I know the narrative is foreign to many, damnwell discomforting or infuriating to others.
But when certain people like myself using certain economic assumptions can see government policies implemented, predict their outcomes, and have those outcomes consistently become true like clockwork …
Well it either proves how the world really works is in line with said model, or we spend our lives in rationalizations and denial. For me, the only thing more frustrating than having to live a life of “I told you so’s” is to also correctly predict the response to be “nuh uh!”
Keynes has been debunked in spades, the most recent coffin nail being Greece’s fall and recovery. Krugman’s Nobel Prize may as well be a dunce hat. And yet he insists the facts are the opposite of what they are and the conclusion is an empty gong. I’m still convinced he must be a shill for global banking interests, the only ones who win in the game he commands we all play.
But we don’t need to bet on such predictions. The maze has been navigated a thousand times in three thousand years, and we KNOW where the exists are to various paths.
For example, reviving Leftist views of the world is like advertising a restaurant that closed in 1991 after too many people got food poisoning. Is our memory really that bad, or didn’t we bother connecting the easily-numbered dots the first time?
Milton Friedman says it all, yet we don’t apply it enough: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
If we took this to heart, economic debate wouldn’t be over, but whole schools of thought would rightfully shut their doors. This isn’t about pluralism of ideologies, but intellectual honesty versus stubbornness. If we want to keep sitting at the adult table,we must all be courageous enough to accept there are things as disproven notions, reject them, and move on.