Krugman is smart and a bit condescending, with a sarcastic bent. "Is evil" was not prima facie humorous, but the way certain people in this thread have responded to the title without reading the article may have been part of the joke.
Well, I disagree. He spelled out why he thinks Bitcoin is evil, he thinks it was cooked up in a lab by cyber-Libertarians to destroy the power of the State to tax, an activity which he thinks is a good and necessary thing. His only consolation is that he thinks it won't work, but that doesn't change the black, black intentions of Satoshi Nakamoto and his Crypto-anarchist crew. I'm serious that he's serious: he thinks Bitcoin is evil, in much the same way that some politicians think Tor is evil because child pornographers can use it.
It's still a totally inaccurate bait and switch title, which annoys me and makes me like his column a little less.
If I click through to an article called "Bitcoin is Evil", maybe I actually want to read about how a Bitcoin-dominated world is going to making exploiting the poor trivially easy. I'm not convinced yet, but it's a plausible (if normative) argument someone could make, so there's no sense in making a joke out of it. Especially if - like Krugman - you already support redistributionist taxation and the welfare state.
Judging from a follow-up discussion, I believe you're using the word "redistribution" in a way that is meaningless and/or needlessly gives ground to a libertarian framing of the situation.
In a nutshell, if you say "redistribution", you must have some baseline in mind. Many people are fooled into accepting an "everyday libertarian" distribution of resources as a baseline, but this is both philosophically problematic and politically foolish if you are not a libertarian yourself.
Taxes are part of the distributive system of society, as are other parts of the legal code such as patents and copyright law. There is no reason to label one part of the law "redistributive" while you call other parts merely "distributive".
Interesting read from Bruenig! While it's true that the term "redistribution" (as opposed to "distribution") implies a default where everyone gets back exactly as much value as they paid into the system, it's also common parlance for progressive taxation and equal benefits. That was the sense in which I used the term.
I'm not a libertarian. I am using the correct terms that apply to those policies. I don't think of the phrase "welfare state" as pejorative, nor was it originally intended to be so. A combination of redistributionist tax code and generous healthcare/education/benefits are working out really well for Scandinavia right now, and in my opinion we could learn quite a bit from what we're seeing in those countries.
In my experience, strong libertarians prefer to avoid even mentioning that the poor exist.
I'm sorry if I offended you in some way. "Welfare state" is a widely accepted academic term, and I was using it in that context. I could just as easily have said "states with very progressive tax systems that offer substantial benefits to all citizens, rather than only those who pay." It would have gone over better with those of us who feel strongly about a US transfer payment system ("welfare"), but it didn't really roll off the tongue.
I wasn't offended, I was merely pointing out that saying you don't think of it that way isn't really what matters in these matters; what others think is.
But sure, talk about the policy, though I didn't disagree with anything you said policy related.
