Economics is the study of why and how goods and services in a society are produced.
When studying economics, you should be highly on-guard for spotting moral assumptions which get slipped in the back-door of what you're reading. Lots of professors of economics would try to sneak something on the end of my definition; that the study is done with the aim of "in order to overcome wealth inequality" or some such objective.
Good economics starts off, at least, value-free (value in the moral sense, not monetary) and simply seeks to address the proposal in the definition. Stuff gets made, so why does one particular kind of stuff get made at X amount instead of another kind, or Y amount? The entire field stems from this seemingly simple question. But this field is not immune from the left's long march through the institutions - in fact, the march probably started here. Marx called himself an economist as his primary title. Would you imagine he simply studied the methods and motivations of production from a neutral position?
The London School of Economics - highly regarded amongst free-market enjoyers because Friedrich Hayek lectured there for most of his career - was founded by The Fabian Society. Much like the Frankfurt school, the Fabians had the explicit objective of capturing all of Europe's institutions by first capturing the universities. The old logo of the Fabians was literally a wolf in sheep's clothing, which they changed when they realised that advertising their subversion that loudly kind of defeats the point. Their subversion was a resounding success and Hayek is a glitch. Their entire record apart from him has been the usual affair for universities of the last 100 years.
You will not find an economics university faculty in the world not aiming first and foremost to engineer the paths of production towards their vague egalitarian goalposts. The study and evidence comes second, and is cherrypicked to suit their aims. Trust me, they will tell you this if you know how to push the right buttons.
This is not economics, it is politics dressed up in calculus equations and insane models just for the sake of being insane. I don't make it a secret that I'm a total advocate of the Austrian School, who understand that in order to ask the question of why particular stuff gets made at a particular amount you must start with the origins of the demand for said stuff, which comes from the subjective desires of individuals. Focus on those last few words and ask yourself how that could possibly be quantified, or that individuals would arrive at these desires through a nonlinear algebraic equation in their minds. This is at it's foundation an insane premise, and no amount of flowery language or models which try to emulate those of the hard sciences can override that.
I don't need to explain to the reader which moral assumptions your average university professor holds in the early 21st century. But what does amaze me is the complete lack of self-awareness at how they completely invert the entire purpose of the field.
Many people first delving into a value-free approach to economics can get carried away with that notion and think that values don't matter, or that they are all inherently subjective, if they even actually exist. This is not the case. One's policy proposals, which come after economic analysis, can absolutely be informed by values, and there certainly are good values and bad ones. A person can absolutely say that their policies will be detrimental to the productive output of a society, but that these values are more important than the line going up. This will of course be an area of intense debate, but it's important to know just how foreign this mindset is to the professor.
They view their values as being the entire driver of not just an economy, but economics itself; that their values are economic laws in themselves. I remember we had a guest speaker in our university who held a talk called "Is economics racist?", not “Is the economy racist?”, and so I felt compelled to hear it out of a morbid curiosity.
I was surprised with the direction it took, but not in a good way, even though my expectations were on the floor. I was very familiar with the shambolic philosophy of John Rawls (which I actually can't begin to explain here because I will get too angry and side-tracked) but it just amounted to a lecture on Rawls' assumptions without Rawls even being credited, which I do find amusing. What the speaker essentially said for 90 minutes was that, in white countries, non-whites have less wealth than whites. The only options you can pick as the reason for this can be that racism is true and they are inferior, or, economics is arranged in a racist manner.
This is mostly standard stuff in the academic bubble (who will cry "correlation doesn't equal causation" against others), but my ears pricked up at the idea that economics, not the economy, was at fault. This is the true mask-off moment. He is not unhappy that the economy has produced unequal outcomes, he is unhappy that this is even possible. If lawmakers are not beginning with the question "How do we engineer production to benefit particular groups?" then he is unhappy. Anything less than this as a starting point is wrong in his eyes. He won't even think to consider how his chosen measures would alter the natural demand and output of the economy - the imposition of his values IS the output.
As I said before, having values is not a bad thing, and you cannot say in a strict economic sense that one ought to prefer higher output over the imposition of values. Any statement involving the word "ought" is not value-free, and is thus a philosophical statement rather than an economic one. Economics, like everything else, must begin from assumptions derived philosophically; but what disgusts me is when this goes completely unchecked, unnoticed, and uncared for. Distributists garner a lot of respect from me due to their honesty, as even though I don't agree with their proposals (whilst still sympathising with why they propose them), they are completely aware that said proposals will not help to increase the velocity with which the mythical line goes up. They'll even admit that they view the line going down as a worthy sacrifice - this is a sacrilegious view to the consoomer.
They have approached this in at least the correct way: analysis first, values second. This is a totally lucid acceptance of reality which I don't think any other school does as well as they do - not even the Austrians, as I said, who focus so much on the method of analysis that they become robotic and often forget that all humans hold values, including themselves, and will deny that their values could be at least somewhat detrimental to output, when they should remember that "line go up" is not the inherent foundation of reality and human interaction. They are correct when instead they defend that the economy will be more healthy and stable under their system, not more productive.
I'm not sure how to wrap this up as I just wanted to put pen to paper on some related things that have preoccupied my mind lately, other than saying that the total absence of cognitive dissonance in the minds of the economics professors shows that only an iron fist can put an end to their reign of tyranny. These people cannot be convinced, persuaded, or reached by reason. They will proudly tell you that they are entirely ideologically captured and do not care for assessing the validity of their positions. They will look you in the eyes with a straight face and say that money supply increases have little-to-nothing to do with inflation.
What could we possibly do when faced with an opponent like this? These people will not listen to reason and cannot be stopped with a soft touch, so all we can do to have any chance of returning to an ordered and properly managed society is to clear them out with whatever means are necessary.
Whatever means necessary?