Philip Pilkington — Marginalist Microeconomics: The Path to Totalitarian Tyranny

Fortunately the totalitarian tendencies of marginalist microeconomics are kept in check in Western democracies to a very large extent. But one can imagine the social chaos that might be unleashed were a government ever to get in that allowed to microeconomists free-reign. Given the opportunity — especially by an authoritarian government — their attempts to impose their bizarre notions of rationality on the population could quickly turn into something out of a dystopian science-fiction novel.

Of course, the microeconomists will say that I’m misrepresenting them and that their doctrines are based on the idea of individual choice. This is entirely untrue, of course, because, as I have written before, in marginalist economics people are nothing but calculating machines — not actual decision-makers. But then, tyranny always comes selling itself as the path to greater freedom, now doesn’t it? And the harbingers of this tyranny often come wearing the frocks of the scientist and insisting on the ‘total objectivity’ of the evils that they do.

Marginalism is another name for neoclassical economics. It pretends to be descriptive, but it is normative and prescriptive — not so much science as ethics, and bad ethics at that, where "efficiency" is the criterion of good. The way to efficiency is by reducing waste, and "waste" is defined as anything that does not meet the criterion of being "rational" in terms of pursuit of maximum utility.

Fixing the Economists
Marginalist Microeconomics: The Path to Totalitarian Tyranny
Philip Pilkington