Brad DeLong directs me to a screed by Clive Crook, who sort of admits that I’ve been right about a lot of things but accuses me of being, well, shrill. Where have I heard that before?

But the Crook piece is actually useful, in an unintended way.

Brad points out, correctly, that Crook demands that I engage respectfully with reasonable people on the other side, but somehow fails to offer even one example of such a person. Not long ago Crook was offering Paul Ryan as an exemplar of serious, honest conservatism, while I was shrilly declaring Ryan a con man. But I suspect that even Crook now admits, at least to himself, that Ryan is indeed a con man.

But in a way the most revealing point here is Crook’s demand that I engage with

thoughtful, public-spirited Americans whose views on the proper scale and scope of government are different from his, yet worthy of respect.

Wait — is that what it’s about? If you read my original post, and Noah Smith’s KrugTron the Invincible post that inspired it, you’ll see that it’s all about macroeconomics — about questions like whether budget deficits in a depressed economy drive up interest rates and crowd out private investment, about whether printing money in a depressed economy is inflationary, about whether rising government debt has severe negative impacts on growth.

What do these questions have in common? They’re factual questions, with factual answers — and they have absolutely no necessary relationship to the “proper scale and scope of government”. You could, in principle, believe that we need a drastically downsized government, and at the same time believe that cutting government spending right now will increase unemployment. You could believe that discretionary policy of any kind is a mistake, and at the same time admit that the expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet isn’t at all inflationary under current circumstances.

So where’s this stuff about the scale of government coming from? Well, in practice it turns out that many conservatives are unwilling to concede that Keynesian macro has any validity to it, or that you can sometimes run the printing presses without unleashing runaway inflation, because they fear that any such admission would open the doors to much wider government intervention. But that’s exactly my point! They’re letting their views about how the world works be dictated by their vision of the kind of society they want; they’re politicizing their economic analysis. And that’s why they keep getting everything wrong.

And I guess that Crook becomes part of the “they” I’m talking about, because he too seems unable to distinguish between how things are and political value judgments.

Do I do the same thing? Well, I try not to — which is one reason I’ve been leery of linking my concerns about inequality to my macro advocacy.

And for what it’s worth, Noah Smith is right to suggest that almost all of what I’m writing about macroeconomics these days has its roots in my late-1990s analysis of Japan — which surely had nothing at all to do with US politics.

The bottom line is that although I have political views — and wear them on my sleeve! — I’m not so postmodern as to believe that all truth is political. Some economic doctrines work, others don’t. And my doctrine seems, objectively, non-politically, to have been working better than the other guys’.