roger says...
RE Bruce W.'s points on the real interest of right wing economists.
There's a wonderful example of that butter-won't-melt-in-my-mouth hypocrisy on the Freakonomics blog today. Gary Becker was asked by Steve Levitt what he thought the goal of economics is. According to Levitt, this son of the freshwater school, who never saw a CEO salary that couldn 't be made higher, a union that should not be broken, or a regulation that didn't interfere with the "market", claims his fifty years of economics work is “to understand and alleviate poverty.”
As Leavitt points out, Becker is a lifelong republican. And as he doesn't point out, the American poor vote heavily democratic. From which I conclude that either Becker is right, and the poor are deluded about their self interest in voting Democratic, which means that the model of rational self interest upon which Becker has based his career is wrong - or Becker is wrong, and he is either individually deluded, or hypocritical in the extreme.
But of course, the way around this is to always point to some other poor group. He must be working for the poor in China, or in India, or in Africa. Of course, if he was, he'd be questioning the business practices of Monsanto in India, he'd be looking at the Jacqueries in the countryside of China and the pollution in the cities and calling for a number of programs by the state to buffer increasing costs to the Chinese workers and poor. But this is to take bad faith naively, like the Right's love affair with unions - as long as they were Solidarity, in Poland - in the 1980s. The man works to make the predator class richer. That is that. End of story.