It is hardly to be doubted that the Libertarian right undertakes its mission with frankly religious zeal.
Economics Professor and Mises Institute scholar William Anderson has intoned that . . .
Our job as libertarians is not unlike the same thing faced by those First Century Christians, who
operated in an atmosphere more hostile to their beliefs than anything we have faced in this country —
at least to this point.1
And Anderson's patron Mr. Lew Rockwell exhibits even more confidence in pronouncing the mere publication
of von Mises’ Human Action as a
miracle.2 Their colleague, Dr. Gary North, has
authored the 31-volume Economic Commentary on the Bible in which he discovers that The
Bible mandates free market capitalism. It is anti-socialist.3
For those participating fully in a religious context there is no context: context remains imperceptible to participants because they cannot imagine other than that their beliefs are utterly transparent unto truth itself. For them, there can be nothing more beyond, i.e.: no exterior standpoint from which to address critique; all is deduced from within.
Science, on the other hand, can be characterized by its tacit creation of a context that is conceptually exterior to the phenomenon under study — an external standpoint being necessary for the operation of inductive thinking upon what lies within. As Wilde put it:
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.Though SFEcon exercises the purest of mainstream economics’ causality, the possibility of accord with economic conservatism is nonetheless denied categorically: our message is profane while theirs is sacred; their faith needs nothing, and will accept nothing, from outside itself.
Conservative economist and commentator Walter E. Williams sees this modus operandi quite clearly when the subject is global warming:
The essential feature of any religion is that its pronouncements are to be accepted on the basis of faith as opposed to hard evidence. Questioning those pronouncements makes one a sinner. 4But Williams presents the blindest of faiths in reason as he extols critical thinking as the ultimate tool for economists:
[T]he statement ‘Scientists cannot spit the atom’ is a positive statement because if there's any disagreement, there are facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement. Just visit Stanford's linear accelerator and watch them do it .5Here we have a specimen of fundamentalist rationalism for examination: the facts to which we can appeal are somehow certain to be consulted; there is therefore no possibly of useful evidence existing outside our immediate awareness; and no untoward evidence has been concealed for the sake of some interested faction.
Economics’ comprehensive findings to the effect that the polynomial factoring problem has no solution and no quantification of a general economic optimum is therefore possible are also positive statements on the order of anthropogenic global warming or the indivisibility of atoms. These articles of economics’ faith have well over a century’s standing; they have undoubtedly been features of Professor Williams’ teaching; and the facts to which our heresy toward his faith might be appealed (being mere mouse-clicks away) are much more approachable than Stanford's admirably-secured linear accelerator.
SFEcon’s demonstrations of a solved economic computation problem demand only a bit more exertion than is needed to prove the Pythagorean Theorem. These demonstrata, with their implications, began coming to the attention of economics’ Grand Seigneurs at MIT in1970. Their subsequent reviews have included that of Dr. Ed Crane at his CATO Institute in 1978; and SFEcon was presented at least a half dozen times at the Hoover Institution during the early 1990’s.
At each of these (as well as at many other lesser) institutions, scholars of lower repute have received SFEcon with enthusiasm, only to be swatted away by higher authorities. Milton Friedman knew a priori that [SFEcon] is a fraud even as a mathematical possibility; and Andreu Mas-Colell would not embarrass [himself by submitting] such a ridiculous premise to a jury of those who have granted one another’s competence in Mathematical Economics and Econometrics.
Professor Williams is on Cato’s advisory board; he is a trustee of Hoover; and he has devised the phrase immunity to evidence to guard the gate-keeping role assigned to him by his paymasters. In his self-acquired capacity as the people’s economist, he is given to non-negotiable proclamations of properly instituted truth:
The point is that an economy is far more complex and mind-boggling than the behavior of the sun and rivers will ever be.6
The billions upon billions of interrelationships between an economic system's human and non-human elements defy human capacity to know.7Williams can, however, be rather shaky on the outright impossibility of economics as a positive science, as well as on the availability of the determinations upon which such a science might rely. He has, for example, favorably compared the operability of economics’ law of demand to that observed for the law of gravity;8 and once he even granted the availability of all that is used in constructing SFEcon’s emulators:
At any point in time, the economy's underlying technological dimensions will determine the mix of human and physical resources required to maximize gross domestic product. 9___________________________