Showing posts sorted by date for query religion. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query religion. Sort by relevance Show all posts

November 4, 2026

Occasional X: The foul spirit of political economics (CDXXX)

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August 26, 2026

Occasional X: The foul spirit of political economics (CCCLIV)

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March 8, 2026

Occasional X: Clueless economists / Breakdown (XXIII)

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November 8, 2025

Occasional X: Clueless economists / Science (CCXVIII)

 
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March 6, 2025

Occasional X: Religion, science, fake science, economics (II)

 

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August 24, 2023

Occasional Xs: The foul spirit of political economics (XXXVII)

 
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May 19, 2023

Key Issues: Methodology ― from anything-goes to rien-ne-va-plus

Economics is a perplexing subject. Though I have spent the better part of my academic career thinking about its aims and methods, I have never been confident that I or anyone else for that matter really understand its cognitive status. ... Without assurance about the cognitive status of the theory, there is no basis of confidence in it. (Rosenberg, 1994, pp. 216-217)
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Now, the doubts about the explanatory relevance of general equilibrium theory suggest that it cannot explain choice within constraints. That is, so to speak, how the problem of justifying general equilibrium theory starts. (Rosenberg, 1994, p. 221)

The great contradiction revealed is as follows: one of the theory's greatest strength – its claim to deduce significant results from very general hypotheses about the behavior of economic agents – turns out to be its greatest weakness. (Ingrao and Israel, 1990, p. 364)

To the extent that they [alternative theories] trade in the preferences and expectations of individuals, they will do no better than neoclassical economics. (Rosenberg, 1994, p. 233)

By having a vague theory it is possible to get either result. ... It is usually said when this is pointed out, ‘When you are dealing with psychological matters things can't be defined so precisely’. Yes, but then you cannot claim to know anything about it. (Feynman, 1992, p. 159)

If we ask, ‘What is the most adequate model of behaviour for economics?’ we implicitly assume that economics actually needs a model of behaviour; hence, we already assume psychologism of a kind. (Hudík, 2011, p. 147)
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In fact, it has not been such a good idea to organize economic theory around a model of behavior.
 The scientific method has rather narrow limits, especially in dealing with human behavior and social phenomena. (Knight, 1921, p. 144)

...  there has been no progress in developing laws of human behavior for the last twenty-five hundred years. (Hausman, 1992, p. 320), (Rosenberg, 1980, pp. 2-3)

... theorists all over the world have become aware that anything based on this mock-up [GET] is unlikely to fly, ...  (Hahn, 1981, p. 1036)

The moral of the story is simply this: it takes a new theory, and not just the destructive exposure of assumptions or the collection of new facts, to beat an old theory. (Blaug, 1998, p. 703)
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What particular reality is described by a given theory can be ascertained only from that theory's axiomatic foundation. (Georgescu-Roegen, 1966, p. 361)

The process of axiomatic thought is then a method both for accreting and warranting knowledge claims, for those claims, if developed from independent and consistent axioms, themselves make strong claims on our attention and reason. (Weintraub, 2002, p. 87)
Axiomatization is indispensable because the methodological anything-goes mentality among economists is the proximate reason for the proto-scientific condition of conventional economics. Because of conceptual sloppiness, neither Orthodoxy nor Heterodoxy has a clear idea of the fundamental economic concepts of income and profit. Doing economics without a clear idea of income and profit is like doing physics without a clear idea of force and mass — it cannot possibly yield practical results, it has not, and it will not.
I think it is the lack of quite sharply defined concepts that the main difficulty lies, and not in any intrinsic difference between the fields of economics and other sciences. (von Neumann, quoted in Mirowski, 2002, p. 146 fn. 49)
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Since, therefore, it is vain to hope that truth can be arrived at, either in Political Economy or in any other department of the social science, while we look at the facts in the concrete, clothed in all the complexity with which nature has surrounded them, and endeavour to elicit a general law by a process of induction from a comparison of details; there remains no other method than the à priori one, or that of “abstract speculation.” (Mill, 2004, pp. 113-114)
Abstract speculation starts with clearly stated foundational propositions.
What are the propositions which may reasonably be received without proof? That there must be some such propositions all are agreed, since there cannot be an infinite series of proof, a chain suspended from nothing. (Mill, 2006, p. 746)
These propositions must relate to economic facts and not to human behavior.
The attempt is made to collect all the assumptions, which are needed, but no more, to form the apex of the system. They are usually called the ‘axioms’ (or ‘postulates’, or ‘primitive propositions’; no claim of truth is implied in the term ‘axiom’ as here used). The axioms are chosen in such a way that all the other statements belonging to the theoretical system can be derived from the axioms by purely logical or mathematical transformations. (Popper, 1980, p. 71)
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His [Adam Smith’s] method is always the method of Newton, which we have already seen applied to psychology and morals: to attain, by generalization, certain simple truths, from which it will be possible to reconstruct, synthetically, the world of experience. (Halévy, 1960, p. 100)

By sketchily copying Newton and by applying the axiomatic method to psychology and morals, Adam Smith set economics on the wrong track. There is nothing wrong with Newton or the axiomatic method, only with Smith's shallow scientific understanding, which still prevails among economists.

