The Tenth-Ranked Quotation of 2008?

The good news is that the title line in my blog post of July 17 was chosen as one of the top ten quotes of 2008 (tied for tenth place, it is true). The bad news is that the quote was attributed to Paul Krugman, who had used it subsequently on the Bill Mayer Show. The sentence is: "If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in financial crises." I had originally used it in 2007 as the first line of an article in a Cato Journal issue devoted to financial crises. Among the others who subsequently picked up on the line were Ben Bernanke, Mark Shields, Bloomberg, WallStreetJournal.com, Brad deLong, and Tom Keene – generally with attribution, when the format permitted.

The list of Top Ten Quotations of 2008 went out over AP on Monday, and has appeared in lots of newspapers over the last couple days. Those are the breaks. Krugman immediately set the record straight on his blog, as I knew he would.

But there are some other, more interesting, aspects.

One is an illustration of how tough is the world in which highly visible columnists like Krugman live. There are lots of Krugman-haters out there. Of course the phenomenon originates in the fact that he consistently has been liberal and anti-Bush (not precisely the same thing). But the antipathy goes very deep. The Yale/AP list was called to my attention yesterday by one Joel West. I told him I was indebted to him for pointing out the misattribution. But I also told him that I was sure that there had been no desire on Paul's part to steal my line: TV shows like Bill Maher don't customarily allow their guests to display footnotes. But Mr. West must be one of the Krugman-haters, because his subsequent blog post blithely accused Krugman of dishonesty. As had another Krugman-hating blog post before that. These people are eager for ammunition against someone of a different ideological persuasion and are not sufficiently discriminating about what they use.

Ironically, of the other two soundbites that share tenth place on the Yale/AP list with the atheists-libertarians quote, one is something else attributed to Krugman ("Cash for trash"), and the third is from the all-time champion Krugman-hater, Donald Luskin. Luskin earned the Top Ten honor when quoted as saying "Anyone who says we're in a recession, or heading into one -- especially the worst one since the Great Depression -- is making up his own private definition of 'recession'" in the Washington Post, September 14. This was of course after a huge fraction of economic commentators had already decided that the country was probably in recession, as turns out to have been the case. (I myself took a bit of grief on various blogs both for saying it too early and also for saying it too late.)

The atheists-and-libertarians line itself has also drawn some grief from two minority communities -- atheists and libertarians -- on various blog sites. I don't mean to put these two philosophies together (although that would be an interesting essay question on some exam). Nor is it the case that either group is objecting to being associated with the other. But both have pointed out that the statement is not literally true. They are entirely correct: There are plenty of atheists in the military; and there are plenty of libertarians in a financial crisis. But of course the statement did not literally mean there are no atheists in foxholes or lilbertarians in financial crises. The claims are, rather, that on average: (i) soldiers under fire tend suddenly to grow more religious in outlook, and (ii) policy-makers facing a financial crisis tend suddenly to grow more interventionist in outlook. If anything, I admire the intellectual consistency of those that do not change their views under such pressure. 1) Yes there really are atheists in foxholes. They are a minority, but a substantial one. (2) And yes there really are libertarians in financial crises. Again a minority, but not to be dismissed.

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