Live from Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Paul Krugman meditates on why the goldbug-grifters currently running and speaking at the APP Monetary Policy event down-valley here in Jackson Hole make such a good living--why they find so many marks, and why it does not matter that the predictions of the goldbug-grifter-con men have proven so false for so long:
: [The Old Man and the CPI](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/the-old-man-and-the-cpi/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs®ion=Body): "I was treated to a long ad from Ron Paul...
...who wants you to buy his video explaining the coming crisis brought on by loose money. And I found myself thinking about the remarkable fact that there really are people who will buy that video.... Ron Paul has been making the same prediction year after year... at least since 1981!... has been wrong year after year. It’s hard to think of a doctrine that has been as thoroughly refuted by events as goldbug economics. For a while gold prices did go up, although not for the reasons the goldbugs thought, but now even that has gone into reverse. So why would anyone pay money?...
It’s... affinity fraud.... People who pay Ron Paul... have made some money... believe... it reflects their own virtue... hear that the Fed is printing money, and it sounds to them like a violation of both the laws of economics and morality... a plot to take away their completely earned gains and give them to Those People (hence the whiteness issue). You can... tell such people... monetary policy is... technical... the Fed isn’t giving money away... predictions of runaway inflation have been utterly wrong... that they would have done a much better job of investing if they had listened to the MIT gang; sorry, we’re just not their kind of people.... I find it hard to feel much sympathy for the marks of this particular scam. Then again, that’s probably why they will never, ever listen to what I have to say.
