QOTD: 1984 as an operating manual

Quote of the Day:

Barry Ritholtz catches AEI purging mention of deregulation from Peter Wallison’s bio. Wallison is co-director of AEI’s financial deregulation project; but he’s also one of the Gang of Four demanding that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission not so much as mention deregulation in its report.

So Wallison’s history as an advocate of the policy that shall not be named must be expunged, I guess.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The same thing happened with Social Security privatization. There was a long effort by conservative groups to promote privatization, a term they themselves devised. Cato had a Project on Social Security Privatization. But then, when it turned out that the term polled badly, they began rewriting old records in an attempt to cover up the fact that they had ever talked about it.

As Brad DeLong says, I’ll stop calling these people Orwellian when they stop using Nineteen Eighty-Four as an operations manual. - Paul Krugman