If one takes seriously what Popper says about falsifiability and the critical attitude, then the methodological practice of economics is not only mistaken, it is stupid and intellectually reprehensible. (Hausman, 1992, p. 275)

One hopes that the economics profession will not spend the whole twenty-first century waiting for a new Newton or Einstein of formal economics to emerge to shed a more powerful light in the current darkness. (Nelson, 2006, p. 227)
As a matter of fact, it is not a question of hope and waiting: As long as the darkness persists, economists have no mandate to speak in the name of science. At present, economic policy advice is, at bottom, the personal opinion of someone who cannot tell the difference between income and profit.


References
Blaug, M. (1998). Economic Theory in Retrospect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 5th edition.
Feynman, R. P. (1992). The Character of Physical Law. London: Penguin.
Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1966). Analytical Economics, chapter Economic Theory and Agrarian Economics, 359–397. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hahn, F. H. (1981). Review: A Neoclassical Analysis of Macroeconomic Policy. Economic Journal, 91(364): 1036–1039.
Halévy, E. (1960). The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism. Boston: Beacon Press.
Hausman, D. M. (1992). The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hudík, M. (2011). Why Economics is Not a Science of Behaviour. Journal of Economic Methodology, 18(2): 147–162.
Ingrao, B., and Israel, G. (1990). The Invisible Hand. Economic Equilibrium in the History of Science. Cambridge, London: MIT Press.
Knight, F. H. (1921). Traditional Economic Theory ― Discussion. American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 11(1): 143–147.
Mill, J. S. (2004). Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, chapter On the Definition of Political Economy; and the Method of Investigation Proper to It., 93–125. Electronic Classic Series PA 18202: Pennsylvania State University.
Mill, J. S. (2006). Principles of Political Economy With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, Vol. 3, Books III-V of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Mirowski, P. (2002). Machine Dreams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nelson, R. H. (2006). Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Popper, K. R. (1980). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London, Melbourne, Sydney: Hutchinson, 10th edition.
Rosenberg, A. (1980). Sociobiology and the Preemption of Social Science. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rosenberg, A. (1994). What is the Cognitive Status of Economic Theory? In R. E. Backhouse (Ed.), New Directions in Economic Methodology, 216–235. London, New York: Routledge.
Weintraub, E. R. (2002). How Economics Became a Mathematical Science. Durham, London: Duke University Press.


Related to Newton and Euclid


© 2013 EKH, except original quotes 
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May 5, 2022

Occasional Tweets: Economics • Communication • Disinfotainment (I)

#Economics
#FailedScience
#FakeScience
#MetaCommunication
#EconTwitter

#Economists have no idea how the #Economy works. So they communicate self-referentially about whether their communication is fine/toxic. ⇒


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Communication / Disinfotainment


For more about disinfotainment see AXECquery.
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December 10, 2021

Occasional Tweets: How to respect the separation between religion and science

 

For more about religion see AXECquery. 
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August 10, 2021

Occasional Tweets: Gossip economics (III)

 

 

 Gossip / Blather / Drivel

The history of economic thought proves that economists are unfit for science.

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July 16, 2021

Occasional Tweets: Religion, science, fake science, economics (I)

 


Economics / Religion

For more about economics imperialism see AXECorg.
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April 7, 2021

Economics ― still the "science" of the mentally impaired

Comment on Barkley Rosser on ‘The Death Of Yeshua Bin Yusuf’


Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT, and Pluralism are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, and materially/formally inconsistent. #1 Since Adam Smith, economics has been a failed/fake science.

The economist Barkley Rosser, though, is NOT worried that economics is proto-scientific garbage to this very day, he wonders instead how Jesus was probably called in Aramaic. And he wants to drive this point home: “Here is the hard core line from me: this guy really lived and most of what he said is for real.”

Needless to emphasize that historical research has established that the biblical Jesus never existed and that the Bible is a socio-pathological fabrication from the first letter to the last point. #2, #3, #4

The absurdity of the situation consists of: (i) the economist Barkley Rosser gets the subject matter of economics wrong because he is too stupid for the elementary algebra that underlies macroeconomics, #5, #6 (ii) true to the traditional strategy of economics imperialism #7 this incompetent scientist dabbles in religion, (iii) unsurprisingly, from inborn sloppiness he ignores the current state of research in this offside field. #8

How can it be that a person who violates all scientific standards and lacks all insight into his own scientific incompetence enjoys a good standing in academic economics?

