One thing that strikes me about this Gruber that's not mentioned in his Wikipedia biography: I have a hunch that in his youth he might have been a Red Diaper Baby, and possibly was familiar with Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals."
One wonders just what Herr Gruber is a perfesser of, exactly? I suspect it ain’t physics or something intellectually disciplined. Some lefty political mumbo jumbo I would expect.
You are probably right about that.
His “world congress” bio:
Dr. Jonathan Gruber is a Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the Director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a Research Associate. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Health Economics.
Dr. Gruber received his B.S. in Economics from MIT, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard. He has received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a FIRST award from the National Institute on Aging, and the Kenneth Arrow Award for the Best Paper in Health Economics in 1994. He was also one of 15 scientists nationwide to receive the Presidential Faculty Fellow Award from the National Science Foundation in 1995. Dr. Gruber was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 2005, and in 2006 he received the American Society of Health Economists Inaugural Medal for the best health economist in the nation aged 40 and under. Dr. Gruber’s research focuses on the areas of public finance and health economics. He has published more than 125 research articles, has edited six research volumes, and is the author of Public Finance and Public Policy, a leading undergraduate text.
During the 1997-1998 academic year, Dr. Gruber was on leave as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department. He was a key architect of Massachusetts’ ambitious health reform effort, and in 2006 became an inaugural member of the Health Connector Board, the main implementing body for that effort. In that year, he was named the 19th most powerful person in health care in the United States by Modern Healthcare Magazine. During the 2008 he was a consultant to the Clinton, Edwards and Obama Presidential campaigns and was called by the Washington Post, “possibly the [Democratic] party’s most influential health-care expert.”
http://www.worldcongress.com/speakerBio.cfm?speakerID=6468
This is how liberal elites feel... watch HBO’s Bill Maher for five minutes and you’ll see the same smug superior attitude. These folks are assh*les...