Paul Krugman, Comedian

Who would guess that a straight up economist from Princeton could have me rolling on the floor in stitches?

Here's Paul Krugman making some very pointed, very funny comments about American ideological blindness:

Why Americans hate single-payer insurance

Because they don’t know they have it. A commenter points me to this:

At a recent town-hall meeting in suburban Simpsonville, a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”

“I had to politely explain that, ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,’ ” Inglis recalled. “But he wasn’t having any of it.”

One of the truly amazing and depressing things about the health reform debate is the persistence of fear-mongering over “socialized medicine” even though we already have a system in which the government pays substantially more medical bills (47% of the total) than the private insurance industry (35%).

In a way, this is the flip side of the persistent belief that the free market can cure healthcare, even though there are no places where it actually has; people also believe that government-provided insurance can’t work, even though there are many places where it does — and one of those places is the United States of America.

I've always found it interesting that there is an inverse relationship between the strength to which a view is held and the level of ignorance on which it is based. Scientists are famous for making highly qualified statements. They know that truth is elusive. Most soap boxers are completely confident of their viewpoints because they have no clue how complex and uncertain the real world is.