Krugman's swipe at Bloomberg's rhetoric about Occupy Wall Street.

Paul Krugman has a column about how various "plutocrats" are "panicking" about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and I want to focus on the 4th paragraph:

Michael Bloomberg, New York's mayor and a financial-industry titan in his own right, was a bit more moderate, but still accused the protesters of trying to "take the jobs away from people working in this city," a statement that bears no resemblance to the movement's actual goals.

So the "actual goals" — presumably, something along the lines of a better world for everyone — should divert us from noticing the actual effects people are actually causing? Imagine that as a general principle: We should to back off from criticizing people who have good intentions, even when they adopt means that cause collateral damage, even when those means aren't likely to get us to the pretty goals they have in mind.

These are exactly the people we need to expose and criticize!

Now, Bloomberg did kind of ask for it, because of his use of the word "trying":

"What [the protesters are] trying to do is take the jobs away from people working in this city... They're trying to take away the tax base we have because none of this is good for tourism....

"If the jobs they are trying to get rid of in this city — the people that work in finance, which is a big part of our economy — we're not going to have any money to pay our municipal employees or clean the blocks or anything else."

Bloomberg's rhetoric assigns to the protesters the intent to achieve the natural consequences of their actions. Obviously, this rhetoric invites the Krugman response. But I think it's a good rhetorical device. It rips away the vani [...]

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