The Anti-Krugman Libertarians On The High Seas

For one week on the Celebrity Solstice, listeners of a podcast devoted to rebutting the Nobel Prize-winning economist get to be with their own kind.

- Lizzie O’Leary

A cruise ship, by its very nature, is a floating monument to capitalism. Thousands of passengers are paying thousands of dollars for the chance to be upsold. Special dinner? Excursion ashore? Botox? All available for a price. Cruises offer distinct fare classes, staff primed to cater to any impulse, and all-day ice cream buffets.

This particular ship, the Celebrity Solstice, bound for Alaska’s Inside Passage, holds about 2,800 patrons and looks like the offspring of a jet-age airport and a Las Vegas casino, lightly dosed on acid. Up in the top-floor Sky Observation Lounge, 111 passengers, all varying flavors of libertarian, are assembled for the fourth annual Contra Krugman Cruise, a weeklong meetup for like-minded listeners of the eponymous podcast. As its moniker implies, the show is dedicated to rebutting the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s weekly New York Times column. Its hosts, Tom Woods and Bob Murphy, dissect Keynesian dogma and revel in finding reversals in Krugman’s positions and in plain old partisanship.