Leftists Are The Economic Science Deniers

Here is Patrick Hedger writing at The Federalist about something pretty basic that more Americans would understand if conservatives were effectively fighting the information war:

Several major Obama administration positions fly in the face of widely accepted economic theories, even those taught in Economics 101. This includes climate change.

Its professors and students lovingly refer to the field of economics as the “dismal science.” The pervasive cynical humor of economists aside, economics is very much a science, complete with experiments and theories. It is a science in the same way that something like climatology is science, albeit far less difficult.

President Obama’s recent comments about economics while at a “climate change” conference in Paris struck me with brutal irony like a bolt of oblivious lightning from our commander-in-chief: “This is a classic market failure. If you open up an Econ 101 textbook it’ll say the market is very good about determining prices and allocating capital towards its most productive use, except there’s certain externalities…”

It was an impressive display of glossary terms. Obama is correct—this is what a basic economics textbook would tell you. It just seems strange that, for most of his presidency, Obama has completely ignored it.

We Know the Science, We Just Don’t Like It

Several major economic policy positions of the Obama administration fly in the face of widely accepted economic theories, even those taught in Economics 101. Just as Obama said in his press conference last week, “The market is very good about… allocating capital towards its most productive use.”

This is a fundamental economics lesson that people like Thomas Sowell, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Adam Smith, and on have been trying to beat into the heads of those with political power for centuries in order to prevent things like taxpayer bailouts of major corporations, such as General Motors and Chrysler.

Of course, this didn’t stop Obama from giving billions of taxpayer dollars to the companies, which they could not otherwise earn by convincing people to buy their products. In short, the market was allocating resources away from unproductive uses (building cars and trucks nobody wanted), until the government under Obama and the Democratic Congress stepped in and said otherwise.

Read more: The Federalist