Repeated Drivel Abounds

Dean Baker has a couple of little mindless refrains that he chants repeatedly, one of which strikes me as petty, shallow and nitpicking, the other of which seems to reveal a very real lack of ability in critical thinking.

The first is his penchant for accusing journalists of “mind reading” when they report what various public figures of organizations think. He does so today, accusing the Washington Post of mind reading for its headline that, “Trump thinks he's saving trade. The rest of the world thinks he's blowing it up.”

He retorts with, “I will assert that the Post has no idea what Trump actually thinks,” which is to accuse them of living in a cave in Outer Mongolia, since Trump has stated repeatedly that he believes he is saving trade. I think Trump is nuts, but one does not have to agree with Trump to be willing to say that he believes what he says he believes, so I will counter Dean Baker by asserting that the Post is aware of what Trump is saying and has a very reasonable assumption for believing that it knows what Trump believes.

Baker could have asserted that the Post has no idea what “the rest of the world” believes, as that part of the Post's statement encompasses an overly broad, grandiose and unknowable scope of knowledge, but he did not have sufficient wit to make that reasonable accusation.

The second is, of course, his constant refrain in response to any talk of a labor shortage, which is that there are plenty of laborers out there who are, “working for your competitors,” so all you have to do is pay higher wages to hire them away from away from your competitors. He never admits that this “solution” solves nothing, merely moving the labor shortage from one employer to another.

This is the kind of drivel that economists thrive on these days.