Krugman echoes Noah

They are two pretty obvious points. But it's still nice to see Paul Krugman using the same language that I usually use when he points out that A) public goods exist, and B) Republicans typically deny this fact:

What is the appropriate role of government?

Traditionally, the division between conservatives and liberals has been over the role and size of the welfare state...

But both sides, I thought, agreed that the government should provide public goods — goods that are nonrival (they benefit everyone) and nonexcludable (there’s no way to restrict the benefits to people who pay.) The classic examples are things like lighthouses and national defense, but there are many others. For example, knowing when a volcano is likely to erupt can save many lives; but there’s no private incentive to spend money on monitoring, since even people who didn’t contribute to maintaining the monitoring system can still benefit from the warning. So that’s the sort of activity that should be undertaken by government.

So what did Bobby Jindal choose to ridicule in this response to Obama last night? Volcano monitoring, of course.

And leaving aside the chutzpah of casting the failure of his own party’s governance as proof that government can’t work, does he really think that the response to natural disasters like Katrina is best undertaken by uncoordinated private action? Hey, why bother having an army? Let’s just rely on self-defense by armed citizens.

The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

Well-said. But Krugman gives the Republicans way too much credit here. Regardless of whether they ever were the "party of ideas," Republicans have never admitted that public goods exist. Not in the modern age, at least. If you want to drown government in a bathtub, presumably you think that private individuals should (and will) build all the roads, power grids, ports, bridges, and lighthouses too. And that we can replace the army with self-funded citizen militias, etc.

But my suspicion is that Republicans know perfectly well that public goods exist. They pretend otherwise because A) they fear that public goods spending will be used by liberals as a trojan horse for welfare spending, and B) many Republican constituents don't like the idea of paying for public goods that also benefit black people.