Boy I’m glad I didn’t see the fake Krugman quote before it was proven to be a fake…

…because I probably would have fallen for it. Well, maybe not: it’s one thing to throw your Bastiat out the window (breaking it in the process, natch*) while speculating about a hypothetical alien invasion. It’s one thing to speculate on how the most murderous armed conflict in human history was good for our economy when that conflict is 65 years in the past.

It’s entirely another thing to say: dammit! If only there’d been widespread death and destruction from that earthquake today – that really would have helped!

So, hopefully, I’d have paused to wonder whether the quote was kosher. Did Krugman really say that? (Answer: no, he didn’t.)

But, given Krugman’s past nitwittedness, I might not have. So I’m grateful that I missed the opportunity.

In case you missed it: yesterday, somebody pretending to be Krugman wrote on Google+:

“People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.”

But it wasn’t Krugman. It was somebody else.

A few commentators did get fooled. If’n you ask me, they can be at least partly (not entirely, but partly) excused because of Krugman’s previous statement that:

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. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren’t any aliens, we’d be better –

ROGOFF: And we need Orson Welles, is what you’re saying.

KRUGMAN: No, there was a “Twilight Zone” episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don’t need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.

Unless and until Krugman can explain why we would be economically better off diverting resources to counter an alien attack – real or imagined – instead of allowing those resources to do whatever they would have done otherwise, then Krugman’s leaving himself vulnerable to spoofs like this. There is, after all, no practical difference between resources being re-allocated due to natural disaster and resources being re-allocated due to alien attack.

In the not-so-out-of-this-world* event that I haven’t explained this very well, I urge you to read about Frederic Bastiat’s “Broken Window Fallacy.”

UPDATE – Krugman: all my stupid and outrageous statements are made in the New York Times.

* See what I did, there?