Source: Law & Liberty
by Reuven Brenner
“It’s commonplace today that governments should try to promote prosperity by building their economic policy around a family of ‘general theories’ developed in the 1930s, known today as ‘macroeconomics.’ Over the past century, this field has legitimized centralizing a wide range of governments’ spending decisions and central banks’ policies, even when it raised deficits and debts. However, it turns out that macroeconomics is no ‘science.’ It has only been wearing its mask. Economists secure their status in modern governments by producing many numbers that ostensibly give concrete, empirical form to an economy’s success or failure. As governments came to rely on these aggregate statistics, a subsidized macroeconomic mythology, often drawing on misleading jargon, offered rationalizations for government intervention, missing the fact that such policies — intentionally or not — were weakening financial markets and preventing continuous access to credit.” (02/24/25)