In an effort to explain how he became a troll, economist John Emerson explains that the way economics deals with price and not value has created our current circumstance. Price is an objective measure (“this candy bar costs $1”), value is subjective (“It’s 3am and no store is open, I’ll give you $10 for that candy bar!”).
It was hoped that by this method major issues of public policy could be taken out of the mess of the political process and protected from the Mussolinis and Lenins. It was also hoped that by this method an expert elite could be created to manage the big questions public life without external interference from the populace. The first hope was pardonable but wishful, and the second was self-serving.
This rather abstract methodological principle has had major policy consequences — without it, Ayn Rand’s disciple Alan Greenspan would not have had the power to cripple to global economy.
I’ve been living under the domination of this crap for 46 years now and I’ve always known it was crap. The majority of my mainstream friends during that era, and some of my radical friends, swallowed the whole boatload and repeated its principles as though they were self-evidently true. Many of them still do. Minds are changing far more slowly than social reality itself is, and by the time my friends in the lumpen-intelligentsia have changed their minds, we will be living in an authoritarian neoliberal world and all these questions will be moot.
So that’s how I became a troll.
Brilliant…
Small point, but Emerson would be insulted by the economist label. He’s the archetypal Minnesota English Major.