Getting the Relationshiop Between Economic Theory and Economic Performance Arse-Backwards

Over at the Unz Review, Eamonn Fingleton argues that Donald Trump will beat the Heck outa Hillary because he understands the economy, whereas she has been closely connected with the ruling elite that, for 25 years, has failed to understand, or therefore prevent, the disaster of American deindustrialization and off-shoring of jobs, a failure Fingleton attributes to faulty economic assumptions. In particular, he says:

Anglophone textbooks have traditionally identified just three key factors of production – capital, labor, and land. Now a further factor has emerged that plays a decisive role in the relative competitiveness of modern nations, blah, blah blah. 

And until now, nobody knew this? As if.

No, the idea that America’s economic decline can be attributed to bad economics has things arse-backwards.

As Harvard economist J.K. Galbraith made clear decades ago, the function of economics is not to steer the economy but to rationalize for the public whatever direction the elite has decided the economy must go.

Today, globalization, i.e., destruction of the democratic, sovereign nation state, accompanied by the concentration of power in the hands of bankers and oligarchs operating via global institutions such as the UN, the WTO, etc., etc., is the objective to be concealed. Economists, liberally rewarded with newspaper columns, Nobel prizes, extremely lucrative textbook contracts (at the expense of students required to purchase their outrageously expensive and essentially worthless books) and Ivy League university chairs, merely provide the cover up.

So Western elites are not wrong about the economy, they just don’t care about the economy as a source of income to the masses. What they care about is the continued concentration of wealth under their own control or the control of those who pull their strings.

That their policies undermine Western prosperity and power means nothing to them. The end game is global governance mediated by local governments subject to corporate control via trade agreements, and global institutions.

Hence Obama’s notice to the British: “sovereignty is obsolete,” which is to say: "I declare your independence as a democratic nation state finished." And the same goes for American sovereignty. National governments must no longer serve the people, they must serve the Treason Party representing the plutocratic global elite. 

The key question about Trump is whether he is a true American patriot or a covert Treason Party alternative to the discredited Bush-Clinton duopoly. The answer to that question will likely determine not only the fate of the European people as a racial and cultural group, but whether we are to have peace or war with Russia and China.