Dear ,
Investor and author Doug Casey recently wrote that most economists “are political apologists masquerading as economists.” He says they are like witch doctors pretending to be neurosurgeons. They “prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.” The discipline of economics, says Casey, “has been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give scientific justification for things the government wants to do.”
“Intellectuals” have always been a key ingredient in the glue that holds government tyranny together, supplying endless rationales and excuses for less freedom and more government, Murray Rothbard wrote in Anatomy of the State. Among the most prominent government apologists, said F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom, are economists, historians, and legal scholars.
This of course is nothing new. In his famous 1949 treatise, Human Action, Ludwig von Mises explained that statist bias already pervaded academe, and not just the discipline of economics. “Tax-supported universities are under the sway of the party in power,” wrote Mises. “The authorities try to appoint only professors who are ready to advance the ideas of which they themselves approve.” The “first duty of the university,” therefore, is “to sell the official [government] social philosophy to the rising generation.” Universities thus have no use for economists like Austrian School economists. They do have a use for Doug Casey’s “economic witch doctors,” who are rewarded handsomely for their masquerades of bamboozlement—given government jobs (at the Fed, for example), government grants, appointments to prestigious university positions, media appearances, book deals, etc.
By 1949 most universities had already become “nurseries for socialism,” wrote Mises, where “the majority of the students espouse . . . the interventionist panaceas recommended by their professors.” At the same time there have always been young people “who are keen enough to see through the fallacies of interventionism.” In other words, there has always been a remnant that, despite being a minority, has used the power of ideas—especially the ideas of free-market, Austrian School economics—to fend off the forces of government tyranny and socialist economic devastation and corruption. It is because of his ideas that Mises was hunted by Nazis and reviled by the communists and all other varieties of socialists of his day. They understood that such ideas were their deadly enemies, especially in the hands of someone as brilliant as Mises.
Read the full letter here.
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