Why the Nobel winner is the Bush haters' champagne.

It's easy to see today's selection of Paul Krugman for a Nobel Prize as a slap by the committee at the last eight years of economic policy. Here we are in the middle of an economic meltdown, and the committee has chosen to give the prize to a leftish, free-spending economist best known for a thrice-weekly column in the New York Times devoted to bashing the Bush administration. Except for one thing: That would have to be someone else, because, in fact, Krugman is in many ways a rightish, tight-fisted economist with a thrice-weekly column devoted to bashing the Bush administration.

For those looking for a measure-and economists themselves are always looking for a measure, aren't they?-of how low the policies of the Bush era have sunk in the estimate of professional economists, Paul Krugman is as good a person to start with as any. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences has in earlier years gone to economists more conventionally liberal than Krugman: Joseph Stiglitz or Amartya Sen, known for his work on developing economies, come to mind. There are Nobel choices out there with a more left-wing outlook, notably Krugman's Princeton colleague David Card, a highly regarded labor economist closely associated with a call for increases in the minimum wage.

And then there's Krugman. The work for which Krugman has been awarded the Nobel falls squarely in the tradition of classical economics. While the evils of globalization have become a rallying cry for what remains of the world's left and a preoccupation of the John Edwards wing of the Democratic Party in the United States, Krugman has steadfastly advocated the elimination of trade barriers. Krugman's work has helped dissipate the force of the old protectionist canard that the United States loses by exporting jobs to low-wage countries. While he has advocated a sensitivity to the dislocations that free trade can cause in both the United States and places like Latin America and the Third World, Krugman remains on balance a committed free trader. He has been critical of protectionist ideas that would ostensibly aid developing nations, has opposed living-wage laws as economically naive, and is a deficit hawk critical of excessive government spending.

The main economics-related idea on which Krugman qualifies as left-wing is that continual increases in spending cannot be accompanied by continual cuts in taxes. Krugman would generally prefer to keep the spending and raise the taxes rather than the other way around. This, in the current state of affairs, makes him practically a raging Marxist, since it has become a basic tenet of the Bush administration that you can do both without consequence. Over the last few years, you can see an evolution in Krugman's writing from a certainty that the Bushies had a nefarious plan to starve the government to an amazement that much of the government really does seem to think that higher spending, lower interest rates, lower taxes, higher consumer spending, and lower savings would create an economic perpetual motion machine.

Krugman is a social liberal by the American definition of the term in that he is a strong believer in the role of the welfare state. But he is an economic liberal (as the big majority of Nobel economics winners have been) by the quite different European sense of the word, which uses liberal to refer to believers in open markets and market-driven government policies. That second part used to be a cornerstone of the governing philosophy of one of the two major American parties. Hard as it is to recall, that was the Republican Party.

The main premise of Republican economic policy of the past years has been that party leaders could serve up a healthy dose of moralizing about personal responsibility while outsourcing economic policy to the experts at the Federal Reserve, who would then in turn allow them to pursue policies that were guaranteed to encourage the exact opposite. The reigning wisdom was that the rote talk about savings was enough because our real savings were safe in the form of phantom real-estate assets. Now that has proven to be an illusion, and it is Krugman's good fortune that the Republicans have given him the opportunity to pummel them with equal vigor not just on their social agenda but on their economic delirium.