“Most economists are political apologists masquerading as economists,” wrote Doug Casey in one of his columns.
“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 power.”
Moreover, wrote Casey, “The field of economics has been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give a scientific justification for things the government wants to do.”
This of course is not a new development. Ludwig von Mises was calling the universities of his day “nurseries of socialism” but, thankfully, there is always a remnant of students who resist the statist brainwashing. The above quote about concocted “scientific” justifications for interventionism and socialism, by the way, sounds like a precise definition of Keynes’s General Theory.
Casey’s sound advice is that to be a good citizen one needs to “become your own economist.” Don’t rely on the state’s mouthpieces in the “media” or even academe for your economic knowledge. Educate yourself to some degree; it doesn’t take a university degree. Indeed, everything we do at the Mises Institute is geared toward helping anyone anywhere to become their own economist (preferably Austrian School and not Keynesian or Post Keynesian!) and avoid being bamboozled by the state and its court historian economists.
Mises never joined the American Economic Association, the association of academic economists founded in the 1880s. The association’s founding document provides a clue as to why. “The state is an educational and ethical agency whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress,” the document purred. “The doctrine of laissez faire,” on the other hand, “is unsafe in politics and unsound in morals,” said the statist moral scolds who founded the American Economic Association.
There are exceptions, the Austrian School economists being the most prominent, but the majority of academic economists view themselves as advisors or potential advisors to the state. They are Rothbard’s “court historians” with degrees in economics instead of history. The role that they serve is the same as all “intellectuals” in our almost 100 percent state-funded universities. As Rothbard put it: “The majority [of the electorate] must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise, and at least inevitable. Promoting this ideology . . . is the vital task of the ‘intellectuals.’” In return, the “intellectuals” are given government jobs, grants, placement at prestigious universities, book deals, and myriad other political payoffs. (Mises wrote that history, law, and economics are the disciplines most widely used to bamboozle the public about the supposedly good, wise, and inevitable state).
Hellbound and Down 