It cannot be a coincidence that economics is failed/fake science and that incompetent scientists occupy the organizational control centers from peer review, textbooks, grants/financing, to the EconNobel. This makes only sense if economics is NOT a science but a branch of the propaganda/entertainment industry.

The fact is that the benchmark of economics is NOT cutting-edge science but the art of lobotomizing a population by storytelling, as it has been perfected by the different priesthoods throughout history.

The significance of Barkley Rosser's Yussuf story is to tell the intellectual proletariat of Econ 101 that stupidity is NOT a hindrance to an academic career in economics, but the essential precondition. #9, #10 

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


#2 Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus
#3 Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, The Bible Unearthed
#4 Hermann Detering, The Fabricated Paul

Related 'Economics: failure, fake, fraud' and 'Economics: A failed/fake science for 200+ years' and 'Economics: 200+ years of scientific incompetence and fraud' and 'The failure of Post Keynesianism' and 'Did economics fail? No! Yes, and everybody knows it!' and 'Why is economics a total scientific failure?' and 'Heterodoxy ― an axiomatic failure just like Orthodoxy' and  'What makes economics a failed science?' and 'What is so great about cargo cult science? or, How economists learned to stop worrying about failure' and 'Mass unemployment: The joint failure of orthodox and heterodox economics' and 'Failed economics: The losers’ long list of lame excuses' and 'Why economics is a failed science ― 24 excuses and 1 explanation' and 'Economics, communication, disinformation' and 'OMG, after 200+ years, economics becomes a science' and 'Your economics is refuted on all counts: here is the real thing.

For more about Barkley Rosser, see AXECquery.

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Graphic AXEC175

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March 23, 2021

Occasional Tweets: The activist is no scientist, the scientist is no activist (I)

 

 

Economics / Marxianism

The age-old problem with economists is that they are strong on opinion but weak on knowledge and that they suffer from mental incontinence, that is, the unstoppable urge to blather about any issue between heaven and earth, that is, from crime, addiction, psychology, sociology, philosophy, religion, literature, ethics to their heroic fight for the welfare/freedom/survival of humanity. Fact is, though, that economists have to this day NO idea of how the economy works. Their policy guidance NEVER has had sound scientific foundations. Marxians are NO exception.


For more about Marx, see AXECquery
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February 8, 2021

Occasional Tweets: Economists and philosophers ― creatures from the scientific swamp

 

Economics and Philosophy

“The moral of the story is simply this: it takes a new theory, and not just the destructive exposure of assumptions or the collection of new facts, to beat an old theory.” (Blaug)

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January 22, 2021

Occasional Tweets: Gossip economics (II)

 

 Gossip economics

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October 3, 2020

In the grand scheme of things, Lord Keynes was only a small-time crook

Comment on Steve Penfield on ‘Financial Fraud: Lord Keynes, the New Deal and 'Stimulus' Mania'’


Keynes realized that the mainstream economics of his time was defective and tried to move the whole thing from microfoundations to macrofoundations. This is called a Paradigm Shift, but unfortunately, Keynes messed it up because he was too stupid for the elementary algebra that underlies macroeconomics.

The blunder occurred on p. 63 of the General Theory: “Income = value of output = consumption + investment. Saving = income − consumption. Therefore saving = investment.”

This syllogism is conceptually and logically defective because Keynes did not come to grips with profit: “His Collected Writings show that he wrestled to solve the Profit Puzzle up till the semi-final versions of his GT but in the end he gave up and discarded the draft chapter dealing with it.” (Tómasson et al.) Because profit is ill-defined, the whole theoretical superstructure of Keynesianism is scientifically worthless.

So, here you have the real scandal. The economist Keynes NEVER understood what profit is. Worse, for 80+ years neither pro- nor anti-Keynesians spotted the foundational blunder that invalidates ALL of the economics.#1

Economics is a scientific fraud because Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT, and Pluralism are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, and materially/formally inconsistent.

Because of this, economic policy guidance has NEVER had sound scientific foundations.

At the moment, it is Stephanie Kelton, her post-Keynesian fellow academics, and a horde of social media trolls who are pushing deficit-spending/money-creation and are complicit in the greatest distributional fraud of all time.#2

The fact of the matter is that the correct macroeconomic Profit Law implies Public Deficit = Private Profit. This is why MMT is currently hyped.

Economists are NOT scientists but have always been the useful idiots of the Oligarchy. Keynes has only been one of the more colorful examples.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke




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ADDENDUM 1 on Oct 4

There are TWO economixes: political economics and theoretical economics. The main differences are: (i) The goal of political economics is to successfully push an agenda, and the goal of theoretical economics is to successfully explain how the actual economy works. (ii) In political economics, anything goes; in theoretical economics, the scientific standards of material and formal consistency are observed.

Theoretical economics (= science) had been hijacked from the very beginning by political economists (= agenda pushers). Political economics has produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years. Economics is a failed science, or, in Feynman's terms, a cargo cult science. The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is a fraud because there is NO such thing as economic sciences.

