This is wonderful and true:
The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.
Joan Robinson, as quoted in Peter Bauer’s “Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion.”
I think many of us have this fuzzy, but comforting, tendency to lump economists in with mathematicians and by extension the “hard” side of university life. They are not reading poetry; they are not out in the wild participating in peyote ceremonies; they are not making pottery. No, they do MATH, and MATH IS REAL.
Thus when an economist pronounces something, people tend to take them seriously.
But the naked fact is that economics cannot, intrinsically, by definition, be divorced from politics. If you want to regulate, as an example, the stock market to achieve an economic end–market stability, for example–you intrinsically have to support a strong enough, intrusive enough police power of the State to make it happen.
Or take Keynes Fascist idea that the government should be able regulate all prices, and all capital flows in and out of the country: you have to have a very strong government in place to do that.
As I have said many times in many ways, there are essentially two types of economists, in my view: those who describe cause and effect relationships based upon historical experiments and logical analysis; and those who describe how things OUGHT to work, and who extrapolate backwards from their desired end point, in narratives which never touch the practical in any way.
Can economists be corrupted by political ends? Of course. Just look at the ubiquity of support for the plainly counter-scientific narrative of Anthropogenic Global Warming. There is no reason to dispute that many, many scientists find themselves in the position of publicly supporting this intellectually offensive attack on the very foundations of the scientific method. Nor is there any reason to grant such farcical ideas any credence because methods of incentivization and disincentivization have been used to effectively and widely for so long. Science is not a popularity contest.
Thus when I use terms like “Fabian”, I have actual referents in mind. It is an unassailable fact that large swathes of the men and women educating our children want one world government, and Socialists running it. This is easily enough documented–for example, in books like David Horowitz’s “The ProFessors”.
Such people breed tendencies in people who go into broadcast journalism, newspaper journalism, and ECONOMICS. Paul Krugman is not stupid: he is an advocate of policies designed to end America’s dominant, peace-keeping role in the world, which in the Never-Never land these fairies live in will result in the improvement in the lots of unspecified humans somewhere.
Laying this idea next to the actual history of such ideas, of course, plainly shows that where such ideas are proposed and idiocy is not present, evil is.