On Monday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman published his last column for the paper. The left-wing pundit and formerly respectable economist is not disappearing from public life entirely. But the end of his Times column is the end of an era. Even for a conservative like me. Krugman played a large role in the formation of my worldview. But probably not in the way he would have preferred.

I first began to pay attention to politics as an independent observer during the 2008 election. It was a tempestuous time. The stock market was a wildly careening roller coaster that fall, as political and financial elites confronted the looming Great Recession. The first years of Barack Obama’s first term were hardly less eventful. Democrats, at the peak of their political power in the 21st century, sought to expand government as much as they could get away with.

Through it all, the big-government view found a ready spokesman in Paul Krugman. (He even sticks to a version of this role in his final column.) He rushed to blame unregulated markets for a financial crisis rooted in government action. And he justified Democrats’ gigantic expenditures — this was the era when trillion-dollar figures became mainstream — and unprecedented expansions of government as eminently necessary.

I was having none of it. As a high schooler with a conservative upbringing (thanks, Rush) and a contrarian instinct, I observed the elite consensus congealing in favor of a larger state in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. I found this consensus repulsive. And Krugman exemplified it. The Cincinnati Enquirer, my hometown newspaper at the time, for some reason reprinted his column. I regularly read it and virtually always disagreed with it. Sometimes vocally: Friends of mine who knew me then still gently mock me for the shouts of “You’re wrong!” they would sometimes hear from me as I read him. I knew he was wrong because, in true contrarian fashion, I had chosen a period of low regard for free markets to begin turning to such luminaries as Milton Friedman (and National Review, which I first began reading around this time).

So I owe Paul Krugman a debt of gratitude. Had I not read him at a formative age politically, I may never have felt motivated to look to higher authorities possessing truer principles. It’s certainly a backhanded influence, one that would probably horrify him. But he is stuck with credit for it all the same. Thanks, Paul. You’re still wrong, though.