Factional Politics: Includes Furthering The Myth That Economics Is Ever Separated From Political Policy

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson; hat tip to Chuck Spinney & Tom Hickey)



There IS no pure economics, only political-economics, aka, factional policy or, rarely, aggregate-policy.

Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare

Gareth Porter on the true history of Iran’s nuclear program

By Andrew Cockburn, Harpers

The emerging evidence about rampant & pervasive myths in both the social sciences and ongoing policy processes should trigger us to simply close down all economics departments ... or at least re-label them as "propaganda" departments set up purely to serve the interests of existing political campaign donors.

The whole premise of economics is to "study the human mind stripped of culture" ?

Impossible. Anyone saying that has never cracked open a biology-101 textbook, or even read many newspapers. At least not honestly.

Just google "feral children." People raised isolated from culture are NOT capable of developing what we think of as the human mind. For Pete's sake!

And orthodox macro-economics purports to study group behavior stripped of aggregate policy? Look, just quit bullshitting me. We are not an aggregate of feral-hermits or feral-communities. Aggregates operating isolated from Public Purpose are also NOT capable of developing what we would consider a group-brain or group intelligence. None of us is as smart as all of us, right?

Unless you flat out lie about the myth of Central Planning, while persisting in paying lip service to democracy.  (All Central Planning is equally fatal? It's just that Upper Class Central Planning is less fatal than than others? Is that the rationalization, among porkers feeding at the common trough?)

To me, them's fightin' words. It's past time to drive the stale numbskulls, rascals & idiot savants out of the temple of Democracy. The only survival option is to save them from themselves .... again. Anything less is long past boring. Their act was pathetic from the start. In fact, it's never been clear why an electorate this smart ever had any interest in the trap of gang, er "party" politics from the beginning.

It's amazing to consider how much ideological momentum it took to keep so much common-sense logic bottled up for hundreds of years, in so many fields.

It's simultaneously fascinating, frustrating & heartening to see these 3 articles in print, precisely for the rarity of seeing simple, straightforward, real thought actually slip through both "scientific," "political" and "journalism" industries.

It's nice to know that that can still happen - even if by accident. :) Yet it is also sobering.

One conclusion? Whenever something starts to be catalogued and systematized, then functionally adaptive wormholes through that catalogue-space begin to be denied, through sheer structural momentum alone.

Such institutional denial can have a strong effect on the herd minded.

Yet for evolution to continue, every herd must keep both it's conservatives and progressives operating safely within - not outside - adaptive tolerance limits. If all of us are smarter than any subset of us, then we need ALL of ourselves, to find ways to utilize ALL of our distributed talents, ALL of the time.

So does that mean having so-called conservatives sitting back and helping to CAREFULLY select from all the insanely great inventions generated by so-called progressives? Ya think? 

What on Earth is there to squabble about? We're staring at an expanding smorgasbord - one that can't run out, only grow, unless we knock the tables over while brawling - and it feels awfully stupid to waste time arguing about which dishes to taste first. As many as possible, ASAP? Then just share feedback, also ASAP, about how all the endless options taste? 

And then? Just follow the feedback momentum, instead of trying to grab some arbitrary option, and hoard it? This ain't rocket science. Hoarding slowly growing static assets instead of leveraging exponentially growing dynamic assets is a strategy of extreme ignorance. We're better than that ..... right?