There seems to be a lot of angst as to why standard macroeconomics ignores the government in its analysis. Or, rather, that when the government slips into the picture it is almost invariably in the form of an evil presence mucking up the sweet operation of market magic and thus stalling us all on our way to the happy place economists love to call equilibrium.
This is quite simple to answer: economists of the standard ilk are opposed to democracy.
Why?
Because, since its very inception, modern economics in most its forms has been the study of the private economy...
Once this hostility to the state found its way into the bedrock of economics it stayed there. Moreover this anti-government perspective, that colored all subsequent economic theorizing, attracted to it analysts who were like minded. We thus find a positive feedback between the anti-state foundations of economics and those who then carry the theory forward.
In contemporary terms this has profound consequences. One of which, as I mentioned at the beginning, is that standard economists are openly and brazenly opposed to democracy.
Why?
Because, apparently unbeknownst to economists, the social and political milieu within which the economy sits, has undergone radical change since the 1700’s. We nowadays have far fewer autocratic monarchs prone to meddling in popular affairs, and significantly more democracies where the people who are the erstwhile agents of the economy are also the agents of self-government. Regular people, unlike economists, admit of more than one social domain. They operate in many all at once. The notion that we the people actually govern ourselves has been born and adopted around the world. But it hasn’t seeped into economic theory, where the government is resolutely presented as a hostile and incompetent force just as it was two hundred or more years ago.What this implies is that economics is stuck in the 18th and 19th centuries while the rest of the knowledge world has moved on for the most part. This begs the question why? Could it be that business is naturally adverse to government, which it views as a competitor, on one hand, and a potential tool in the hands of a rabble under popular sovereignty?
The Radford Free Press
Natural Liberty or Democracy?
Peter Radford
Peter Radford
It makes perfect sense to me. After the evolution away from aristocracy to democracy, TPTB needed another method for social control other than direct force. Economists are perfectly suited propagandists for TPTB. They are widely believed to be "scientists" and "experts" by the public and thus their proclamations are given gravitas. Think about how widespread and critical to economist propaganda the myth about the damage that "money-financed" deficits cause. This point is really the crux of the MMT paradigm conversion problem. Its fairly easy to convince or at least get people to acknowledge the fact that the Govt can print money. And this one fact alone should put the whole "national debt" issue to rest, because people can intuitively accept and understand that debt is not an issue if you can print money. So why is the national debt issue still so prominent? Precisely because people have been brainwashed into accepting as obvious, that "printing money" equals inflation, hyperinflation, and dishonor. I've hit this roadblock so many times during my efforts at explaining the reality of fiat currency operations to people, maybe more than any other. All the effort of explaining the operational details about why reserve accounts and securities accounts are fundamentally similar and thus having more of one or less of the other is largely irrelevant to inflation fails against the simple intuition that "printing money=bad". No amount of explaining how printing money is not inherently inflationary as long as there is spare capacity in the economy can overcome the moral revulsion that "deficits" and "Debt" effect in people. Personally, I'm not hopeful. Too deep and wide is the propaganda against social action via Govt fiscal policy to defeat at the moment. Its going to take another catastrophe the size of the Great depression and WWII, but I cant see that happening. Without an equally effective propaganda machine of our own will the truth ever be widely know. But without money there can be no propaganda machine. Money, as usual, is the problem. Whoever came up with the notion that money is "neutral" and "just a veil" deserves a raise because thats a good one. Money is everything. Its what separates "us" from "them", .1% and the 99.9%.
ReplyDelete"Without an equally effective propaganda machine of our own will the truth ever be widely know."
ReplyDeleteshould be
"Without an equally effective propaganda machine of our own the truth will never be widely known."
Stupid proofreader.
There's also the class thing. Economics attracts those who believe in a Guardian Class - a set of Solomon like wise men who can pull the levers at precisely the right moment to make sure the celestial forces of the economy always line up.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course they believe it should be them doing the lever pulling in perpetuity.
Particularly on the left there is always a desire for a 'higher power' to appeal to beyond a sovereign elected government. Something that can stop a government when the people 'pick the wrong one'.
Its libertarianism. ... this started way before the 18th century.... you have to go back to when the empire dissolved and the vestigial nations monarchies started to use mass measures of the 3 metals vs the former empire's currency.
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