From the most recent of Captain Capitalism’s rantings and tirades of a frustrated economist:
As I’ve aged and become more experienced, I start to realize just how much of a fraudulent study economics is. Not because economics isn’t important. Not because there isn’t some serious important issues that economics addresses. It’s not even that the secret to riches for all does lay within economics (it does and it is what ultimately drives my eternal passion for economics). But rather how the field’s self-proclaimed experts have turned it into nothing more than self-serving political bunk. It is no longer simply about the “efficient allocation of resources” or “maximizing the wealth of people” but rather idiotic concepts like the Phillips Curve, running advanced (and ultimately flawed) economic models, fretting about things like the liquidity trap, drawing idiotic foursquare games for “prisoner theory,” and the hundreds of other temporary and fleeting relationships that have been observed in the past 60 years that the economist academians trump out and treat it as if it were a real science when in reality it is a constantly changing art as it is human psychology that underpins it all.
The unfortunate fact is that economics has gone from amongst the social sciences to join the non-science of socialist religious observance. So if I may continue to quote:
If you truly want to understand (or disprove some things about) economics, I argue going backwards. I argue going outside the study. I argue applying some basic, simple logic and factual testing to see if this increasingly complex “field” even makes sense anymore or is merely a circle jerk for wanna-be mathematicians just like religion is for most clergymen.
For example, a simple question I have, is WWII the only data point the Keynesianism can point to in history where it worked? And if so, why the hell did we base the entire western world’s governance and economic policies on something so ill-tested?
Another, precisely whose brilliant idea was it that government should intervene period? Who precisely died and made you economic king giving you authority to “provide incentives” or “boost demand curves?” Since when was it the government’s and politician’s responsibility to MANAGE people? (I’ll tell you who. One sick, power-hungry, totalitarian, that’s who).
And though I am certainly very political, shouldn’t we be concerned when the likes of Krugman call Republicans racist or we start claiming that 100% purely politically moves such as “diversity” have some kind of inherent value? i.e. – why is politics allowed to enter, let alone corrupt economists and their views?
I could go on, but these simple questions are identical to the basic, logical questions we need to ask (but aren’t allowed to) of religion.
Economics once really was useful and enlightening but you’d have to go back to its golden age, from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill. Since the mathematicians took over sometimes around the 1870s, and economics became social-physics, it has been generally downhill. I read journals now as part of my penance, but it is mostly non-answers to unimportant questions. Meanwhile, not only do politicians invent whatever economic theory they need to suit their wishes, so too do their economic advisors. Economics was once a discipline. You obeyed its rules or your economy would unravel. There is only just that last small bit of Adam Smith-John Stuart Mill left to keep our economies from completely crashing, but even that small bit is eroding fast. Economics has for the most part gone back to being Mercantilist trash.
Law of Markets 