When humanities academics -- historians, political scientists, sociologists -- comment on markets, they almost never mention their positive side.
Instead, they tell us markets are so dreadful, volatile, unfair, inequitable, overrun with greed and destruction. Only more controls, they insist, can solve problems involving markets.
Not that such analysts sully themselves with anything resembling careful analysis of the evidence. For example, discussions of the alleged importance of industry policy and protection in the (now somewhat tarnished) East Asian miracle regularly failed to note that the two most successful East Asian economies -- Singapore and Hong Kong -- are free-trade states.
Similarly, claims about the "need" for capital controls fail to grapple with the fact that the most regulated of the major OECD capital markets -- the Japanese -- is also the most corrupt and problem-ridden.
The current problems of Russia -- where 70 years of communism left a society without a properly functioning legal system, judiciary, defined property rights or any real experience of the institutions, practices and conventions of commercial society we take for granted (except for the distorted mirror of the black market) -- are blamed on "capitalism", when the problem is the lack of capitalism.
The knowledge elite equates economic problems with "market failures" even when the problems are actually -- as in Thailand, Indonesia and Korea -- the result of bad public policy. Where economic success occurs, the education elite thanks government intervention.
Government failure is not accepted as evidence for problems in political processes. North Korea constantly teeters on the edge of starvation; Castro took the second richest nation in Latin America and turned it into the third poorest; 70 years of Soviet socialism created the only industrial society ever with a declining life expectancy. All such failures are glossed over or ignored.
It is the poor intellectual quality and selective attention which is most revealing: particularly when it comes to explaining the failure of the command economies. After all, the "Third Way" only exists because the "Second Way" of collectivism has so conspicuously and universally disappointed.
The language of politics is an abbreviated language. It deals in intentions and resources allocated, not in effects; because intentions and resource levels are easy to grasp and most of us have neither the time, the incentives nor the information to examine effects seriously. And since the intentions are so "noble" those who complain about the effects are easily categorised as heartless, simple-minded, blaming the victim, prejudiced, unconcerned with social justice, or (worst of all) economists.
The ongoing chorus of denunciation of "economic rationalism" encapsulates these anti-market sentiments. The economic reform program is about removal of regulatory privilege and forcing people to justify their claims on resources. As people like their privileges, and resent having to justify their use of resources, naturally economic reform is denounced; though not in those terms, of course.
Those who sneer about "worship" of the market and economics as a pseudo-religion hide their own their own extraordinary faith in state action, public ownership (such as of Telstra) and politics generally.
Ironically, the anti-market knowledge elite is actually winning its war on the market. Taxes are at record peacetime levels as a share of GDP. More people are dependent on the (coercive) transfers of the state -- rather than the consensual exchanges of markets and families -- for their income than ever before in our history. Each year, the Commonwealth Parliament passes eight to nine times the number of pages of legislation it did in the 1950s.
The fundamental appeal of anti-market sentiment to the knowledge elite is that the claim that markets should be controlled translates as "people should be told what to do".
And who is going to do the telling? Whose schemes are to be implemented? The people who know so much more than anyone else, of course! One can also detect envy for the power over human affairs the vulgarians of the market place are taken to have and envy of the public policy influence (and consultancy fees) of economists. In such circumstances, belief in politics uber alles can be a great boost to their self-image as wise moral legislators who just know how we should be told to behave by the state.
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