uesday, June 15, 2010
Cobdenist Manchester School Corn Law Rant
How's that for a title?
I don't want to ruffle too much any well flounced feathers, but a few words now, here in mid June 2010, re some of these abstruse topics, seems not inapposite....
Americans have long been on a free trade, laissez faire, less government intervention is best, commercial and economic globalization bender.
Everyone has long looked, however, and especially now, to those very economists, those inimitable specialists, who first helped (along with the politicians) in the 30s and especially after WW II to set America on that bender, for guidance, about the emerging situation we all, and the rest of the world, face.
What does anyone now believe that the economists, virtually any of them, will now tell them, about their presuppositions? What explanations will they now give for the inexplicable mess?
Would they opine that they may have been wrong, or misguided, or myopic, or delusional, about the approach to political and economic policy inferred from their narrow special dull field?
No. That is not what one has been hearing from these paragons of scientific virtue; quite the opposite.
'Imperfect' markets was, for a long time, one of their puerile mantras.
Monetary policy is quite sufficient to direct the stultifera navis, they were wont to conclude.
They were relatively innocent, of the abundant research available from other fields, such as military history, or of the political and commercial directions some regimes were moving; when they did attend to it, mere 'free riders' they were usually called, by these doctrinaire pundits, as if this explained away the multifarious phenomena of economic rivalry, as mere evanescent aberrations, imperfect competition, which would resolve themselves naturally by market forces returning to equilibrium in good time.
What nonsense, on which to build a political or military policy, or one 'promoting the general welfare' of a nation state.
I don't want to ruffle too much any well flounced feathers, but a few words now, here in mid June 2010, re some of these abstruse topics, seems not inapposite....
Americans have long been on a free trade, laissez faire, less government intervention is best, commercial and economic globalization bender.
Everyone has long looked, however, and especially now, to those very economists, those inimitable specialists, who first helped (along with the politicians) in the 30s and especially after WW II to set America on that bender, for guidance, about the emerging situation we all, and the rest of the world, face.
What does anyone now believe that the economists, virtually any of them, will now tell them, about their presuppositions? What explanations will they now give for the inexplicable mess?
Would they opine that they may have been wrong, or misguided, or myopic, or delusional, about the approach to political and economic policy inferred from their narrow special dull field?
No. That is not what one has been hearing from these paragons of scientific virtue; quite the opposite.
'Imperfect' markets was, for a long time, one of their puerile mantras.
Monetary policy is quite sufficient to direct the stultifera navis, they were wont to conclude.
They were relatively innocent, of the abundant research available from other fields, such as military history, or of the political and commercial directions some regimes were moving; when they did attend to it, mere 'free riders' they were usually called, by these doctrinaire pundits, as if this explained away the multifarious phenomena of economic rivalry, as mere evanescent aberrations, imperfect competition, which would resolve themselves naturally by market forces returning to equilibrium in good time.
What nonsense, on which to build a political or military policy, or one 'promoting the general welfare' of a nation state.
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