Why Is Everyone Pissed Off?

Far be it from me, a one-time college faculty member with a lowly Ph.D., to question the wisdom and brilliance of a Nobel Prize laureate like Paul Krugman, but I found the op-ed he has just published to announce he will no longer be writing for The (failing) New York Times to be an analysis of current-day politics which I simply believe to be totally and completely wrong.

Krugman started writing for the NYT in 2000, which he claims was a time of optimism “in much of the Western world,” an optimism which he believes has now been replaced “by anger and resentment.”

Why were Americans so optimistic back at the beginning of Century XXI? Because according to Krugman, “we took peace and prosperity for granted” and assumed things would continue that way far into the future as well.

Now this optimism has been replaced with a pessimism which often slides over into anger because we’ve had a “collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest. And it wasn’t that long ago that technology billionaires were widely admired across the political spectrum, some achieving folk-hero status.”

Krugman then identifies Elon Musk as one of these ‘technology billionaires.’ That’s like calling Warren Buffet a car manufacturer if he…