It?s not just the 21st century they want to turn the clock back on ? health-care reform, global warming and the financial regulations passed in the wake of the recent financial crises and accounting scandals.
"Not every candidate embraces every one of these kooky ideas. But what’s striking is that when Rick Perry stands up and declares that “Keynesian policy and Keynesian theory is now done,” not one candidate is willing to speak up for the most important economic thinker of the 20th century. Or when Michele Bachmann declares that natural selection is just a theory, none of the other candidates is willing to risk the wrath of the religious right and call her on it. Leadership, it ain’t.
I realize economics isn’t a science the way biology and physics are sciences, but it’s close enough to one that there are ideas, principles and insights from experience that economists generally agree upon. Listening to the Republicans talk about the economy and economic policy, however, is like entering into an alternative reality.
Theirs is a magical world in which the gulf oil spill and the Japanese nuclear disaster never happened and there was never a problem with smog, polluted rivers or contaminated hamburger. It is a world where Enron and Worldcom did not collapse and shoddy underwriting by bankers did not bring the financial system to the brink of a meltdown. It is a world where the unemployed can always find a job if they really want one and businesses never, ever ship jobs overseas.
As politicians who are always quick to point out that it is only the private sector that creates economic growth..."
to read Steven Pearlstein's "The magical world of voodoo economists" published September 10, 2011, click on
http://www.washingtonpost.com/the-magical-world-of-voodoo-economists/2011/09/07/gIQARBiEIK_print.html
Original: The magical world of voodoo 'economists'