Why Does Paul Krugman Want A Klingon Invasion?

The Huffington Post recently reported on a CNN interview where Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman suggested that if the United States staged a fake alien invasion, the US economy would quickly recover. Krugman: "If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months." Krugman continued, "And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren't any aliens, we'd be better--"

But Dr. Krugman, we haven't even developed warp capability yet! And I'm not even sure we have the technology to produce photon torpedoes right now! Even so, I think Krugman may be onto something. Had the United States a formidable threat to unite the country as we had during World War II, perhaps social and economic cohesion would improve and the world economy could get back on its feet.

According to the Huffington Post, Krugman was just using a space invasion as an example, but now some think that Krugman's comments are "part of a giant conspiracy by a shadowy group of elites to enslave the world through a fake alien attack". It will only be a matter of time until some conspiracy theorists start believing that Krugman himself is an alien-human hybrid trying to distract people into believing that an alien invasion will occur from the sky when in fact an alien conspiracy is already in place on the ground in the powerful governments of Earth. Maybe Krugman's alien-invasion comment itself was part of the alien conspiracy!

Let's take it a step further. What if aliens invade the planet Earth, proclaim Paul Krugman to be a prophet, and install Krugman as "all-time world dictator" over Earth's inhabitants? This situation could very well spiral out of control very quickly if these power-hungry extraterrestrials capable of light-speed travel and high-tech weaponry (presumably eons ahead of ours) are not held at bay by Earth's grand arsenal of nuclear weapons and projectile-based weapons. Even worse, what if, after people discover the alien invasion is a staged hoax, then real aliens arrive and invade the planet? That would truly be an incident of apocalyptic proportions.

In all seriousness, Krugman's idea is somewhat admirable (if only for science fiction authors), but it is also far-fetched. If we continue with Krugman's proposal, the costs of staging an alien invasion and the complete loss of credibility and integrity in the establishment thereafter once people find out the whole thing was a hoax may outweigh any benefits of such an endeavor. Such a hope as that of uniting the planet to a common threat could possibly boost the economy for a while, but the problems we face economically go further than using government funds to produce war machines capable of taking on extraterrestrials. And besides, after the alien threat is revealed as being non-existent, what will all those space-weapons factories produce?

If we're going to rebuild the global economy, let's do it in honesty; dishonesty is part of the reason we ended up in this situation in the first place.

No, our economic quagmire is deeper than being solved by some fabricated war with aliens. Economist Henry Hazlitt discussed these concepts as being part of an economic fallacy called the "blessings of destruction". Those resources that Krugman is proposing being used for space-weapons could have been used more efficiently elsewhere. The sort of Keynesian tactic that Krugman is proposing inefficiently uses limited resources that may be required in other areas of society. Rather than building a proton cannon to fight aliens, those limited resources could have been better used to make a car or a boat per the free market. Rather than a doctor being drafted to serve in the counter-alien army, the doctor could have been treating patients on the market. Although I admire and appreciate Krugman's work as an economist, perhaps he would be better off taking a look at Henry Hazlitt's "Economics In One Lesson" rather than watching old episodes of the "Twilight Zone".

The real "twilight zone" in which we find ourselves today is not about alien invasions, but economic and political uncertainty. Hopefully, like the "Twilight Zone" episode that Krugman cited, perhaps the current economic crisis will end in some sense of world peace. And hey, maybe extraterrestrials can arrive afterwards as well. If government was a major cause of the problem, then it's difficult to see how more government action would be the solution.

Along the lines of Krugman's proposal, maybe actual extraterrestrials could be part of the solution. And hey, if aliens do arrive, maybe they can buy some US Treasuries. This could go from being a global financial crisis to being a galactic financial crisis. Welcome to the planet Earth!