You wouldn't kid us......surely

Seen on the cover of a print edition of The Economist while shopping (paraphrased): "Doing something about America's economic tailspin."

Apparently it will take a magazine of that name, no doubt staffed by numerous Economists, interviewing or quoting from Economists, to tell us what should be obvious....but somehow we can't face it, and apparently on any level:

STOP SPENDING.

There. Now I'm an "Economist."

Economics has slid into repute as a putatitve "Social Science" (when no such thing exists), and treated as a secular religion. A half-century since the rise and fall of Keynesian theory (which should have killed off Economics as anything but stargazing, but didn't), some of its practitioners are regularly elevated to the eminence of shamans in our culture. And that's exactly what they are: the shamans and druids of a false religion. And they will retain their eminence because of that most powerful force in the universe: the human will to believe in something, even if demonstrably wrong, false-headed, and destructive.