Theoretical economics has to be judged according to the criteria true/false and NOTHING else. Truth, in turn, is well-defined by material/formal consistency. Criteria like good/bad or good/evil or like/dislike or useful/useless or right/left do NOT apply.

So, for the question of whether Keynes' General Theory is scientifically true or false, his sex life is IRRELEVANT. It is relevant, though, for politics because argumentation in the political realm consists of not much more than shit-throwing and blackmailing. Steve Penfield's piece is a telling example of this genre.

Obviously, Steve Penfield deals with the ‘paradox of thrift’ entirely on the emotional/ moralistic level: “Regarding his relentless assault against individual ‘thrift’ — made futile now by ongoing inflationary debasement — the hedonist Keynes loved public adoration and hated anything that required patience and self-control. Accordingly, he championed an ideology that merely reflected his own personal preferences at the expense of everyone else.”

Now, the fact of the matter is that Keynes happened to be right on this specific point. The (simplified) macroeconomic Profit Law says Q≡(G−T)+(I−S), and in the most elementary case, Q≡−S, i.e., the business sector's loss is equal to the household sector's saving. We all can agree that such an economy has a short lifespan. On the microeconomic level, the individual saver may be a good and responsible person, but on the macroeconomic level, the savers spell doom for the economy.

There is a way out, though. The saving S of the household sector can be compensated for by deficit-spending of the government sector, i.e., (G−T)>0. If (G−T)>S, the business sector makes a profit. And this is exactly what happened historically.

The Profit Law implies Public Deficit (G−T) = Private Profit Q, so the policy of deficit-spending/money-creation provides a free lunch for the Oligarchy. Accordingly, the financial assets of the Oligarchy grow in lockstep with the public debt of WeThePeople. The interest on public debt is taxed from WeThePeople and paid to the Oligarchy. This, in a nutshell, is the modus operandi of late capitalism. Picking up momentum in the 1970s, the public debt now stands at ≈ $23 trillion.

The fact of the matter is that the so-called free-market economy is NOT self-regulating and self-optimizing but has already a long time been on the life support of the state. Profit is in the main produced by public deficits. The Oligarchy, in turn, uses the opulent free lunches to corrupt the state’s legislative, executive, and judiciary institutions in its favor. This constitutes a self-accelerating positive feedback loop, the very opposite of an equilibrium system.

Keynes did not really understand how the monetary economy works.#2 However, with his macroeconomic approach, he came closer to the truth than the Austrians, of which Steve Penfield is an intellectual heir. Austrianism never rose above the level of gossip and shit-throwing. It's economics at its worst.



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ADDENDUM 2 on Oct 6

Steve Penfield maintains “1) all bank credit is inflationary, 2) all credit inflation involves counterfeiting, and 3) all counterfeiting amounts to organized theft.” And “In banking, the first step in ensnaring society in the trap of fiat credit began with the simple act of lying: pretending to store more wealth in a banker’s vault than honest accounting could demonstrate.”

Keynes is known to have been pro-fiat money and anti-gold standard. The fact that fiat money is created ‘out of nothing’ upsets many people because it reminds them of the alchemists' fraudulent claim of being able to turn shit into gold. To this day, the Austrians cannot get over the replacement of gold with fiat money as a transaction medium and blame Keynes for inflation and other economic ills as a result of the original monetary sin.

The fact of the matter is that there is nothing wrong with the central bank's creation of money out of nothing as long as the money is injected on the supply side, i.e., for financing a growing wage bill that results from increasing employment. Problems arise if the money is spent on the demand side. In this case, it has the same effects as counterfeit money. #1

The fiat money system indeed has a weak point that can easily be exploited for political purposes. In our days, it is the MMTers that push Wall Street's agenda in their lectures and on social media, and push with the propagation of deficit-spending/money-creation the central bank into the role of a counterfeiter. 
  • The counterfeiter never runs out of money.
  • The counterfeiter never stops stealing stuff from the rest of society.
  • The counterfeiter increases the profit of the business sector with his additional monetary demand. The Profit Law implies Public Deficit = Private Profit.
  • The counterfeiter causes merely an almost imperceptible one-off price-hike (NO inflation).
  • The counterfeiter poses as a good guy and boasts that he promotes growth and employment.
  • The counterfeiter 'solves' any problem from unemployment to pandemics to global warming with deficit-spending/money-creation.
  • The counterfeiter continuously increases the public debt but says that it does not matter.
While Steve Penfield repeats the old rants about banks and bankers, MMTers/Wall Street/Trump pull off the greatest profit explosion of all time before his very eyes. #2



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REPLY to TheTrumanShow on Oct 6

You say, “Theories are just unproven hunches.”

