Is it hard to notice that this is a shockingly unfair point? Comparing one's maximum to the other's minimum?

This isn't the issue. The issue is that Cuba is in no way a conventional economy. Never mind that it's nominally socialist - it's been aggressively ostracised by its nearest and largest physical trading partner. So saying that Cuba somehow proves the limits of redistribution is a non-point.

But it's a revealing non-point. The fact that Krugman can write this, and - presumably - actually believe it, says a lot about his assumptions and the shallowness of his political insight.

This may be true, but is rather too flippant a statement to be accepted without a convincing demonstration. Otherwise it's just a slogan.

You mean apart from the British Empire, the age of colonialism in the rest of Europe, the East India Company, the oil and resource wars of the 20th century, and the US-sponsored coups throughout Asia and South America in the late 20th century?

Do I need to explain how all of these were contrived, or at least packaged as, the inevitable rational actions of nominally free markets?

You seem entirely too awed by Krugman to accept that in his environment anything to the left of a centrist solution like Sweden's is considered suicidally self-destructive by definition.

It's good that he's not a psycho-Randian like most of the Chicago altar boys, but that doesn't mean he's pushing the Overton window as hard as it needs to be pushed in the US.

The market economy is a system for organizing activity -- a pretty good system most of the time, though not always -- with no special moral significance. The rich don't necessarily deserve their wealth, and the poor certainly don't deserve their poverty; nonetheless, we accept a system with considerable inequality because systems without any inequality don't work.

Sweden works, Cuba doesn't.

This pretty clearly implies tht the amount of equality in Cuba is too great for the economy to work. And Krugman ignores the massive punitive behavior of Cuba's former trading partner to the north. Krugman also ignores that our economic system deliberately excludes moral considerations while having insisted on remaking the society to serve the needs of the economy. That the way in which this has been done is necessary is an underlying assumption, not a demonstrated fact. Refusing to grant the assumptions of Classical and Neo-Classical Economics has come to constitute an act of opting out of the discussion, in a Rawlsian consensus approach. That is the problem, especially when it has repeatedly been shown that the Classical and Neo-Classical approaches have major problems and little predictive power. The Rawlsian consensus has come to exclude all who do not drink the Cool Aid.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."