When someone accuses someone else of stupidity and the someone who does the accusing is generally pretty smart, I expect that the accusation, even if nasty, will at least hit the target. Not so Paul Krugman’s attack on Ohio Republican congressman John Boehner. Before you accuse me of being in Boehner’s pocket or even in his camp, you should know that for the entire time George W. Bush was in office there was little about Boehner I liked other than that he looks vaguely like the late Steve McQueen. In short, I hold no brief for Boehner.

So what, according to Krugman, was evidence of Boehner’s stupidity? The following statement:

Why should we reward Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with $200 billion in taxpayer dollars without first reforming these housing entities that were at the heart of the economic meltdown?

And in case you think Krugman criticized Boehner for thinking Fannie and Freddie were at the heart of the meltdown, that wasn’t it. Instead, according to Krugman, because Fannie and Freddie are government-owned, they can’t be rewarded with taxpayer dollars. Krugman makes explicit his belief that taxpayers are the government. That’s not evidence of Krugman’s stupidity. It’s much, much worse. It’s evidence of Krugman’s collectivism. What collectivists, whether they were socialists, fascists, or communists, had in common was their view that society equals the state.