Krugman Strikes Again

Poisoning the Well – by far the most common tree in the fallacy forest that passes for our National Debate.

This fallacy consists of rejecting an argument on the grounds that one’s opponent allegedly possesses some bias, rather than on the grounds that the argument itself is faulty.

The latest offender is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Back in April, it took me three entries to catalog all the fallacies in his attack on the Tea Party movement (../../2009/04/fallacypalooza.html, ../../2009/04/fallacypalooza-ii-wrath-of-limbaugh.html, ../../2009/04/fallacypalooza-iii-final-tea-leaf.html).

Now Dr. Krugman strikes again. This time he takes on the excellent analysis of administrative costs in health care by Robert Book of the Heritage Foundation (the analysis I gave four blades last week). Dr Krugman begins, “Whenever you encounter ‘research’ from the Heritage Foundation, you always have to bear in mind that Heritage isn’t really a think tank; it’s a propaganda shop. Everything it says is automatically suspect.”

Like I said, Poisoning the Well.

The Logic Critic gives Paul Krugman…

1 Blade - Not even an argument (again).

For the full text of Dr. Krugman’s article, see http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/06/administrative-costs/

For Dr. Book’s response, see http://blog.heritage.org/2009/07/06/medicare-administrative-costs-and-paul-krugman’s-propaganda-shop/