Obviously, you do not know the difference between a hypothesis and a theory. Sit up and take notice.
  1. “In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion.” (Stigum)
  2. Science manifests itself in the form of the true theory.
  3. Truth is well-defined by material and formal consistency.
  4. Logical consistency is secured by applying the axiomatic-deductive method, and material consistency is secured by applying state-of-the-art testing.
  5. The true theory/model is the humanly best mental representation of reality.
  6. The main approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and all got the foundational economic concept of profit wrong.
  7. Because the foundations are false, the analytical superstructure is false.
  8. Economics is scientifically worthless.
  9. Economic policy guidance (left/center/right does not matter) has NEVER had sound scientific foundations. It's just opinion and blather.
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REPLY to Joe Levantine on Oct 8

Economics claims to be a science, but it is NOT. This has to be kept in mind when, in the next few days, the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” is awarded. #1 Economists are NOT scientists but clowns and useful idiots in the political Circus Maximus. Since Adam Smith/Karl Marx, economics has never been anything else than political propaganda in the garb of science.

Needless to emphasize that the general public has no real chance to figure out that economics is fake science: “They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. ... But it doesn’t work. ... So I call these things cargo cult science because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential.” (Feynman)

What is missing for 200+ years is the true theory. However, as political agenda pushers, economists do not suffer from their scientific incompetence but, in fact, enjoy their life in the swamp between true and false where “nothing is clear and everything is possible” (Keynes). Like everybody else in the disinformation business, economists apply the idea of scientific truth not as a guiding principle for their work but as a Potemkin façade.

Economics is, in the main, storytelling without scientific content. People who have been educated by the entertainment industry like this junk. #2, #3

A pretty obvious case of brain-dead agenda-pushing is when the discussion turns to history or even to stories from the bible. Time to realize that the bible is a literary forgery from the first to the last page.#4

Economics cannot be based on history because it is well known that history is, for the most part, a literary construct. #5 So, always when the argument becomes historical or psychological or biblical, it is pretty obvious that some troll is trying to lead a clueless public deeper into the swamp.



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REPLY to Mark Tapley on Oct 9

My post #149 ended with “Economics cannot be based on history because it is well known that history is, for the most part, a literary construct. So, always when the argument becomes historical or psychological or biblical, it is pretty obvious that some troll is trying to lead a clueless public deeper into the swamp.”

Mark Tapley's post #150 begins with the bible story of the Talents and then goes further back to Moses.

From this alone, one can safely conclude that Mark Tapley is an agenda pusher, and it is not too hard to see that he pushes the agenda of Uncle Scrooge.

Uncle Scrooge is known for sitting on a huge pile of gold/money, lending large sums to the state as the most attractive borrower, charging a risk-free long-term fixed interest, and also being heavily invested in real estate, which has the known property of steadily increasing in value in a growing economy.

As it happens, Uncle Scrooge and Adam Smith started their careers about the same time: “Adam Smith, when he wrote his Wealth of Nations, and Burke, when he produced his famous speech on economic reform, understood by ‘political economy’ a ‘branch of the science of the statesman or legislator’, a theory of practice, the science of the prudent management of the public finances. The growth of the huge debts which weighed on the great military nations would end in proving their ruin. This was especially true of England, which had become immensely in debt through the conquest of her colonial Empire.” (Halévy)

When gold was the transaction medium, Uncle Scrooge was one of the gatekeepers and at the height of his economic and political influence. This changed with the introduction of fiat money and the technical possibility of commercial banks to create the additional money that was needed for the steady growth of the stock of real capital.

So, the argumentation of Mark Tapley is easy to understand.

Uncle Scrooge 
  • is pro-bible because the story of the Talents justifies interest, and anti-catholic because the early church condemned usury,
  • hates the fiat-money bankers because they ended his gold supply monopoly and with it the rich and steady source of risk-free interest income as well as political power,
  • is less than enthusiastic about the revival of the ancient idea of debt jubilees,
  • fears inflation because it devalues his huge stock of government bonds,
  • cautions against new debt because this increases the risk for old debt,
  • hates the state when it levies taxes for welfare spending on top of the absolutely necessary interest payments,
  • warns against confiscatory taxation on the landowners because “property ownership is … necessary for capital formation” well knowing that capital formation no longer depends on the landowners.
Mark Tapley covers his agenda-pushing for the Oligarchy with cheap Tea Party populism: “There is nothing worse than giving money to the government since they will waste it or apply it to some kind of racket like the present fake virus to benefit all their cronies.”

This is a bit ungrateful because the Oligarchy thrives since the Napoleonic wars on the government's deficit spending and the steadily growing public debt. It holds, Financial assets of the Oligarchy ≈ Public debt of WeThePeople.

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REPLY to Mark Tapley on Oct 10

You say, “My only agenda is for more liberty and less government.”

You certainly agree that this is a political agenda. Everyone is, of course, entitled to climb on a soapbox and spread their opinion. As a result, the world is drowning in shitty opinions. The fact is that nobody needs opinions; what is needed is knowledge: scientific knowledge.

