Paul Krugman has just announced that he is retiring as a columnist for the New York Times, where he was a reliable mouthpiece for economic intervention to expand the government’s power.

Economics professor William Anderson has written a sharp piece that takes the measure of Krugman.

He writes, “After spending 25 years as a columnist for the New York Times, Paul Krugman is finally retiring from that position—25 years too late, if one wishes to be honest. It is hard to measure the influence he had from that perch, but his columns surely were the deciding factor in his winning the Nobel in economics in 2008 after eight years of lambasting the George W. Bush administration.”

A disciple of Keynes, Krugman pushed for big government spending projects to “stimulate” the economy, giving no thought to the opportunity costs of all that spending. At least, however, he understood that tariffs are damaging. Anderson continues:

To his credit, Krugman did condemn the tariffs proposed by President-elect Donald Trump, but the truth is that he never has truly understood economics from the praxeological vantage point, nor has he ever been interested in seeing economics in that way. An economy, to Krugman, is a series of aggregates—consisting of homogeneous labor, natural resources, and capital—all to be manipulated by government agencies and central banks. The idea that demand springs from what we produce in a market economy was anathema to Krugman, who hated that economic doctrine so much that he referred to Jean-Baptiste Say as a “cockroach.”

Krugman frequently substituted invective for argument, assuming that he could carry the day based on just his lustrous credentials. No doubt he will be replaced by another apologist for big government. Anderson concludes, “Paul Krugman can retire peacefully, knowing that he has sanitized the use of raw state power in place of mutually-beneficial exchange that characterizes the marketplace.”