What Has the ABQ Journal Done with Winthrop Quigley?

In just the last few weeks, Winthrop Quigley, the writer of the Albuquerque Journal's Money & Medicine column, has made a sharp break with progressive fallacy and economic fantasy and turned sharply toward economic reality and freedom.

Here [sorry, subscription required] is today's column in the Journal's Business Outlook, but the latest example of this trend.  Only the last 6 of 33 column inches sounds at all like the old progressivist Quigley.


In the first 80% Quigley's alter ego writes of Don Schrader, "the small, long-haired, middle-aged guy who walks around downtown and the university area in skimpy cutoffs and little else" and who "makes sure that he never earns enough income to pay taxes because he refuses to help finance war."  The Quigley impostor reports that Schrader claims to live on $4,000 a year, and then writes this stunner:

I'm reminded of David Thoreau, who managed to live an honorable and frugal life on Walden Pond because the wealthy Emerson made sure he had the resources to do it.

Our Quigley's alternate personality then writes something I wish I had written myself:

Schrader lives on raw vegetables year round. Affordable raw vegetables are available year round because corporate farms in California and Mexico produce them in the winter. They can produce them because they have access to capital and markets. They get lines of credit from banks, and they hedge against price fluctuations by trading in futures markets. They can deliver produce because other companies have built fleets of trucks and railroad trains to meet demand for transport. Those fleets can move because other companies have drilled for oil, financed by equity investors and lenders who come together in global financial exchanges like Wall Street. The trucks move on roads built by other companies that bought heavy equipment from yet other companies. The roads were paid for by bonds issued in financial markets. The interest on those bonds was paid by taxpayers most of whom earn considerably more than $4,000 a year.

The last six column inches?  Ah.  The good hearted Winthrop professes his admiration for the saintly Schrader, and for the occupations of financial districts everywhere, for which the Schrader story has served as a useful allegorical introduction, saying that "They are a much-needed Greek chorus, warning the affluent and comfortable that we are the authors of our own doom."

It's quite impossible to believe that the same person is writing the column today who wrote it through the Obamacare battle.  I am tempted to believe that the Rio Grande Foundation has kidnapped Quigley and that my esteemed friend Paul Gessing is writing the columns for him, allowing Quigley only time enough before deadline to pen a few lines of apologia.

We must set out immediately to find those responsible and the person who is now writing under the Quigley byline ... and congratulate him on a job well started, if not yet completely done.