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."