When a government official claims that it’s unethical to disagree, that’s bad. But when a government official claims that it’s illegal to try to repeal a law, that’s horrible.

With the glaring failure to predict even the possibility – much less the circumstance – of the recent Crash and with the even more foreseeable failure of its tired old, rehashed nostrums of ending the slump by means of an inequitable programme of corporate welfare, inflationary ‘unorthodoxy’, and the unleashing of the debt-spewing monster of the state to gorge itself upon such things as individuals and private concerns no longer care to consume, it should hardly be controversial to assert that mainstream macroeconomics – and the reputations of the many panderers to power who practice it – are equally broken.

An efficient man makes it his rule to accept the world as he finds it, and to work out his own salvation with a light heart. His joy is in effort, in work, in progress. A difficulty overcome, a riddle solved, an enemy vanquished, a fact proved, an error destroyed; in such things he finds the meaning of life and surcease from its sorrows.

But the inefficient man, unable by his own hand and brain to cope with the conditions which beset him, seeks refuge, soon or late, in the notion that the world is out of joint. Sometimes he concludes, finally, that the horrors of existence are irremediable, and then he is ripe for religion, with its promises of repayment in some gaseous paradise beyond the grave. At other times he arrives at the idea that all would be well if there were some abysmal reconstruction of the scheme of things—some new deal of the cards, with four aces pushed his way. When this madness falls upon him, he gropes about for a ready guide to the Utopia that arises nebulously in his brain. And thus it is that discontented, ignorant, helpless men subscribe to the poetical fancies of imaginative dreamers…

The great objections to Socialism, as a philosophy, are that it encourages and aggravates this feeling of martyrdom which burns in the breasts of all such incompetents, and that it inflames them, at the same time, with the idea that their discomfort is due, not to the operation of natural laws, but to the deliberate and devilish cruelty of their betters. Your true Socialist is firmly convinced, before everything else, that his personal existence is of vast and undoubted value to the world, and that the world, if it were not a swindling felon, would reward him handsomely for remaining alive.

Too many people, including otherwise very smart people, believe in secular magic. They believe that words written on paper by people, each of whom receive a majority of votes on certain days of the year of adult citizens living in certain geographic areas, and who utter ritualistic pronouncements under marble domes in buildings conventionally called “capitols,” are somehow endowed with greater understanding of society’s complexities and with superhuman capacities to care about the welfare of strangers. These priests preach devotion, dedication, and sacrifice to the One True State (your own government), even while each recognizes that legitimate disputes about the details of the dogma divide various cliques of the secular clergy. When they speak and act in their official roles, they expect – usually correctly – that the laity pay their words special heed as if these words have extraordinary power.

One of the many dangerous delusions that too many people suffer today is the delusion that tells them that as long as ‘their’ government is democratically elected – and as long as ‘their’ government largely refrains from using brutality openly and of the sort that was routine in 20th-century hells such as the U.S.S.R. and East Germany – then ‘their’ government is largely civilized and an agent for Good for The People.

One may ask why, as of August, 2008, they had absolutely no clue what was coming. This is a powerful witness to the failures of neo-Keynesian, neo-Classical, and Monetarist economic theory. It is also a testimony to groupthink and institutional hubris. Perhaps if they had heard of Mises and Hayek, things may have turned out better for them. Accept conventional wisdom at your peril.

Just as every verbal ejaculation by every New Age therapist professing the healing powers of crystals and stones need not be addressed by serious physicians, every shriek by pundits on the economy who know absolutely nothing about the economy need not be addressed by serious economists.