George Akerlof is becoming a household name. Well, sort of. The 2001 Nobel Prize Laureate for Economics, who teaches at Berkeley, was recently cited by Al Gore in his rousing speech to MoveOn at New York University.

Just a few days earlier, Akerlof had been quoted in the German magazine Der Spiegel condemning the Bush Administration as “the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history.” These words catapulted Akerlof to the top of Google for a few days but it’s worth reading the full text of his illuminating interview with the German weekly for a look at how horrified another longtime member of the American establishment is at the extremism of the Bush Administration.

“This is not normal government policy,” Akerlof says. “Now is the time for [American] people to engage in civil disobedience. I think it’s time to protest as much as possible.” When asked about the deficit, one of his many areas of professional expertise, Akerlof replied that with the current tax cuts, a realistic estimate would be in excess of six trillion, far more than the Administration is predicting.

So is the government just bad at doing the math? “The government is not really telling the truth to the American people…Past administrations from the time of Alexander Hamilton have, on the average, run responsible budgetary policies. What we have here is a form of looting.”