Substituting economics for politics is a failure

The verdict is in on “economism.”

Most of us believe that we do stuff because we want to be good people, and that other people act the same. But the dominant political philosophy for the last half-century, “economism,” views us as slaves to “incentives” and nothing more.

Economism is the philosophy of the neoclassical economists, whose ideology has consumed both the Democrats and Republicans. They dismiss all “non-market” solutions (that is, projects of democratically accountable governments) as failed before they’re begun, due to the “incentives” of the individuals in the government.

Economism’s major project has been to dismantle the achievements of the New Deal (Social Security, unions, public housing, limits on corporate power) and to discredit the very idea that we can or should attempt those sorts of bold initiatives.

In economicist doctrine, it’s actually impossible to make national parks or social security or public healthcare, and people are naive to even think we should try. To the extent that these things actually exist and thrive and please people in the real world, they are mirages — they don’t work in theory, so they must not work in practice, either.