potential "out-of-control" inflation in the UK.

What exactly is this terribly worrisome British inflation rate, you ask? Nearly the 11% of 1990? The 22% of 1980?! The 27% of 1975?!?! No. It is the haunting and ominous 3.6% of September 2006...

Never mind that there is not a scrap of evidence to indicate that inflation rates as high as 8% actually damage real economic growth. Yet the wise old Bank of England wants us to believe that anything over 2% CPI growth is somehow sinister and perilous.

And this is exactly the kind of crazy thinking that Ben Bernanke wants to bring to the United States...