Finding Krugman

A reader earlier this week asked us to keep the Krugman links going. That's not exactly our job, if you call blogging a "job." Even if it were our job, we wouldn't care to be on the receiving end of all the copyright infringement lawsuits.

But if anyone wants to know how to find Professor Paul Krugman's incisive editorial analyses on the cheap, nothing could be easier. On his own blog, which is seriously out of date, Krugman very pointedly links to the The Unofficial Paul Krugman Archive, which presumably is run by someone other than him.

There, under the left-hand index word "Columns" you'll find an up to date compilation of his pay-to-view New York 'Times Select' columns. The article themselves merely link back to the Times, but somehow or other under almost every one of them there's a "reader comment" that just happens to quote very, very liberally from each Times Select article soon after it appears.

For reasons that escape us, a very active blog known as Tennessee Guerilla Women also regularly frees Krugman articles from the vise-like capitalist grip of Times Select. Today, they have his latest: "Weapons of Math Destruction," where he points out the Bush administration continues to hide standard government data that would show exactly who benefitted from the infamous Bush tax cuts, and what that tells about Bush's war plan for Iran.

If you are the patient type and can wait a day or two, a Portland blogger also has his own Paul Krugman Archive. There are plenty of other places where Krugman articles turn up whole, or nearly so, but you'll have more fun finding them on your own.

How all these web sites get away with pirating Krugman articles truly stumps us. But that's not as great a mystery as why the New York Times persists in charging readers to access their most popular 'select' columnists. It's a peculiar marketing plan that takes eye-catching store-window merchandise and buries it in a back room where few will pay to see it.

typos correct 4-14