Interesting article on TechCentralStation about economic illiteracy and demagoguery.

The idiotarian approach to debating economic policy is to frame an issue as a conflict between Authority Ranking (bad) and Communal Sharing (good). For example, an idiotarian treats drug company profits as evil (as if they resulted from Authority Ranking) and insists that the results of drug research belong in the public domain (to facilitate Communal Sharing). However, as John E. Calfee pointed out recently, when this policy is analyzed from the perspective of Market Pricing, we can see that it reduces research and adds to suffering, particularly in the Third World.



There are ways to deal compassionately with the cost of drug research for Third World countries. For example, rich countries could give foreign aid that would enable people in poor countries to purchase drugs at fair market prices. However, for idiotarians, it is necessary to portray the issue as a conflict between drug company villains and poverty-stricken victims.

The archetypical idiotarian demagogue was Karl Marx. Marx did not portray capitalism as an impersonal system of Market Pricing. Instead, he viewed it as a mechanism for Authoritarian Ranking, in which the capitalist class exploits the working class. The alternative, naturally, was Communal Sharing: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.