The ancient Greeks realized this long ago: “There are always many different opinions and conventions concerning any one problem or subject-matter … This shows that they are not all true. For if they conflict, then at best only one of them can be true. Thus it appears that Parmenides ... was the first to distinguish clearly between truth or reality on the one hand, and convention or conventional opinion (hearsay, plausible myth) on the other ...” (Popper)

This insight, obviously, has not yet arrived under the rock where you live.

Economics is about how the economic system works. It is NOT about the sex life of Keynes, nor about liberty, fake moonwalks, or global warming. True, economists are relentlessly blathering about all these things, but this only proves that they are stupid/ corrupt agenda pushers that have NO idea of what science is all about.

Science is about knowledge, and politics is about opinion and belief. The plain fact about economics is: Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT, and Pluralism are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and ALL get the foundational concept of profit wrong.

Let this sink in: economists do not know to this day what profit is because they are too stupid for the elementary algebra that underlies macroeconomics. #1 And this means that economics from Adam Smith to Marx to the Austrians to Keynes and beyond is proto-scientific garbage.

Economists have NO idea of how the actual monetary economy works. Economics is NOT a science but the natural habitat of morons, agenda pushers, confused confusers, blatherers, fraudsters, trolls, disinformants, entertainers, clowns, and fake scientists.

This thread deals with financial fraud and Keynesianism. Now, the absurdity of the situation is that while you are waffling about property rights in ancient Rome #2, the greatest financial fraud is pulled off right before your eyes.

The correct macroeconomic Profit Law implies Public Deficit = Private Profit, and this means that the current explosion of deficit-spending/money-creation will result in the largest profit explosion the world has ever seen. And it is academic economists, MMTers more specifically, who provide the ‘scientific’ cover for this plain distributional fraud and sell it as a benefit for WeThePeople. #3

Economists are once again the agenda pushers for the Oligarchy. Adam Smith was in this business, Karl Marx also, Keynes too, Hayek and Friedman too, and, of course, the brain-dead opinion spreader Mark Tapley.



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REPLY to Joe Levantine on Oct 11

You and Mark Tapley are propagating obsolete Austrianism. The Austrian core assertion is that Laissez-faire would result in a stable economy with overall optimal outcomes. This assertion has NEVER been proven. The provable fact of the matter is that the market economy is inherently unstable.

So, the very premise of Austrian economics is false, and because of this, the whole verbal superstructure is false. Austrian economics is scientifically worthless, and Austrian pro-liberty and anti-state rhetoric is just political agenda pushing.

Reality is at odds with the popular ideas of a free-market economy and Laissez-faire.

The axiomatically correct macroeconomic Profit Law states Q≡(G−T)−S, and this means that the greater part of the profit in the United States is actually produced by the State. The U.S. economy has been hanging for a long time already on the state ventilator for its survival.

The policy of deficit-spending/money-creation is ultimately a means of postponing the breakdown of the U.S. economy. It is a free lunch for the Oligarchy. The financial wealth of the Oligarchy grows in lockstep with the public debt of WeThePeople. Take the state away, and Capitalism as we know it breaks down. Laissez-faire is a pipe dream.

There is nothing more mendacious than the populist anti-statism of the Austrian school.

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REPLY to Mark Tapley on Oct 12

Today, the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” is awarded. Each year, economics ceremoniously claims to be 'sciences'.

Science is well-defined for 2300 years: “Research is in fact a continuous discussion of the consistency of theories: formal consistency insofar as the discussion relates to the logical cohesion of what is asserted in joint theories; material consistency insofar as the agreement of observations with theories is concerned.” (Klant)

The fact is that the main approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and all get the foundational economic concept of profit wrong. Because economists lack the true theory, their economic policy guidance has had NO sound scientific foundation since Adam Smith/Karl Marx.

Economists are a hazard to their fellow citizens: “Late in life, …, he [Napoleon] claimed that he had always believed that if an empire were made of granite the ideas of economists if listened to, would suffice to reduce it to dust.” (Viner) Economists bear the intellectual responsibility for the enormous social devastation of mass unemployment since the Great Depression. Right policy depends on true theory.

Economics is vacuous political drivel. In order to prove this, you need merely read your own stuff.

The EconNobel is the widely visible landmark of economists’ scientific fraud. #1 On the street level, this fraud is perpetuated with populist slogans by social media trolls like you.



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REPLY to James Charles on Oct 13

You say: “However, during time periods such as the 1950s, when in many countries credit was mainly channeled into the real economy, asset prices remained stable and the traditional quantity theory could be expected to hold.”

The traditional quantity theory has been summarized as: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” (Milton Friedman, quoted in @James Charles' link above)

Now, the traditional quantity theory is proto-scientific garbage, like everything else from Milton Friedman.

