Last night Atif Mian and I flew up to Boston for a conference — and as I slid into my seat, who should I see staring at me but Ron Paul. It turned out that all of the seatback screens in the plane were showing Newsmax TV — who knew there was such a thing? Is it there to serve people who find Fox News too liberal? — and as best I could tell from the visual context (the sound was blessedly off), the elder Paul was lecturing us about monetary policy.
This sort of thing is obviously an important part of the reason we’re living in an age of derp. Events and data may have made nonsense of claims that the Fed’s policies would inevitably produce runaway inflation, and made those insisting on such claims look like fools; but there’s a large audience of people who, pulled in by affinity fraud, live in a bubble where they never hear about such evidence.
Truly, we live in a world in which people feel entitled not just to their own opinions but their own facts.