The Economic Nationalist

I am ignorant of some things. So presumably are you. Demagoguery, as old as the Athenian republic, is that vile art which seeks unrighteous political power by exploiting your ignorance and mine.

Few fields have been more fertile for Western demagogues to plow than the study of economics. We the people do not think that we can understand economics, yet paradoxically we feel that we ought to understand it. We tend to confuse business-management experience with economic understanding—though to do so is a simple categorical error, for the businessperson deals in microeconomics whereas what we usually mean when we speak of “economics” and “the economy” is macroeconomics, the study of wealth and trade at large.

Have you ever wondered why reporters are treated seriously, who seldom understand economics better than we do, when they report opinion-poll numbers as to which candidate for office “will better handle the economy”—as though we thought that it were somehow the candidates’ job “to handle the economy?” As though we had some idea of what “handling the economy” might entail? As though the candidates had some idea of what “handling the economy” might entail? As though we suspected that the candidates were less clueless about “the economy” than we?

When Democrats suggest that we tax oil profits, when Republicans suggest that we drill offshore, do you know which policy is wiser in the long run? How many foreign guest workers, if any, does the U.S. economy need to meet labor shortages? (What constitutes a “labor shortage,” anyway?) Are you sure of your answers? What short- and long-term ends, exactly, do you and I wish the relevant proposed public policy to achieve? These are largely, or at least partly, economic questions. There is room for a difference of opinion on such questions, but one can hardly entertain such questions’ economic aspects sensibly without having first appointed one’s mind with the sturdy mental furniture of basic macroeconomic theory. That furniture is what this article is about.

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Daniel Larison writes:

Something that the defenders of party loyalty seem never to be able to grasp is that loyalty is a mutual obligation. It is not only something that supporters are supposed to give to their party, but it is something that party leaders owe to the people who put them and keep them in their positions.

Just so.