The macroeconomic Law of Supply and Demand states for the case of an elementary production-consumption economy P=ρ W/R with ρ>1 meaning deficit-spending, W wage rate, and R productivity.#1 The point is that the quantity of money is NOT among the price determinants, meaning that the traditional quantity theory is false.

So, a fiat money system as such is NOT the cause of inflation. To put the blame for creeping inflation on Keynes as pro-fiat/anti-gold advocate is just Austrian shit-throwing.

Creeping inflation happens, of course, and it is mainly a problem for the holders of government bonds, i.e., the coupon-clipping rentiers. It can be said that Austrianism is not a scientific thought collective but rather the public relations arm of the rentier class.

Note that Austrians never formally refuted Keynes' General Theory and replaced it with something better; instead, Murray Rothbard wrote a biography with extensive details about Keynes' sex life.

Economists are scientifically incompetent, but Austrians never rose above the level of lobbying and shit-throwing.



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REPLY to Joe Levantine on Oct 14

You say: “I think that the impetus of any new economic or social ideology should center first and foremost on human dignity as a value in itself.”

Obviously, you do not understand. Social ideology is not the point of the issue. Humanity has more than enough ideology. You can flush ideology/religion/history down the toilet. The longevity of this sociopathic storytelling proves only one thing: people can be made to believe any bullshit for any length of time.

Every time you board an airplane with the expectation of landing safely 10 hours later in some foreign country, the idea should pop up in your head that this has not been made possible by politicians, priests, ideologues, journalists, or any other member of the blathering class but by scientists/engineers/mathematicians.

To this day, economics is ideology and not science. Economics is provably false, and the blunder lies at the level of elementary algebra. #1 This scientific disgrace is bad enough, but the whole thing turns into fraud when economists award themselves a prize for sciences, i.e., the “Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”.

Your talk about social ideology and human dignity tells one that you do not understand the difference between politics and science. Politics is an issue for the 99% of stupid/corrupt agenda pushers, science is an issue for the 1% that has preserved some human dignity, i.e. is committed to science/knowledge/truth. It is of utmost importance to secure the separation of these two spheres because science cannot improve politics but politics can corrupt science. In the political sphere, there is NO human dignity.



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REPLY to Mark Tapley on Oct 15

You say: “You think Friedman didn’t know what he was talking about?”

This is a proven fact. #1, #2 Friedman was the archetypical political economist, i.e., an agenda pusher for the Oligarchy. First of all, he did not realize that the mainstream supply-demand-equilibrium approach was proto-scientific garbage, and he never understood what profit is. So, he was a scientific zero.

Friedman's mission was not science but propaganda. As a member of Mont Pelerin, his task was to defend and promote U.S. capitalism and to roll back Keynesianism/Socialism. This he did eloquently with his AEA Presidential Address in December 1967. The American Economic Association is the politburo of the profession and defines what mainstream economics is.

As a representative of the Chicago School, Friedman was practically on the payroll of the Oligarchy. And he did a good job.‡ Rockefeller called the university ‘the best investment’ he ever made.

For abusing academia as a platform for political agenda pushing, this fake scientist was awarded the fake Nobel.



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REPLY to James Charles on Oct 16

THX for the link. Richard Werner's piece is far superior to anything the quantity theory folks, in general, and Steve Penfield, Mark Tapley, and Joe Levantine, in particular, have ever brought to the table.
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September 12, 2020

Bang — the representative economist and supply-demand-equilibrium are dead

Comment on Brian Albrecht on ‘You'll have to pry supply and demand from my cold, dead hands’*


Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT, and Pluralism are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and all get profit ― the foundational concept of economics ― wrong. Because of the foundational blunder, the analytical superstructure of economics is false. Economics is failed/fake science. #1 This includes, of course, supply-demand-equilibrium, the one-graph-fits-all explanation of what happens in the economy.

Whether the ‘Totem of the Micro’, which consists of ill-founded marginalistic curves, has scientific value has often been questioned. #2-#10

• “The primitive apparatus of the theory of supply and demand is scientific. But the scientific achievement is so modest, and common sense and scientific knowledge are logically such close neighbors in this case, that any assertion about the precise point at which the one turned into the other must of necessity remain arbitrary.” (Schumpeter 1954)
• “You can make even a parrot into a learned political economist – all he must learn are the two words ‘supply’ and ‘demand’.” (Anonymous in Samuelson 1973)
• “You cannot teach a parrot to be an economist simply by teaching it to say ‘supply’ and ‘demand’.” (Anonymous in Samuelson 2010)

The genuine scientists among economists are well aware of the failure of the overarching general equilibrium theory and acknowledge the need for a Paradigm Shift: “There is another alternative: to formulate a completely new research program and conceptual approach. As we have seen, this is often spoken of, but there is still no indication of what it might mean.” (Ingrao et al. 1990)

This, though, is not how things play out in economics because the vast majority of economists are either stupid or corrupt or both. Economists either apply willful ignorance or come up with silly excuses. #11 Morgenstern criticized this back in 1941: “In economics we should strive to proceed, wherever we can, exactly according to the standards of the other, more advanced, sciences, where it is not possible, once an issue has been decided, to continue to write about it as if nothing had happened.”

