Jon,
It seems to me that we could also say that Krugman is using the good old red herring tactic of using an irrelevancy to draw the reader off the trail of the argument. He doesn’t want to deal with Mulligan’s criticism of Obama policies that lower incentives for employers to create new jobs, so he introduces a claim that perhaps some talk radio hosts have made, but is not relevant to Mulligan’s work. The careless leftist reader will leap to the conclusion that Paul the Magnificent has once again slain a free market dragon, when in fact he has run away from the fight.
