|Peter Boettke|
James Buchanan stressed that:
Political economists stress the technical economic principles that one must understand in order to assess alternative arrangements for promoting peaceful cooperation and productive specialization among free men. Yet political economists go further and frankly try to bring out into the open the philosophical issues that necessarily underlie all discussions of the appropriate functions of government and all proposed economic policy measures.
The task of the political economist is not to advise politicians -- whether left or right -- and it is also not to advocate for policies in the political process -- whether sensible or nonsensical. The task of the political economist is strictly speaking to be a "student of society" and to be a "social critic" of proposals from the men of systems that believe they can manipulate the social order so it bends to their will. The greatest tool at the political economists disposal is the "means-ends" reasoning that follows from basic economics, and the implications this basic economic reasoning has for understanding how alternative institutional arrangements impact human well-being. The worst thing that can happen to the political economist is to be captured by those in power, or those seeking power, rather than sticking to their role in speaking truth to power.
Economics as a discipline cannot answer moral questions per se, but it can detail the consequences for human society of others answers to those moral questions.
With this in mind consider Senator Bernie Sanders recent remarks at the Vatican, or for that matter various talks by Pope Francis --- as a political economist, strictly speaking, one cannot establishing the "rightness" or "wrongness" of the moral sentiments expressed, but one can -- and must -- point out errors of logic and errors of evidence, and subject the proposed policy remedies to operationalize those moral sentiments to a rigorous evaluation based on situational logic, and organizational logic. Otherwise, nice sounding political stump speeches, or basically what could be termed political sermons, could result in unintended undesirable consequences that not only will not yield results consistent with the aspirations of the sentiments, but in many cases leave those who are most vulnerable in an even worse position than they were before.
When the logic and evidence provided by political economy pile up against the moral intuitions that appeal to the unreflective mind, and the effort to speak truth to power is undermined by professional peers captured by the lure of power, it is hard to stay the course as a political economist. But one must if the integrity of the discipline is to remain and the task of the political economist as "student" and "social critic" is to remain uncorrupted and to play its role in the free play of ideas in a truly democratic society. Democratic self-governance does not deny specialized knowledge, but it does not operate on "expert rule", and especially not on institutions which make use of "monopoly experts". Instead, a self-governing democratic order requires citizens capable of shouldering the burden of the "care of thinking and trouble of living" (as Tocqueville taught). The role of the political economist in that vision of society is restricted to the "student of society" (or civilization) and the "social critic" who may proposed changes in the "rules" to fellow citizens to be treated as hypotheses to be tested in the democratic process of deliberation in collective decision making.
As George Stigler noted in a letter to Milton Friedman in the 1940s, the restricted task of the political economist is hard to maintain when so much nonsense is being expressed from left, right and center on the political spectrum. But we must maintain if we are to sustain the scientific integrity of the discipline.
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