Refuted theories are not discarded but stubbornly recycled in Econ 101. The disgrace of economics consists of teaching generation after generation approaches that are provably false at the level of elementary algebra. #12

Brian Albrecht has heard about the failure of economics in general and of supply-demand-equilibrium in particular, but that does not stop him: “I’m kicking this shindig off with a simple defense of (the increasingly scoffed at by the loudest voices online) supply and demand. It seems silly to need to defend supply and demand within economics circles. But it is 2020… tl;dr We can’t forget how much supply and demand explains about labor markets, especially when teaching students in their first economics course.”

Brian Albrecht does not know that, without valid scientific foundations, economic policy guidance is something between worthless and socially disastrous: “In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion.” (Stigum 1991)

To this day, economists do NOT have the true theory. Supply-demand-equilibrium has never been more than educated common sense. Its scientific value is zero. There is a fast and easy way to determine the scientific value of a theory/model. One has to look at what the theory/model says about profit. Profit is the pivot of economics; if profit is false, the whole approach is false. #13

Now, how often does the word profit appear in Brian Albrecht's explanation of supply and demand? Not at all, zero! And this tells one without going into detail that Brian Albrecht is one of the many brain-dead blatherers who populate economics and are the very cause for the unassailable fact that economics is for 200+ years now a failed/fake science.

The right thing to do is to bury supply-demand-equilibrium at the Flat-Earth Cemetery and start anew. In methodological jargon, this is called a Paradigm Shift. More specifically, one has to move from provably false Walrasian microfoundations and provably false Keynesian macrofoundations to true macrofoundations. #14

This, though, is entirely beyond the capacities of the representative economist. The only thing they can do is sell their obsolete stuff to mentally retarded students: “We are trying to keep this lighthearted and fun while still discussing important economic ideas. We hope you do too.” Of course, the students do. The history of religion and the entertainment industry proves that young people readily accept any absurdity and stick to it until the end of their lives.

So, what does the correct Law of Supply and Demand look like? It is NOT derived from microfoundations because these end with methodological necessity in the Fallacy of Composition. There is no way to come from microfoundations to an understanding of how the economy works.

Here are the basics of the macrofoundations approach. #15 The elementary production-consumption economy is defined with this set of macroeconomic axioms: (A0) The economy consists of the household sector and the business sector, which, in turn, consists initially of one giant fully integrated firm. (A1) Yw=WL wage income Yw is equal to wage rate W times working hours. L, (A2) O=RL output O is equal to productivity R times working hours L, (A3) Ec=PX consumption expenditure Ec is equal to price P times quantity bought/sold X.

Under the conditions of market-clearing X=O and budget-balancing Ec=Yw in each period, the price as the dependent variable is given by P=W/R (1a). The price is determined by the wage rate W, which takes the role of the nominal numéraire, and the productivity R. This is the most elementary case.

The macroeconomic Law of Supply and Demand (1a) implies W/P=R (1b), i.e., the real wage is always equal to the productivity, no matter how the wage rate W is set or how long the working time L is. Full employment is possible, and the workers always get the entire product O. The workers' living standard depends ultimately on productivity.

The logical next steps are (i) to skip the conditions of market-clearing and budget-balancing, (ii) to differentiate the business sector into multiple firms and markets, and to determine the price structure.

For the time being, real balances are excluded, i.e., it holds X=O. The condition of budget-balancing, i.e., C=Yw, is now skipped. The monetary saving/dissaving of the household sector is defined as S≡Yw−Ec. The monetary profit/loss of the business sector is defined as Q≡Ec−Yw. Ergo Q≡−S.

The balances add up to zero. The mirror image of household sector saving S is the business sector loss −Q. The mirror image of household sector dissaving (-S) is business sector profit Q. Q≡−S is the elementary version of the macroeconomic Profit Law.

Instant ramifications: (i) Because the mirror image of saving is loss, Keynes's I=S is false, (ii) ALL IS-LM models are false, (iii) Post-Keynesianism in ALL variants is false.

For the macroeconomic Law of Supply and Demand, follows P=ρE W/R with ρE≡Ec/Yw. This Law becomes a bit more complex when differentiated for an arbitrary number of firms/markets.

The point to grasp is that the Law of Supply and Demand has to be derived top-down from macrofoundations and NOT bottom-up from microfoundations and silly behavioral assumptions like utility or profit maximization. Time to pry supply and demand from Brian Albrecht's cold, dead hands.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke


#10 Ch. 3 Market interdependence in Sovereign Economics
#13 Profit


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For more about supply-demand-equilibrium, see AXECquery.
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