I thought this week I might discuss the following rhetorical question and answer. Q: “What do adherents of anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style call those who understand and promote real neoclassical welfare economics?” A: “Communists.” I thought of this the other day after hearing yet another conservative, right wing, Republican fascist banging on about “communists” everywhere, the communist threat to the USA. I looked around. “Where? Are they under the bed?” Slowly it dawned on me. He meant me. I was the communist.
The issue, unsurprisingly, has to do with normative beliefs relating to equity and interpersonal ethics. Such beliefs are famously excluded and thus exogenous from real neoclassical welfare economics due to the idiosyncratic and more than a little confusing definition of “utility” in that theory. Real neoclassical welfare economics is incapable of evaluating economic results. Doing so requires additional exogenous normative inputs, from somewhere, and although the notion is not developed in that theory, if one supports the democratic ethos, one supposes from voters, the governed.
Bad economics in the conservative style misinterprets real neoclassical welfare economics to say one should not “distort” or “interfere with” markets, one should simply strive toward any near enough approximation to an unreal theoretical “perfectly competitive” market or if there, stay there. They pursue this argument, meant to mimic the results of discredited classical economics with its rather more conventional definition of “utility” and “welfare,” using various clever rhetorical maneuvers including terminological equivocation, conflation of issues, word play, etc. Working through the rhetoric bad economists use to switch out real neoclassical welfare economics for bad economics in the conservative style is the mainstay of what I write about it. It’s great fun but it’s slow going because the rhetoric is rather clever, arch, tricky. I’d like to do it all every time, right now, but I’m rather afraid it might make eyes glaze over or even heads fall off. So here I’ll just say what’s going on, leave it at that.
To return to our theme, those who support bad economics in the conservative style do so to rhetorically promote and defend certain views on equity, ethics, the resolving of interpersonal conflicts or preferences, allocation of resources, that are external to real neoclassical welfare economics. Because they associate their favored conservative normative or ethical views with their flawed understanding of economics as bad economics in the conservative style, they call as “communists” those with differing normative views or even those who support voters registering different views. In this way, they will label as communists anyone who correctly understands conventional, traditional, neoclassical welfare economics for what it is, eschews bad economics in the conservative style, and understands the importance of democracy and voter input for normatively optimal economic policy.
I’ve pointed out the irony involved before in calling as “communists” those who support democracy and its role in economics given the main or one of the primary problems of communism, at least in the eyes of many liberals, is its anti-democracy authoritarian nature. But yes, if one is an adherent of anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style, one may well see what one considers “communists” everywhere, just anyone who understands real neoclassical welfare economics, and anyone who supports democracy, the US Constitution.
